AER Beyond Nostalgia
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Lawrence Angus & Terri Seddon
Beyond nostalgia: reshaping australian education distils this ongoing debate into a concise account of developments in education, and provides a positive framework for finding a way forward. It examines the: • shifting relationship between government and education; • implications of commercialising education; • broader social factors, such as globalisation, which impact on education; and
With contributions from 12 highly-regarded education professionals, this insightful and accessible book is important for policy makers, undergraduate students, academics and educators, as well as anyone concerned with education reform.
Australian Education Review No 44
t. seddon and l. angus (eds)
• prospects, challenges and opportunities for Australian education in the new millennium.
reshaping australian education terri seddon and lawrence angus (eds)
Enormous change to Australian education over the past decade has created a maelstrom of debate among politicians, teachers and academics about the direction of education.
beyond nostalgia: reshaping australian education
"The polarised and exclusionary debate about education (has created) unproductive walls of silence… reconstructing a sensible debate about educational reform is imperative for the long-term future of Australian education and the people, young and old, who pass through it."
beyond nostalgia:
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THIS FOLD REMAINS CONSTANT. ADJUST SPINE WIDTH TOWARDS LEFT HAND EDGE
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Beyond Nostalgia: Reshaping Australian Education
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The Australian Education Review is a series of books on subjects of current significance and emerging importance to Australian education. Up to three titles are produced each year. The books are written for a general audience and attempt to present a broad discussion of issues. As the series title suggests, the books describe and discuss current educational strategies or issues rather than undertake major research projects per se. They have a national focus, although case studies and research materials from individual states and regions, as well as from overseas, may well be included. As an additional resource for readers, each book includes a substantial bibliography. Further information is available from Dr Laurance Splitter, Editor, the Australian Education Review, Australian Council for Educational Research, Private Bag 55, Camberwell, Vic. 3124. Tel: +61 3 9277 5594, Fax: +61 3 9277 5500, e-mail:
[email protected] Editorial Board Professor Sid Bourke, Department of Education, University of Newcastle Ms Sharan Burrow, Federal President, Australian Education Union Ms Deirdre Morris, Publishing Manager, ACER Mr Howard Kelly, Chairperson, Board of Studies, Victoria Associate Professor Jane Kenway, Faculty of Education, Deakin University, Geelong Campus Professor Helen Praetz, Acting Pro Vice-Chancellor (Academic Projects), RMIT, Coburg Campus Dr Laurance Splitter (Editor), Principal Research Fellow, ACER
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Australian Education Review No. 44
Beyond Nostalgia: Reshaping Australian Education Terri Seddon and Lawrence Angus (Eds)
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First published 2000 by The Australian Council for Educational Research Ltd 19 Prospect Hill Road, Camberwell, Victoria, 3124
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © 2000 Terri Seddon & Lawrence Angus
All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Copyright Act 1968 of Australia and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers. Edited by Ronel Redman Printed by Ligare Pty Ltd National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Beyond nostalgia : reshaping Australian education. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 86431 339 X. 1. Education - Australia. I. Seddon, Terri. II. Lawrence, Angus. (Series : Australian education review ; no. 44).
370.994
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Contents Introduction
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Section I: Reinventing government 1 Competent citizens and limited truths Ian Hunter and Denise Meredyth 2 Education and economy: A review of main assertions Gerald Burke
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Section II: Education design and class formation 3 Competition in Australian higher education since 1987: intended and unintended effects 48 Simon Marginson 4 From lucky country to clever country: leadership, schooling and the formation of Australian elites 70 Peter Gronn 5 Competition, education and class formation 91 Mark Western Section III: Redesigning education 6 Institutions with designs: consuming school children Jane Kenway and Lindsay Fitzclarence 7 Gender, teaching and institutional change: an historical perspective Marjorie Theobald 8 The social and organisational renorming of education Lawrence Angus and Terri Seddon
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Section IV: Rethinking the education government nexus 9 The politics of postpatrimonial governance Anna Yeatman 10 Beyond nostalgia: institutional design and alternative futures Terri Seddon and Lawrence Angus References
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Figures and Tables Figure 2.1: General government outlays, % of GDP, 1997
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Figure 10.1 Statement of purposes of education in Synod Report and the Victorian Department of Education’s response
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Table 2.1:
Students in education and training, Australia, 1990, 1993, 1998 (‘000)
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Education participation rates, Australia, 1990, 1992 and 1997 (per cent)
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General government total outlays and outlays on education, Australia, 1990–91 and 1997–98
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Public and private educational expenditures as % of GDP, selected OECD countries, 1990 and 1995
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Government and private expenditures and outlays on education, Australia ($billion, and % of GDP)
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School enrolments by type of school, Australia, 1990 to 1998 (‘000)
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School students and teachers (‘000), and student-toteacher ratio (STR), Australia, 1990 and 1998
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Labour force aged 15–64 by highest level of qualification, Australia, 1993, 1996 and 1999 (May ‘000)
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Table 3.1:
Positional typology of Australian universities
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Table 3.2:
Competitive position, individual higher education institutions 1993/1995, five different measures
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Table 2.2: Table 2.3: Table 2.4: Table 2.5: Table 2.6: Table 2.7: Table 2.8:
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Introduction In October 1992, a Victorian State election tipped the Australian Labor Party from office. The Liberal-National Party Coalition (i.e. Conservative) Government, led by Jeff Kennett, was returned after a decade of Labor administration. In October 1999, the Coalition lost office to a minority Australian Labor Party Government. Immediately after election, the Kennett Government moved on its reform agenda. By the end of 1992, 55 schools around the State were closed, the central education bureaucracy was downsized and over 8000 teachers were declared ‘in excess of need’. One month after the election, 100 000 people took to the streets of Melbourne to condemn the new Government’s savage retrenchment of the public sector, including education. This public protest was the biggest public demonstration since the Vietnam Moratorium marches in the 1970s, but the radical restructuring continued. Anger began to give way to uncertainty, grief, consent. While teachers, principals and parents reeled under the impact of these cuts, the Government announced its new flagship education policy, ‘Schools of the Future’. This promoted decentralisation of budgets and administration. Principals were to become educational leaders in their schools. They would be the school’s chief executive officers, accountable to the community through their reconstituted school councils, the schools’ boards of directors, and through the review processes instituted by the Victorian Department of School Education. In early 1993, at an evening seminar in Flinders Lane in the Melbourne central business district, John Smyth, then of Deakin University, presented a solid academic critique of the new Government’s policy directions. ‘Schools of the Future’, he argued, was the flipside of the Government’s policies of retrenchment. This ‘reform’ would create an educational market like that which had been developed in England. The process of marketising education, he
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argued, destabilises existing educational provision and creates a context in which funding cuts and the privatisation of public educational assets can proceed. A striking moment occurred during question time. A woman in the audience said that she was on the school council at her children’s school. ‘Our system of school councils has let parents like me work with teachers and the principal. We have had our say in shaping the education that our school provides for our kids. We have all worked hard, participating together, to make sure that what our school does is best for our children.’ A dark-suited man in the audience took up the woman’s comment. He was an economist, he said, and he could not understand why people continued to make statements like the woman’s when the State Government’s debt meant that public expenditure could not continue as before. Education, like any other area of government expenditure, was subject to fiscal constraint. The audience polarised. There were many words spoken but the two sides never heard each other. Later, walking up the darkened Flinders Lane, the woman expressed incredulity at what had happened. ‘We’ve worked so hard for our kids,’ she said through tears of anger and pain, ‘and all they can do is talk about dollars.’ 1993 seems a long time ago. Two elections later, the Kennett Government is out of office yet its policies of restructuring have become commonplace. While time has passed and change has continued, the politics of that Flinders Lane seminar has persisted: the woman and the man; the mother and the economist; the person concerned with kids and the person concerned with dollars. Both parties talk at each other, but neither side hears. Looking back at the start of 2000, it is clear that the motif of polarisation evident in that Flinders Lane seminar has been replayed over and over again in education. The simple opposition between cost and care has been elaborated in many different ways. The kind of radical restructuring of Kennett’s Victoria has become increasingly evident nationwide. All sectors of public education schools, technical and further education (TAFE), adult and community education (ACE) and universities have been subject to far-reaching reforms as governments divest themselves of responsibilities for funding education and training. Efforts to spread these financial burdens across public and private agencies have encouraged commercialisation and privatisation of provision. The great historical achievements of public education appear to have been forgotten in the press for marketisation. While we have long
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been critics of stifling bureaucracy, it seems that every feature of bureaucratic organisation has been redefined as a ‘bureaucratic rigidity’ and slammed as inefficient. Yet this universal condemnation overlooks positive contributions: the way bureaucratic organisation underpinned the development of mass education in a large but thinly populated country; the development of a complex technology of educational provision that attended to individuals’ differences and capacities, and the formation of a modern and multicultural nation without significant ethnic violence; and the protections which due process provided from corruption and patronage. Now that the nation-building State has ‘changed its mind’ (Pusey, 1992), the work of government is being refashioned, its bureaucratic infrastructure and community linkages being unpicked in the pursuit of market solutions. The construction of the educational market place is pursued by government decrees that build upon and fuel the apparent crisis of public education by offering choice for those who can pay. The choice of private education is supported by increased funding for non-government schools. The choice of training provider is backed by the allocation of government funds to employers. Opportunities for individual choice in higher education are increasingly structured by cost as the principle of ‘user pays’ is accepted. In school education, such strategies ignore the point that opportunities for choice vary according to socioeconomic and cultural, as well as material, assets. Market solutions advantage the advantaged and disadvantage the disadvantaged. They naturalise inequality so that educational failure and the lack of social and economic opportunities appear to be a result of the individuals’ poor choices or personal failings. Through the 1980s and 1990s, under both Labor and Liberal governments, an unproductive stand-off has developed in education. Governments thrill us with hype about new opportunities for choice. Yet, all that is on offer are options to exit from marketised contexts in which educational ‘consumer’ confronts educational ‘producer’. Policy makers have increasingly operated at arms length from the face-to-face work of educational practice and the rich interrelationships between teachers, students and administrators that enable teaching and learning. In Victoria, for instance, education policy and reform throughout the 1990s were driven by a government that suspended virtually all consultation with organised teachers and their unions, and even with organised parents and school councils. The distance that developed between policy makers and practitioners meant that there is a lack of feedback loops between the top-down redesigners of
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education and those who work day-to-day in the provision of education and training. The gulf between policy and practice limits the flow of information about the effects of reform and therefore limits the capacity of government to fine-tune and optimise reforms. This oppositional politics and the growing gulf between those who redesign education and those who are subject to those redesigns are accompanied by the construction of media spectacles which lead easily to the unproductive stereotyping of positions. The positions seem simple, black and white, opposites of each other. Those who press reform forward claim the high ground: they are engaged in modernisation of education and society. They are taking Australia in new directions that may be difficult, even painful, but which are nonetheless necessary if the nation is to retain its standing in the global economy. Those who decry what is happening are positioned as opposites. Their concerns and fears are dismissed and they are presented as against modernisation, as living in a time now past, as locked into opposition. The cycle of politics plays on: if you are not with us, you are against us. If you criticise the new, you must want the old. In the ugly politics of polarisation, this dualism of modernisers and critics is easily painted as an opposition between necessary reform and nostalgia.
Beyond nostalgia This book steps decisively beyond nostalgia. It attempts to circuitbreak the unproductive polarisations in education by providing a basis for building more productive conversations about education and the course of education reform into the twenty-first century. We accept that modernisation in education and society is an inevitable feature of our times and that a return to some imagined golden past is neither possible nor desirable. The challenge is to find new ways of organising education and training to meet the imperatives of the new millennium. But we suggest that nostalgia is a common response to change, not just restricted to critics of reform. It is not always clear what is new and what is old in proposals for change and processes of reform. Our contemporary modernisers seem, increasingly, to be advocates of nineteenth-century free market liberalism and to pursue a comfortable status within traditional, apparently monocultural, social hierarchies in which domination and subordination are organised on the basis of class, gender and race. Those seen to be critics are often pilloried for being locked in the 1970s. Their nostalgia also
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rests on the personal experience of expanding social and cultural horizons as social democracy struggled to extend and diversify prevailing hierarchies of authority and power so that social leaderships could accommodate difference. We recognise that the polarisation evident in education is paralleled in other domains of social life. In Australia, at the start of the third millennium, the politics of polarisation are being played out in ever more destructive spirals. In the ten years to 1994, household disposable income increased by 52 per cent in the lowest quintile compared with 71 per cent in the highest. In 1994, the top 20 per cent of households received 40 per cent of total disposable household income (average $1250 per week). The bottom 20 per cent of households received a 6 per cent share (average $175 per week). Unemployment increased. The youth labour market was particularly hard hit. In the ten years to 1995, full-time employment among 1519-year-olds declined from 32 per cent to 17 per cent. Meanwhile part-time employment increased, but usually in low-paid jobs providing little career opportunity or job security. Industrial relations reforms have pressed for labour market deregulation in which unions are seen to have little place. They serve to reconfirm and unfetter employer rights and managerial prerogative while leaving workers with very limited protection. While the Government continues to dither about apologising for past treatment of Aboriginal Australians, the social and cultural polarisation of Australian society proceeds apace. We acknowledge that one of the pressing challenges of our times is to tackle the emergent politics of polarisation and its potentially ugly implications in a society that is increasingly organised into the haves and the have-nots. This requires us to recognise that the politics of polarisation is being driven by nostalgias of both the Left and Right. It is fuelled particularly by those who have been rendered vulnerable to the chilly winds of change, who feel deserted by the withdrawal of old protections and familiarities, and who see no option but to struggle to survive in a compassionless world. The politics of polarisation is rooted in contemporary social change but is exacerbated by the growing disillusion with government. Cynicism and disrespect have accompanied government efforts to engineer institutional reform. We know that education is one of the instruments of government that can play an important role in tackling this politics of polarisation. But we can also see that, today, education is criticised as being part of the problem, as well as being part of possible solutions, to our contemporary dilemmas. Education is a social institution which serves
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society by educating the next generation and by reforming society and culture over time. It serves as a valuable bulwark to change, while also inducting individuals into ways of thinking and acting that give birth to innovation as well as conservation. It is these contradictory social purposes that, in a time of rapid change, render education vulnerable to criticism from all sides. The so-called ‘crisis of education’ is tied to the complex agendas that are run through the social institution of education. Governments seek to redesign education to meet the presumed imperatives of new times. To engineer change they construct crises in order to lever new commitments that detach individuals’ affiliations from old institutional arrangements and reattach them to new procedures and policies. Resistance to change from both within and beyond education is generated in response. Resistance creates its own discursive politics, its own perceived crises and its own preferred reform agendas. Moral panics emanating in civil society are run through education as levers on government policy and resource allocations. New vulnerabilities associated with exposure to risk drive alternative proposals for reform. Experts deploy their particular knowledge to the generation of technical solutions to social problems: improved testing, performance indicators, new management. Others seek to privatise risk, linking risk to market mechanisms that depend upon individuals’ private capacities and resources. Security can be enhanced for those who possess the capacity to pay for their own protection while deflecting risk to those who are more vulnerable. Others are willing to share risk by contributing to public benefit but, as the retreat from the welfare state and clamour for tax cuts indicate, this is not a popular option today. We understand that this rhetoric of crisis and politics of change in education is confusing. It is not clear whether, in today’s society, it is better for education as a social institution to change or to continue its work of conserving cultures and social organisation. Because education contributes to both change and continuity, it is challenged as a means of change and, when frustration mounts, it is criticised for not changing or not changing quickly enough. But we do not think that the confusions of our times will be avoided or reconciled by simplifying the issues. The challenge is to tackle the complexities of social change, and the diversity of human responses which set nostalgias alongside and against innovative proposals for reform. Our concern in the current context is that the discursive politics of education, the advocacy of reforms alongside reactions and nostalgias, have created polarisations not only in practice but in the crucial
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debates about necessary change for the future. In this polarised and exclusionary debate about education, unproductive walls of silence have developed which limit full assessment of necessary and viable reshaping of education. Reconstructing a sensible debate about educational reform is imperative for the long-term future of Australian education and for the people, young and old, who pass through it. Sensible debate, we believe, will not develop while there is stereotyped denunciation of either the current restructuring or those who criticise it. Those who seek to modernise education are not just dollardriven rationalists and those who criticise the current marketising trajectory of education are not just reactionary social democrats seeking to escape change. Rather, there is growing recognition among many of those involved in policy making, educational practice and research that there are educational futures that lie beyond unfettered markets and protectionist bureaucracies. Seeking and working towards these alternatives is the task for our times. It depends upon setting aside confrontationist stereotyped images of both those committed to armslength organisation of education and those concerned with the intimate, face-to-face work of educating. It means building meaningful conversations between policy makers, practitioners and researchers to maximise the basis of knowledge and understanding among all those engaged at the practical cutting edge of educational debate and reform. Research has a particular contribution to make in this process. Researchers’ distance from both the direct work of arms-length policy and face-to-face educational practice limits their capacity to grasp the subtleties of day-to-day policy and practice. But this distance is also a distinctive resource that permits researchers to stand aside from the hurly-burly and provides them with a particular vantage point from which documentation and critique can occur. Seeing educational reshaping at a distance offers opportunities for commentary in a distanced, more disinterested and less partial way. These resources of space and detachment also permit the exploration of new intellectual and cultural resources in the debate about educational reshaping. This is achieved by enabling marginal voices to speak back to policy and practice, and also by extending the repertoire of concepts and understandings that can be used to make sense of reform processes, trends and trajectories, and the practical limits of reform.
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About this book This book opens a more inclusive debate about the reshaping of education for new times. It conveys a hard-nosed recognition of the conditions within which the reconstruction of modern education must proceed. It walks a path between utopianism and conformity to contemporary realities, seeking preferred but feasible educational reform. It steps between the advocates and critics of current education reform agendas in order to rethink education beyond nostalgia. The collection pursues this aim by contextualising and documenting developments in Australian education in the 1990s as a basis for extending debate about the reshaping of education in the 21st Century. It affirms that there are preferred, as well as probable, futures and explores the kind of contribution that education might make to social reform. Our approach in this collection is informed by recent debates in institutional theory which we have accessed through our role as coordinators of the education strand of the cross-disciplinary Reshaping Australian Institutions project that has been orchestrated by the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. This project is committed to documenting and evaluating the ongoing work of rethinking and reshaping Australia’s most crucial social institutions as we arrive at the turn of the century and the centenary of federation in Australia. It has encouraged debates between researchers investigating different theories of institutions, institutional change and processes of institutional design, and researchers involved in more substantive investigations of different social institutions (e.g. constitution, labour market, family, indigenous Australia, gender, population, economy, and education). The larger Reshaping Australian Institutions (RAI) project has provided a context that has both framed and supported the work of the education strand in the preparation of this book. Specifically, it has encouraged us to apply an institutional perspective to the study of Australian education and its contemporary reshaping. In framing the collection, we have focused on education as a social institution. We have drawn on the RAI definition of institutions as a useful starting point. The RAI defines institutions as sets of regulatory norms that give rise to patterns of action, concrete social structures or organisations... Institutions can be public or private, so long as they refer to a set of regulatory norms (not merely a single
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BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION norm), resulting in a whole structure of relations rather than just a single relation. Institutions therefore constitute the social infrastructure which orders the behaviour of relevant social actors (both individuals and groups) and organises relations among them. Institutions may either have been deliberately chosen (as in the case of laws) or have emerged from interactions among persons without explicit design (as in the case of social conventions) but they all have an impact on the distribution of authority and influence in society. They both establish individual and organisational centres of power and constrain the exercise of that power. (Reshaping Australian Institutions, 1994)
This definition highlights the context in which practice occurs. Although some contributors would argue with aspects of the definition, it suggests that action always occurs in a social infrastructure which orders and organises behaviour, relationships, individuals and groups, and power and authority. This social infrastructure is the social, discursive and organisational medium in which practice occurs. The definition also offers a way of understanding recent restructuring in education and the radical role played by government. The logic is simple. If, as the definition suggests, contexts shape behaviour and its outcomes, then changing contexts will change practice. If preferred changes in practice are identified, then the contextual levers that produce such change can be sought. And if these contextual levers can be identified, they can be used to bring about changes in practice and to re-engineer institutions, including government. The great insight of radical reformist governments has been to recognise that contextual changes have potent effects and that these can be manipulated towards preferred ends. The great shortcoming of recent governments has been their preoccupation with rational actor theories of institutional change. Society has been reconceived as the market in this process and individuals have been seen as self-seeking actors who pursue their own interests as their primary (only) motivation. The result has been far-reaching institutional redesign which has focused on the introduction of systems of ‘carrots and sticks’ in order to engineer changed behaviour. But, as Saul (1997) argues, this narrow view of the individual as an economic unit, divorced from its social attachments and contexts, can result in a civilisation locked in the embrace of corporatism. The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of selfinterest and our denial of the public good. (Saul, 1997, p.2)
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This corporatised social organisation privileges particular groups and vests authority in particular interests. Individuals’ primary loyalty becomes tied, not to society or common humanity, but to their group membership. Social action becomes oriented and organised relative to these particular group interests, rather than to the common interests of individuals living together on a small planet. As a result individuals are formed as subjects who acquiesce to the dictates of particular group interests. Decision making becomes a consequence of group negotiation with individuals merely enacting functions within the process. This social organisation emerges as a stark contrast to societies in which ultimate authority lies with the individual citizen (as a social actor rather than an economic unit). Such social organisation is not built on particular interests, but on the shared disinterest, of individuals. Action is shaped by a commitment to put the common interest before self-interest to regulate activity by the standards of the public good. Institutional design is oriented not to the privileging of self-interest but to the practical protection and encouragement of disinterest. The challenge is to promote concern with the provision of education for our children. Today, the preoccupation is with providing education for my children. This book examines the changing social infrastructure of education in order to identify the effects of recent reforms in both shaping individual behaviour and the ongoing work of educating in Australia. Our concern is not only to document the immediately identifiable outcomes of reform, but also to see how changes in the framework of institutional rules that shape education as both an institution and practice may play out in the longer term. No one can see the future, but careful documentation coupled with analysis that seeks to identify trends and understand processes of change from past, to present and future, can offer tentative insights about our current pathway into the future and its implications. The authors represented here are all engaged in detailed empirical and theoretical research that sheds light, in one way or another, on the nature of education as a social institution and the processes through which education has changed and is changing. They each approach the analysis of education as a social institution from different intellectual traditions but, by drawing on their disciplinary resources, they provide a valuable range of commentaries that document and critique the way education is being reorganised as a social institution and as a
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means of inducting new generations into the ways and wisdom of an age. The chapters cluster around three major themes: reinventing government, redesigning education and rethinking the educationgovernment nexus. These themes have been used to organise the chapters into sections. The two chapters in Section I: Reinventing government, focus on the changing work of government in Australia and its linkages with education. The first chapter, by Hunter and Meredyth, considers education as an instrument of government. Hunter and Meredyth argue that education has been institutionalised as a means of managing populations by being oriented to the production of particular kinds of individual selves. They analyse the emergence of the modern school at the conjuncture of confessional communities and secular states. The former reworked religious discipline pedagogically so that it operated in the day-to-day lives of individuals and communities. The latter pursued calculative bureaucratic strategies of population management in the formation of secular states. The ongoing coincidence of these dynamics shaped education as calculative bureaucratic technique that deployed pastoral pedagogies in the production of moral selfregulating individuals within secular societies. Marketisation and devolution in education rework this technology of population management, liberating local forces relative to bureaucratic regulation and reworking the secular settlement on which 20th Century Australian education has been built. However, Hunter and Meredyth argue, the current politics of education cannot be seen as a crisis. The current debate in education is better seen as part of ongoing negotiations about the contribution of education to the work of government: the social organisation and ordering of local impulses, economic developments and civic responsibilities. In Chapter 2, Gerald Burke examines the prevailing assumptions about government in Australia. He shows that the reinvention of government in Australia, as in other parts of the Anglo-Saxon world, has been informed by particular views about the state of the economy and the way government best supports economic development. These assumptions have shaped the work of government, particularly policy development and resource allocation activities. The result has been an increased emphasis on the contribution of education to economic development and vocational preparation, alongside moves to cut public expenditure and free up market mechanisms. Burke draws on statistical and trend data to show that recent criticisms of government are not sustained by the data and yet rhetoric about the necessity of
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governmental and educational reform has had significant resource and educational effects. Section II shifts attention from changes in government, to the impact of recent reforms in education on processes of elite production and class formation. The section begins with a chapter by Simon Marginson which challenges the simple notion that competition is a good thing. He suggests that competition is currently advocated as a means of disciplining education providers so that they provide educational services that are of higher quality, cost-effective and responsive to customer demand. But, he notes, education is a quasi-market and does not conform to textbook models of markets. The economic competition unleashed by marketising government reforms articulates with market segmentation in education that has long been organised on the basis of competition for positional goods. Students have always competed for positional goods in education, for ‘good’ schools and university places. The value of these goods depends upon their exclusivity; the more there are, the less value they carry. The shift towards market competition does not ‘introduce’ competition but further segments the educational market. Some providers compete for students on the basis of their low cost and quality of provision. Other providers are protected from such economic competition because they offer positional goods. They chose their students and are under no compulsion to either restrict cost or lift quality. Their reputation, their brand name, ensures market success. The contemporary reshaping of Australian education is being played out between these different forms of competition, as Marginson shows in relation to the market segmentation of Australian universities. It exaggerates market stratification, differentiates reform imperatives in different strata and reaffirms class, gender and ethnic differentials in provider performance and educational outcomes. The notion of elite markets is also pursued by Peter Gronn, whose chapter makes it clear that particular educational institutions have long played an important part in elite formation. Gronn focuses on education as an instrument for the development of capacity for social leadership. He notes that, in the 20th Century, old models of social leadership based on inherited privilege and class patronage were contested on meritocratic grounds, fuelling the growth of both professionalism and managerialism. Now, market reforms privilege managerialism relative to professionalism. Meritocracy is destabilised and processes of institutional redesign are reshaping the processes of elite formation and its composition. In this analysis, Gronn examines
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traditional and emerging processes of elite formation that operate through schools and through management education. He draws attention to the long-standing class-biased nature of Australia’s elites and the way elite recruitment is made even more selective as a result of marketising reforms in education. While acknowledging that social leadership is a necessary feature of modern societies, he warns of the social and civic dangers which accompany skewed elite recruitment and its dysfunctional consequences narrowness of vision, the emergence of predatory elites and lack of trust. The final of the three chapters in Section II, by Mark Western, draws specifically on the previous two chapters. Western draws attention to the relationships between education and class formation in Australia. He uses Gronn’s work on historical elite formation, and Marginson’s chapter on the effect of recent higher education policies on cementing the relationship between social class and prestigious educational access, to argue the centrality of educational institutions in shaping social stratification. He maintains that the reconfiguration of education provision as an education market is reconfirming class differentials and creating increased emphasis on positional goods. Where class relations had been de-emphasised and obscured by the myths and partial practices of meritocracy, they are now starkly revealed. Western comments on the implications of these developments for ongoing processes of institutional change in Australia and for research in class analysis. Section III: Redesigning education, introduces three cases of market-oriented educational designs being played out in specific educational contexts. First, in Chapter 6, the impact of marketisation in school education is explored further by Kenway and Fitzclarence. These authors examine the way education has been commodified as a consequence of recent reforms, creating new imperatives for advertising schools and their products, and new articulations in the patterns of consumption among students and parents. Drawing on ethnographic data collected since 1992, Kenway and Fitzclarence draw attention to the way students and their parents read the commodification patterns within schools and inscribe themselves into schools’ commodification practices. The analysis reveals the cultural micro-workings of marketisation; the processes by which marketisation constructs differentiated and stratified social spaces occupied by students, parents and schools, and the cruel dilemmas students and parents face as they negotiate these new consumer contexts.
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A particular historical experience of teachers in marketised contexts is the focus of Chapter 7. Marjorie Theobald takes us back to Victoria in the 1860s to show how decentralisation and marketised education created distinctive patterns of opportunities and constraints for teachers and principals in schools. Using archival records, Theobald introduces us to a number of Victorian women teachers in order to show how they constructed viable lives and livelihoods between the strictures of the market, the local community and the family. Some of these teachers became entrepreneurial stars on good incomes in this environment, well able to tough out criticism and local politics because of their networks and community standing, but many others faced limited opportunities in both pay and teaching duties. This market environment came to an end in 1872 with legislation that instituted public educational provision orchestrated through bureaucratic organisation. Theobald shows how legislative and administrative decisions reconstituted the institutional rules which shaped teachers and their work, closing off the spaces in which the entrepreneurial superstar could work and encouraging a professionalised and public service teaching force. The expansion of public educational provision increased the demand for teachers, but the vision of a male-dominated teaching force left women vulnerable to exploitation in the emerging bureaucratic arrangements. As Theobald argues, there are distinctive patterns of winners and losers in both market and bureaucratic organisation which are divided by the way gender norms and practices cut across the institutions of state, market, education and family. The articulations of education, family and market in the 1860s enabled some female teachers to flourish. The shift from educational market to maledominated bureaucracy and profession re-gendered teachers and their work by institutionalising inequalities through, for example, the marriage bar for female teachers which persisted until the mid-20th Century. The final chapter in Section III also examines the way teachers and managers deal with the emerging educational market. Angus and Seddon document the marketising trajectory in schools and Institutes of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Victoria. Drawing on interview data they show that the institutional redesign agendas of government not only reshape teachers, managers and their work, but also fuel bottom-up institutional redesign agendas as teachers and managers enact, resist and rework changing institutional rules and relationships through their day-to-day activities. They argue that the scope for working in and against new institutional arrangements is
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influenced by local factors and by the longer cultural and social traditions of each workplace and sector. In school education there was more evidence of the reassertion of cultural myths about education, accompanied by grudging compliance to change, whereas in TAFE responses to change were more pragmatic. There were advocates and resisters but, in TAFE, we also found some of the most interesting and innovative rethinking of educational practice. Section IV steps back from the specifics of reinventing government and redesigning education in order to offer more general commentaries on the changing nexus between government and education. The final two chapters draw out key themes which emerged in the earlier sections and consider their implications for the future. They speak back to both the theorists of institutions and institutional redesign, and to those who are engaged, top-down or bottom-up, in the practical politics of reinstitutionalisation in Australia. In Chapter 9, Anna Yeatman explores the contemporary politics of institutional change in the longer history of democratisation. She argues that the new contractualism that is emerging as the mechanism for orchestrating relationships is being driven by a common impulse towards individualised democratic governance. However, this impulse is tensioned by different conceptions of the individual: the sovereign individual versus the individual in relationships of many kinds, not sovereign but embedded. The politics of institutional redesign plays out between these different conceptions of the individual and of the social organisation presumed to drive them. It encourages, on the one hand, trends towards neo-liberal postpatrimonial governance and, on the other, the development of relational, postpatrimonial social democracy. The final chapter explicitly looks to the future and to the feasibility of a design of education that is different to that which is currently being asserted. It argues that education and training are crucial to the social and economic well-being of the entire community. As such, education, educational governance and educational provision will necessarily be important items on any political agenda, and governments that cannot demonstrate that their policies have contributed to educational progress will always be vulnerable. It is through education and training of various kinds that learners develop relevant capacities as citizens, social practitioners and productive workers. Governments cannot abolish responsibilities in these processes, regardless of how the role of government is defined. It is a responsibility that must be addressed by all members of society.
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1 Competent citizens and limited truths IAN HUNTER AND DENISE MEREDYTH
Australian education is said to be in crisis. The crisis is said to have been precipitated by a series of developments in which economic globalisation and the international trend to deregulation have undermined the effectiveness of national economic governance and eroded citizens’ claims on social welfare states. Public policy has been overwhelmed, it is said, by a mixture of classical liberal political philosophy and neo-liberal economic theories. National governments are reducing public spending, deferring national economic planning decisions to international markets, and devolving regulatory capacities to autonomous agencies and brokers (Alford & O’Neill, 1994). In the educational domain these developments are seen as undoing decades of social democratic reform. Whereas schooling was once oriented to the cultural development of individuals and communities, students, families and employers have now been reconceived as consumers who calculate a private rate of return on educational risks and investment (see for example Lingard et al., 1993a; Marginson, 1993). There is no doubt that Australian education has undergone major shifts in the past decade. Both Labor and Liberal–National Coalition governments have been committed to reorienting education to meet the needs of employers, labour market reform and national industrial competitiveness. The main party platforms have 1
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a common emphasis on the need to use education to build a ‘national skill pool’ and to compete internationally within ‘a global economy of increasing technical sophistication’ (Kemp, 1996; cf. Dawkins & Holding, 1987; Keating, 1994). In government, both Labor and Coalition have ‘marketised’ education, encouraging educational institutions to orient themselves to students as customers and clients (Marginson, 1997). Both have used tactics of privatisation and devolution, deferring educational planning to a constellation of institutions, stakeholders and agencies. The effects of this combination of deregulation and re-regulation have been felt across each of the education and training sectors. In primary and secondary education, the policy emphasis on privatisation and deregulation, and the use of financial incentives, have encouraged migration from public into private schooling. Following the lead of Victoria, State governments are encouraging competition in the public sector as well as in the private. Planning capacities and responsibilities have been devolved to schools, while ‘de-zoning’ policies have required schools to gain student numbers through competition and aggressive marketing (see Kenway & Fitzclarence, Chapter 6, this collection). Consequently, schools are increasingly dependent on the goodwill of both parents and corporate sponsors. Asked to be more entrepreneurial, schools are more dependent on parents for voluntary work, fundraising, expert advice and policy direction. They are correspondingly less likely to orient themselves to the needs of underprivileged groups or to particular racial or ethnic communities (Marginson, 1997). At the same time, with deregulation and the increasing availability of government subsidies to private educational initiatives, we are beginning to see the proliferation of small-scale particularist schooling. A variety of schools dedicated to specific ethnic, religious and social cultures is sprouting in the cracks and fissures of bureaucratic governance, with potentially divisive consequences for the state’s civil culture and political order. For many, these developments can be traced directly to a clash between rival political and economic ideologies. Recently, critical sociologists have extended their commentary on ‘economic rationalism’ (Pusey, 1991) to analysis of the combined forces of deregulation, globalisation and new contractualism. This analysis combines empirical exposé, epistemological dispute and dialectical hermeneutics. Often, attempts to understand the role of neo-liberal economic theory in public policy collapse into a series of exemplary normative contrasts between the market and the community, the economic and the social,
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the technical and the human (see comment in Miller & Rose, 1990; Rose, 1995). Observation of the effects of internationalisation on national economic planning become predictions of global change and of the end-of-the-nation state. A certain eschatological uncertainty appears as, with the predicted breakdown of state governance, we face either wholesale human ruination or redemption through ‘global citizenship’, popular sovereignty and active participation (cf. Turner, 1993; Kymlicka & Norman, 1994). For the redemptorists, participation is seen as transformative and empowering, having the potential to change individual self-interest into collective ideals and action (e.g. Nielsen & Limerick, 1993). Civic participation is to be the answer to consumer sovereignty. In such scenarios, global change and local adaptations have made the defence of centralised governance irrelevant to the new age of the enterprising self and the self-governing entrepreneur. The rise of new communitarian movements has made it possible to seek ‘a form of politics “beyond the State”, a politics of life, of ethics, which emphasises the crucial political value of the mobilisation and shaping of individual capacities and conduct’ (Barry, Osborne & Rose, 1996, p.1; cf. Hirst & Khilnani, 1996; Yeatman, 1994). The argument is a popular one among intellectuals, and in many ways chimes with the dominant theme of this collection. Nevertheless, recent analysis of the extent of economic internationalisation suggests that it may be premature to relegate the steering capacities of national state agencies to the historical dustbin (Hirst & Thompson, 1996). Closer to home, it is also uncertain that the power of neo-liberal economic theory has been sufficient to cause the abdication of political governance in favour of the rule of the market. Given some uncertainty regarding the extent to which state agencies have actually quit the field of social governance – or are perhaps acting on it in new ways – it may be premature to place too much faith in self-governing communities as alternative sources of civil administration. There are, we suggest, two reasons for adopting a degree of scepticism regarding the supposed capacity of neo-liberalism to replace state administration of education with an archipelago of educational markets and private providers. First, neo-liberalism may itself be a form of economic and social governance dependent in various ways on the political and social infrastructure of the nation state. Second, there are important features of education as a social institution that can neither be conceptualised nor regulated via the language of markets, consumption and consumer sovereignty.
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Liberal government: less is more To begin with, some phenomena taken as symptomatic of the push to minimise government may not be what they seem. Rather than seeing economic rationalism as the victory of market forces over government, it might better be seen as the dominance of a specific form of government: liberal government of the economy. Liberal government may be taken as a sophisticated technology of government that operates through the dual processes of the government withdrawing from direct participation in a given activity while simultaneously tightening the steering and information mechanisms responsible for regulating that activity. ‘Economic rationalism’ is perhaps best seen as the ideology of a movement dedicated to achieving a liberal governance of the economy while more or less ignoring the tasks of government in other (civil, social and political) domains. In the area of education this push can be seen in the introduction of various kinds of market signalling, budget cutting, the shifting of public funding from State to private schooling, the introduction of more corporate forms of management, and so on. Despite their sometimes ideologically driven implementation, such developments show the same combination of deregulation and reregulation that can be seen in other domains of liberal government. Arguably, what has occurred over the past two decades is the establishment of a ‘government-made market’ in the governmental regulation of private schooling and of the provision of privatised modes of training (see Smith, 1993; Marginson, 1997). Across the education and training sectors – public and private – government has created educational market places that provide students and parents with the means in which to conduct themselves as conscientious consumers – consumers with the capacity and the desire to choose (Smith, 1993, 1991). These developments take place not in a ‘free market’, but as part of governmental systems for allocating resources and for planning the provision of educational services – a process entailing considerable public regulation. Observing this makes it less easy to believe in the demise of national governance and in the consequent rise, for good or ill, of global and local communities. The progressivist educational sociology of the 1970s and 1980s has rendered academic educational discourse uniquely ill-equipped to understand the mix of deregulation and re-regulation found in neoliberal programs. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, educational sociology viewed the economy as a pre-political ‘material’ force acting
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causally on the other social institutions, including education. The resulting accounts of education took several forms, with some stressing the role of pedagogical discipline in creating a factory-work disciplined labour force (Thompson, 1963); others targeting the role of a ‘competitive academic curriculum’ in systemically favouring the social promotion of those with middle-class ‘cultural capital’ (Connell et al., 1983; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977); and still others combining these approaches in accounts of the role of the school discipline in reproducing the repressed minds and divided capacities suited to the capitalist division of labour (Bowles & Gintis, 1976). What these accounts have in common, though, is the view that market capitalism, left to its own devices, is capable of remoulding education and society in accordance with economic needs and to the detriment of human self-realisation. Secondly, as a result of its dialectical structure – in which economic determination is theoretically opposed by intellectual selfdetermination – progressivist educational sociology had a radically ambivalent view of the state. On the one hand, under conditions of capitalist domination the state was seen as little more than the instrument of the economy, translating its needs for trained workers and docile populations into the reality of repressive schooling. Hence it was widely held that the disciplinary relation between teacher and student mimics and reproduces the repressive relation between the middle and working classes (Bowles & Gintis, 1989). On the other hand, because this economistic discipline was conceived as acting on essentially self-determining individuals or communities, progressive theory was committed to an ideal form of the state – one that would democratically express the self-realising capacities of citizens (Gutmann, 1987). It is this dialectical oscillation between an actual state seen as the instrument of a repressive economy and an ideal state seen as the instrument of self-determining community that renders progressivism incapable of understanding neo-liberal forms of governance. For it means that the apparent withdrawal of the state from economic governance is seen as the final pure form of economism as markets are allowed to do their amoral worst; while hope is simultaneously invested in a return of the state in its ‘true’ form, as the executor of morally self-governing communities. But this dual response is doubly unsatisfactory: it underestimates the degree to which neo-liberalism involves the governmental regulation of social markets; and it over-estimates the degree to which communities are capable of conducting
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themselves as ‘civil’ societies without the continuous administration of governmental discipline. Ironically, there are some points in common between these leftist valorisations of community participation and the neo-conservative advocates of choice. Each distrusts expertise, especially the expertise concentrated within the bureaucracy. Each counterposes the technical and expert elements of educational governance to an ideal, whether it be that of the rational economic actor or that of the self-realising democratic community. Our argument suggests, however, that the school system can neither be explained nor reformed by appeal to a single historical principle of intelligibility, whether that of rational economic agency or democratic participation. Historically, mass education was formed from more contingent ‘settlements’ between various groups and interests. These continue to inform the school’s mixed ‘pastoral bureaucratic’ accommodation of various purposes: social discipline and self-realisation, national interest and community formation, civil pacification and self-expression. Mass schooling has no single purpose or organising principle, though it has incorporated definite institutional commitments and capacities.
Instruments of government We can begin with the critical counterposition between instrumentalism and human self-realisation – or, in its alternative formulation, between expertise and democracy. How convincing is the argument that education has been overtaken by a new instrumentalism? Surely it is quite appropriate for policy analysts, economists and applied sociologists to address the institutional redesign of the school system as an a-historical technical problem. We should not be concerned if in doing so they use an array of expert means – statistical survey, input-output measures, economic modelling, rational-actor modelling – in order to achieve various economic and managerial objectifications of the institutional field. Such objectifications – whether deployed via government bureaus or private consultancy firms – are an integral part of the monitoring, administration and reform of education. Without them there would be no way of knowing where to build new schools; how many teachers should be trained to staff them; what the economic costs and benefits of schools might be; how they might best be administered or geared to their markets; and so on. For this reason it seems a reasonable conjecture that these objectifications will be an indispen-
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sable part of any large-scale education system, whether administered by a ‘command state’ through an exhaustive bureaucratic apparatus; by a ‘social democratic’ government presiding over a mix of State and private subsystems; by a ‘minimal’ government seeking to amplify ‘market signals’ for private providers and consumers; or by ‘communal democratic’ government seeking to transform the school system into the transparent instrument of the people’s self-realisation. At the same time, it is not appropriate to address the institutional design of schooling as a purely technical problem if one is attempting to achieve an unimpassioned historical understanding of the institution. For, given this objective, it quickly becomes apparent that in addressing institutional design in this way, policy analysts are themselves giving symptomatic expression to a specific historical way of rendering schooling intelligible. This mode of intelligibility became available to governments during the 18th and 19th centuries when the increasingly systematic deployment of demographic and economic statistics, in combination with ‘cameralistic’ social calculation, allowed education to be conceived by relevantly trained experts as a problem of ‘government’; that is, as a problem open to objectification from the viewpoint of administrative calculation and manipulation. Despite some significant differences, today’s modes of objectifying schooling as an institutional sphere open to expert knowledge and technical planning are the linear descendants of these earlier intellectual technologies. This observation is meant neither to question the objectivity of the statistico-technical approach, nor to insist that it should always be accompanied by a critical reflection on its historical conditions of possibility. On the contrary, we have already suggested that administrative objectification will remain indispensable for all large-scale school systems. Further, there is no reason to think that such expert-technical knowledge will be functionally improved by the addition of critical or historical reflection and, perhaps, some reason to suspect that it might be impaired by it. Rather, our observation points towards the fact that the technical-governmental objectification of schooling occurs within certain limits; roughly, the limits imposed by the expert means that allow schooling to appear as a quantifiable and technically manipulable object. These limits though are set by the historical disposition of a certain kind of expertise, rather than by epistemological reflection. Identifying the limits of this expertise is thus not a prelude to transcending it – in a self-reflective consciousness, waiting to ‘humanise’ it, or a self-governing community waiting to ‘democratise’ it.
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Identifying its limits is instead a means of contextualising and pluralising expertise, through empirical-historical reflection on its circumstantial relation to other modes in which schooling has been rendered intelligible. Foremost among the latter is what might be called the moralphilosophical intelligibility of schooling. If schooling’s technicalgovernmental intelligibility is grounded in a certain administrative milieu, then its moral-philosophical intelligibility emerges from the milieu of modern pedagogy, whose core elements in fact derive from the pastoral pedagogy of post-Reformation Christianity. It is this milieu that gives rise to the understanding of schooling as the unfolding of latent intellectual and moral capacities towards their ‘complete’ form in and as the ‘person’; that is, in the unified form of self-reflective, self-determining being. Like the technical-governmental objectification, this pedagogical ‘moralisation’ of schooling has its own irreducible reality. It is the means by which the pastoral intellectuals organise the pedagogical disciplines and relationships of a specialised learning environment. This is a milieu in which students acquire knowledge via the ritual of a hermeneutic recovery of latent capacities under the supervision of a teacher who combines discipline and personal care.1 This does not mean though that schooling is insusceptible of ‘technicalinstrumental’ planning, by virtue of its morally self-realising end in the person, or its historically self-realising end in the community. These all-too-familiar views are symptomatic of the failure to realise that the moral-philosophical intelligibility of education has its limits too, in the pedagogical disciplines of the pastoral milieu. We should not feel compelled therefore to take sides in arguments over whether education can be rendered transparent to economic or statist planning or, alternatively, remains opaque to such planning by virtue of its ‘organic’ relation to personality or community. Nor should we feel compelled to take sides in debates over the planable or unplanable character of schooling – over the alleged opposition between the instrumental and the hermeneutic in education. Such arguments are in fact the result of a misunderstanding that occurs at the borders of the technical-administrative and moral-philosophical understandings of schooling. They arise from the assumption that the school system is a homogenous reality open to a single mode of intelligibility of one kind or the other. We are suggesting, however, that the technicalgovernmental and moral-philosophical views represent discrete understandings of schooling. They arise from the different parts of the system – the administrative and pedagogical – where each functions as
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the ‘theory-program’ for organising a local functional milieu. Further, while each theory-program is indispensable for the organisation of its particular milieu – the bureau, the classroom – neither is capable of achieving a detached understanding of the school as an institution. This is because their role is to form intellectuals possessing the specialised capacities required by the milieus – the capacities for the administrative objectification of schooling, and those associated with the role of pastoral intellectual. Our historical outline of the institutions of education must therefore include a description of its different (administrative and pastoral) forms of intelligibility. In developing this sketch we must be particularly careful to avoid establishing a dialectical relation between these forms – the dialectic of the instrumental and the normative, the technical and the hermeneutic. For such a dialectic treats the institution as the point where the technical-administrative and the moral-philosophical reach an ideal reconciliation, giving rise to scenarios in which instrumental reason might be returned to self-realising consciousness, and technical administration to self-determining community – returned, that is, to the larger wholes from which they have supposedly been alienated. But the technical-administrative and the moralphilosophical are not parts of a larger whole represented by self-reflective consciousness or a self-governing community. Rather, they belong to irreducibly real and distinct historical milieus – the governmental and the pastoral – which impose functionally allied but intellectually incommensurate modes of intelligibility on schooling. It is this combination of functional alliance and intellectual incommensurability that is central to understanding the school system as an institutional order.
The historical ends of education The institutional form of modern school systems emerged from the unplanned convergence of two major historical developments in early modern Europe: the ‘confessionalisation’ of populations by rival Christian churches, and the state-building undertaken by territorial monarchs and their court bureaucracies. Confessionalisation refers to the pedagogical practices by which churches, beginning in the 16th Century, sought to make religious discipline operative at the level of the daily life of whole communities (Schilling, 1988a, 1988b). Central European state-building, which was occurring at the same
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time, refers to the process by which princes began to carve out independent territorial-administrative states from the tottering edifice of the Holy Roman German Empire. The ground on which these independent movements converged was that of the social disciplining of populations (Oestreich, 1982). In transferring spiritual discipline into everyday life, the confessionalising churches offered emergent territorial states a powerful governmental instrument and, for their part, these states offered the confessions political protection in troubled times (Zeeden, 1985). That these developments occurred with greatest intensity in the German states is reflected in the fact that prototypes of the modern school system – that is, systems oriented to the pastoral education of entire populations – first emerged there in the 17th Century (Melton, 1988). Further, it was due to the peculiarity of its historical emergence – in the unscripted exchange between Christian confessionalisation and secular state-building – that this system developed as a distinctive hybrid of pastoral pedagogy and governmental administration (Hunter, 1994). The pastoral pedagogy of the new form of schooling is evident in the schools built by the Pietists of Halle in the latter part of the 17th Century. Emerging as a Lutheran ginger group in the wake of the Thirty Years War, the Pietists represented a relatively late and restrained stage of the process of confessionalisation – allowing for a degree of separation between inward spiritual and outer civil duties. Nonetheless, in addition to their cultivation of religious inwardness they also practised an intense social activism, transforming Halle in a burst of institution-building. This included a large orphanage, small manufactories and a trading company associated with proselytising, and a school system designed to cater for the entire population of the city, which included elementary schools for the poor, a Latin school for middle-class boys intended for university, and a Pedagogium or boarding school for upper-class boys (Hinrichs, 1971). It was not just the systemic organisation of the Pietist schools that qualifies them as ‘modern’, but the form of pedagogical discipline they deployed. Elaborated by A.H. Francke, the object of this discipline was to effect the moral transformation of each child through a process that called the ‘old self’ into question – via continuous supervision – and created a ‘new self’, in the form of an inwardly concerned and self-directed individual (Francke, 1885). The pedagogical arrangements supporting this end – the exhaustive timetabling of the teaching day, the development of standardised lessons and textbooks, the continuous surveillance and periodic examination of the students – represented major
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innovations whose derived forms remain at the pedagogical core of the school system (Melton, 1988; Gawthrop, 1993, pp.150–75). They emerged as a technical solution to the problem of how to take the intimate relation of pastoral supervision – in which students learn to attend to and shape their inner selves through their relation to a morally concerned exemplar – and make it work in large teaching institutions on lower-class children. As far as the process of territorial state-building is concerned, two aspects are of particular concern to us. First there is what has been called the ‘governmentalising’ of the state (Gordon, 1991). This refers to the breaking-up of administration into a series of linked domains – territory, economy, population – each with its own particular end and form of expertise. Seen first in the so-called ‘cameralist’ or Polizei (police/policy) states of Germany, this process detached government from the immediate interests of the prince and tied it to expert knowledge of the domain to be governed. In the cameralist textbooks of the 17th and 18th centuries we find both the typological division of zones of government – into finances and taxes; military governance; economic development, social welfare and public order; trade and tariffs – and the elaboration of the associated expert demographic, economic and policy sciences (Polizeiwissenschaften) (Justi, 1782). This was accompanied by the formation of a special stratum of cameralists or bureaucrats whose ethos was governed by the provision of technicalgovernmental advice in a given area, ideally, regardless of their personal moral views. It was in this context that mass schooling was first brought within the domain of administrative intelligibility. Here it appeared as a means of disciplining the population in accordance with the social and economic interests of the state, which were in turn identified with the ‘happiness’ or social well-being of the people. And it was in this context that demographic and economic discourses were first applied to education, rendering it intelligible as a calculable and manipulable sphere of government. The second aspect of state-building of concern to us is the emergence of a set of doctrines, of sovereignty and reason of state, whose role was to separate the spheres of state and civil society. The initial unplanned convergence of confessionalisation and state-building had issued in the system ‘confessional states’ – an array of states in which the dependence of political rule on mutually hostile confessions led to an uncontrollable slide into religious civil war (Schilling, 1988b). In reacting to this devastating occurrence, intellectuals and statesmen began to elaborate doctrines aimed at ‘de-theologising’ politics by
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quarantining the problem of political order from the domain of moral community. These areas had been inseparable in the confessional states, whose intellectuals saw politics and the state in terms of the execution of the will of the moral community, giving rise to the first popular sovereignty doctrines. Given that the moral community was in fact the confessional community, these moral communitarian conceptions of politics had in fact been part and parcel of the slide to religious civil war. Hence, in attacking the political communitarians, statist intellectuals like Henning Arnisaeus elaborated doctrines in which political order became its own end – an empirical domination to be preserved through expert exercise of sovereign power regardless of the religious or moral culture of the community or civitas (Dreitzel, 1970). It was this de-theologisation of politics that allowed statesmen to view moral education in a purely secular manner – as a question of ‘political hygiene’ – hence to begin to deconfessionalise it. Approaching education in this statist manner, Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia could support the school-building initiatives of the Halle Pietists at the expense of Lutheran orthodoxy and despite the ruling house’s own commitment to Calvinism. In the Pietist division of inner religion from outer public conduct, the king and his court bureaucrats recognised a form of religious education that allowed significant space for the formation of a purely civil regulation of conduct; that is, regulation understood in terms of the preservation of external civil order regardless of inner moral conviction. Given this kind of emergence, we should be less surprised to find that the modern school system is not a homogenous institution in which a single set of norms gives rise to a group of social practices and structures. The alliance of pastoral pedagogy and governmental administration was reached neither through the adoption of common norms, nor, for that matter, through a dialectical reconciliation of the ‘normative’ and the ‘instrumental’. Instead it was achieved through the gradual and piecemeal elaboration of a modus vivendi that allowed atheist governmental states to deploy Christian pastoral schooling by encouraging its deconfessionalised civil forms. Needless to say, this did not occur in England and Australia with the speed or statist elan of Prussia, and there are many differences between the resulting national school systems (Green, 1990). Nonetheless, the emergence of school systems in all such societies is characterised by similar modus vivendi reached between confessionalising churches and governmentalising states. It is for this reason that the history of state schooling in Britain and
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Australia is marked by the 19th Century struggle to arrive at a deconfessionalised pastoral pedagogy; the emergence of hybrid publicprivate, state-religious systems; the continuation of confessional systems in the form of the Catholic parochial and Protestant private schools; and the later efforts of the state to bring the heterogenous systems within a single field of calculation and planning through the deployment of overarching monitoring and funding regimes. This history, which shapes our present thinking and circumstances with great force, testifies to the fact that schooling is not a homogeneous institution based on a single normativity or social function. It must instead be seen as an institutional hybrid, emerging from the governmental deployment of a pastoral pedagogy and, as a result, harbouring divergent ends and serving a variety of functions.
Education and community This understanding of the school system’s institutional form has a number of consequences for some of its economic and political theorisations. As noted above, marxian educationists have generally held that the disciplinary relation between teacher and student mimics and reproduces the repressive relation between the middle and working classes (Bowles & Gintis, 1989). Those few who notice that pastoral discipline is in fact designed to intensify the student’s capacity for selfreflection and self-control, rather than repress it, explain the anomaly away by treating this as the internalisation of repression in the form of conscience (Johnson, 1976). By contrast, our history of the institutional reality of the school suggests both empirical and methodological grounds for political theorisation of the school in terms of the correspondence or non-correspondence between its disciplinary and administrative forms and the self-governing form of the democratic community. As a matter of historical fact, mass education did not originate in democratic societies as the means of realising their capacities for political self-governance. As we have seen, it emerged first in authoritarian societies from the unscripted exchange between confessionalising churches and governmentalising states. To the extent that schooling between the 17th Century and late 19th Century was ‘community based’, the communities in which it was based were confessional ones. Left to their own devices, these communities were incapable of producing the kind of education required by ‘liberal’ citizenship, because
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they were incapable of separating civil discipline and social order from spiritual discipline and moral zeal – that is, of separating the good citizen from the good Christian or ‘man’. We have already noted that this separation was made possible in part by the appearance of religions that divided outer conduct from inner morality, and in part by the political neutralisation of moral communities (civil society) achieved by radical statism. This process was characterised by the shifting of schooling from the political to the social sphere through its reconstruction as a deconfessionalised civil-moral pedagogy. It was also marked by the ‘authoritarian liberal’ protection of schooling from direct political intervention, to the degree that it respected the border between confessional moralisation and the civil education of tolerant citizens. Marxian and liberal theories that lament the gap between school and community, public and private, as a ‘depoliticisation’ of social life may be in danger of underestimating both the fragility of depoliticisation and the degree to which secular-civil citizenship depends on it. That conjecture is at least worth consideration as we reflect on the existence of various kinds of community-based schooling: the Protestant and Catholic schools of Northern Ireland; segregationist community school boards in the southern USA; the rival Anglican and Dissenting elementary schools of early 19th Century Britain; the Koranic schools of Muslim fundamentalism; the biblicist schools of various Christian sects. There is no reason to think that the exercise of democratic citizenship in a liberal state requires either democratic school discipline or democratic educational administration. There is a sense in which the goal of pastoral pedagogy is indeed the formation of self-reflective self-governing individuals. It does not follow, however, that this pedagogy should or can be reflectively chosen and governed by the individuals it acts upon. In fact, there is a fundamental reason why it cannot be: despite the fact that this pedagogy represents itself as maieutically ‘educing’ them from pre-existing intellectual capacities, it actually only teaches self-reflection and self-governance as particular ‘tasks of behaviour’ or conducts of the self. The condition of students acquiring such conduct is their moral-disciplinary subordination to a pastoral teacher, whose personification of love and surveillance is internalised by the students in the form of self-concern and selfrestraint (Hunter, 1994, pp.49–58, 79–87). Hence, far from being an obstacle to the conduct of tolerant self-controlled citizens, the nondemocratic discipline of pastoral pedagogy is one of its central conditions.
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Similarly, while it is true that during the 19th Century the school system added the grooming of democratic citizens to its long list of objectives, this does not mean that the system itself should or can be democratically administered. The reason for our scepticism here should be clear enough: The administrative intelligibility of schooling was the achievement not of ‘conscience and consciousness’, but of an expert-technical objectification effected by intellectual technologies housed, not in the community but in the bureau. There is little reason to think that these intellectual techniques can be put at the disposal of communities, nor, given the history of community-based schooling, is there much incentive for thinking that they should be. They may, however, be distributed to a special group of parents going under the name of the ‘school community’. Such a distribution does not signify the partial expression (or partial betrayal) of the community’s irrepressible desire for educational self-determination. Rather, it must be understood in terms of the difficult and tenuous integration of limited groups of activist-parents into the bureaucratic governance of the school. To exemplify this, we turn now to the Australian context.
Australian settlements Given the history we have sketched, it is possible that the current devolution of educational administration to school communities may jeopardise the civil-secular educational accommodation reached between the state and the churches at the turn of this century. The bureaucratic measures permitting this accommodation were the result of the constitutional and religious settlements of the 1870s, which established a bureaucratically registered teaching profession ordered by centralist standards, inspection and statistical record keeping (see Theobald, Chapter 7, this collection). Replacing systems of ‘local control’ (loose alliances between State government, private entrepreneurs, parents and parochial boards) these measures introduced a system of (notionally) ‘free, compulsory and secular’ elementary education sitting alongside the confessionally specific schools of the Anglicans, Catholics and Dissenters (Portus, 1937; Austin, 1961). These reforms consolidated bureaucratic efforts to introduce systems of central administration that could redress the perceived ignorance and apathy of local control, and that could introduce the model of mass pastoral schooling that had been developed in Britain from the 1840s (Turney, 1969, 1991). This model depended upon removing children from the
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moral influence of the family and the street, enclosing them in the reformatory playground and in the expert architecture of the classroom (Jones & Williamson, 1979). In the State education systems, the claims of local communities to educational control foundered in the face of the expertise possessed by the new ‘pastoral bureaucrats’ – a failure that was also to haunt denominational schooling until well into this century (Smith, 1991). The governmental management of educational markets and communities consolidated as the State took on more direct responsibility for post-elementary schooling. By the 1910s, direct State intervention had extended elementary education and established arrangements in which diverse forms of extended elementary, secondary and technical schooling were shaped into the modern mould of mass secondary education. The rationales supporting this extension are strikingly familiar: bureaucrats referred to the new pressures of international economic competition and to the need to make Australia industrially competitive, while providing more choice and flexibility to a rapidly expanding mass education population possessed of new political rights and social expectations. The explicit aim of State planning was to train workers suited to national needs, while providing a common and minimum preparation for citizenship. This was to be rendered capable of meeting the needs of a scattered and often isolated population through the centralised bureaucratic provision of curriculum, examinations and inspection. The historical interpretation to which these developments were subject in the 1970s and 1980s tends to draw on the familiar duality between democratic values and instrumental calculation – between a potentially democratic and organic school community and the rationalism of bureaucratic experts (Ely, 1978). Where bureaucratic reformers were not treated as bearers of a secular liberal vision (Smith & Spaull, 1925; Crane & Walker, 1957), or as liberals supporting illiberal policies (Hyams & Bessant, 1972), they became representatives of middle-class and patriarchal interests (Miller, 1986; Miller & Davey, 1990; Vick, 1990). Bureaucratic effort has been counterposed, in these historiographic debates, to ‘the promise of a holistic, spiritually committed education, an active local educational culture, working-class cultural traditions, and the unleashed resources of an educational market place’ (Smith, 1990, p.68). However, these early administrators can also be regarded as the inhabitants of a bureaucratic stratum, the inheritors of two centuries of ‘pastoral bureaucratic’ educational governance concerned both with fostering unique individuals and with
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forming productive, healthy and moral populations. Our previous historical discussion encourages us to see these negotiations as driven by something far larger than the rival political philosophies that accompanied them. From the perspective of our broader history they appear as part of the political neutralisation of civil society. They have their origins in governmental rationalities whose aim was to form ‘civil’ citizens and competent workers from confessionally divided communities. Since this time, the school as a governmental system has been charged, among other things, with ensuring that moral communities are not the only source of the future citizenry’s political affiliation and civil conduct. This responsibility was explicitly discussed at the time by pioneering educational bureaucrats such as Frank Tate and Peter Board, Directors of Public Instruction in Victoria and New South Wales respectively. According to Board, secondary schooling must combine ‘the preparation of the youth of the nation for the most efficient participation in productive industry’ with the provision of a common general education, sufficient to make future citizens moral and literate, possessed of sound general knowledge and good civic habits. Constructing new school systems adapted to industrial expansion and an extended franchise demanded some sort of harmonisation of private belief and civic duty, Christian doctrine and non-sectarian moral formation. Schools were to be ‘the instruments for national purposes, for the cultivation of individual productiveness and intelligent citizenship, the training grounds for national defence, and the nurseries of the nation’s morality’. Education, for Board, was ‘the unifying and consolidating influence in a State, bringing about common standards of honour and of conduct and common habits, so that the school of the people is the birthplace of the national conscience’ (Board, 1910, pp.708−2). Nevertheless, in the interests of maintaining civil peace, the State set limits to its regulation of the ‘moral’. At the same time it sought to forestall religious incursions into the still-fragile realm of civil society: the unacceptability of direct teaching of sectarian doctrine had been established by statutory provision in Queensland and New South Wales, so as to prevent religious sectarianism and prohibit confessional instruction in State schools. From their European heritage, however, Australian school systems had to hand the means of forming a teaching corps capable of indirect and non-coercive moral influence, within the milieu of non-coercive moralisation and ‘supervised freedom’ that constituted to basic pedagogical economy of mass schooling (Hunter, 1988). Accordingly, early twentieth-century models for moral forma-
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tion and civic instruction relied on the teaching of literature and history and on the effects of school ethos (Thomas, 1994a, 1994b; Meredyth & Thomas, 1997). Civic textbooks used historical and literary lessons to emphasise practical civic and ethical capacities. Lessons featured a combination of moral and physical training, shaping the rounded ‘character’ through the pastoral technology of self-directed play and practical activity. The common environment and ‘corporate life’ of the school, as Board put it, was the main instrument in ‘the development of the pupil into a citizen of the State’, making public spirit and obligation to the community ‘habitual’, so that personal ambitions could be directed to useful ends and national purposes (Board, 1905, p.6). This was the contemporary form of the standing accommodation between private morality and State schooling – one that is still being negotiated today. There were other aspects to these settlements between the bureaucratic governance of State schooling and the organised lobbies of religious communities and familial interests. Board and others were seeking ways to manage the expectations of a population capable of making demands on State education, both as citizens and as human souls possessed of unlimited potential. Then, as now, the State school system operated within patterns of inherited economic and cultural privilege, while promising equality of opportunity. The hypocrisy or confusion of those who made these promises has exercised contemporary egalitarians, preoccupied with the effects of doctrines or ideologies. But while these early bureaucrats drew in different ways on the resources of democratic and liberal philosophy, or developed enthusiasms for ‘mental science’ or child study, their strategies were more consistent than their educational philosophies. The interests of the nation-building state lay in identifying ability and in distributing vocational outcomes and social rewards on the basis of that ability, more or less independently of family background or expectations. Its interests also lay in maintaining social cohesion, and therefore in managing individual and familial ambition. The State’s concern in mass secondary education, as Peter Board argued, was not to promote individuals’ aspirations for university entry and social mobility, but to provide common civic preparation and fair vocational differentiation. Students should be regarded as ‘contributors to the well-being of the State as a State’, capable of pursuing their personal progress and freedoms, but able to subordinate personal freedoms to the welfare of the State. This combination, he noted had ‘produced the most stable and contented communities’ (Board, 1905, p.6).
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If we look past the ‘undemocratic’ elements of Board’s concerns with State interest, we can see the process of social settlement at work. Mass secondary education provided the means by which government sought to defuse the unrest caused by the gap between the formal political equality of enfranchised citizens and their unequal social and economic resources (Marshall, 1963; Donzelot, 1988). On the one hand, the routines of the classroom made it possible to enclose diverse social groups within a common regimen of pedagogical exercise and testing, thus providing a social laboratory capable of detaching educational performance from familial background. On the other hand, educational selection provided a means to link the family more closely to the governmental norms of the school and its apparatus of psychological counselling and guidance (Donzelot, 1979; Rose, 1990). The administrative promise of the school system (constantly challenged) has been that the unequal social rewards distributed by the school system will be allocated on the basis of educational performance within the common educational environment, as registered by disinterested pastoral observation and publicly accountable testing and selection procedures. The inherently contestable validity of these claims has depended on the extent to which educational institutions are able to defuse the tension between limitless familial and public expectations regarding the social rewards of education and the limited capacities of governments to meet such expectations. Here educational selection has acted as a crude pressure valve, allowing a limited release of the build-up of social expectations through the common acceptance of educational norms as the passage to vocational outcomes. However, it has also provided the statistical machinery used to plot patterns of educational participation and outcomes, mapped against governmental norms of equity and the regular distribution of life chances and social risk (cf. Ewald 1991). Such calculations have depended on a centralised institutional capacity for intense individualisation, statistical normalisation, expert analysis and pastoral concern – a combined resource that, so far, has been exclusive to the education bureaucracies. The patchy and incomplete project of establishing common norms and administrative dispensations within a secular State school system entailed significant achievements. Not the least of these is the peaceful accommodation of civil order, private beliefs and familial ambitions. While these settlements will no doubt fall short of the emancipatory ideals of democratic theory – owing little to the model of the selfgoverning community – they form the background to important modern conceptions of social rights and the relations between states and
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citizens of a modern democracy. If we are to mount effective responses to doctrinal enthusiasms that undermine the long-term stability and achievements of mass education, we will need to describe and defend the social settlements embodied in the institutional organisation of the school system.
Limited truths No doubt there will be those to whom the preceding analysis will seem, at best, antiquarian and, at worst, completely redundant in the face of the apparent rush to dismantle government in favour of markets and to wind back the state in favour of private enterprise. Centralist planning, coordination and resourcing are hardly political priorities for the conservative parties, at least at the level of doctrine. Under Labor, despite the perception that this government was dominated by ‘economic rationalism’, the prevailing emphasis on national economic competitiveness was accompanied by a strong statist program of nation-building and institutional reform, connected to the restructuring of social security, employment, training, credentialing and labour relations. Such programs sought to promote ‘national goals’ of economic development and industrial competitiveness, while seeking to avert the social risks of long-term unemployment, welfare dependency and disaffection (Meredyth, 1997). Under the Liberal–National Coalition, the intrusiveness of big government is being replaced by informed rational choice, personal interest and responsiveness to the needs of the employment and training market place (Kemp, 1996; Vanstone, 1996). Claims of consultation, choice and flexibility abound, but the talk of commonality and centralised planning has been reduced to a murmur. There is little consideration of the civil capacities required to exercise rights of choice, of government’s responsibility to build such capacities, and of government’s duty to ensure that such choices do not undermine longer-term systemic objectives, whether those of national security and economic performance, or of social welfare and equity. The ambiguities of the political rationality of ‘choice’ have become clearer as the effects of deregulation and devolution are felt within the school system. Once, activist educationists and teachers, equipped with enlightened attitudes and advanced theoretical instruments, could regard themselves as acting as agents of a popular political will thwarted by the bureaucratic and technical aspects of the school. Anti-
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bureaucratic sentiment could be regarded as reflecting collectivist and egalitarian support for community-based participation. It could be assumed that activist teachers and parents acted in alliance. Such assumptions no longer hold. As others in this volume have shown, parental and community groups are now capable of characterising the ‘progressive’ values of activist teachers as tendentious and sectarian, while pursuing their own sectional interests. The recent public debate on civic education is a case in point (Meredyth & Thomas, 1996). Presented with proposals to institute courses designed to provide a minimum of political education (Civics Expert Group, 1994), commentators spiralled either into dystopian pronouncements that education had been overtaken by reductionist and instrumental conceptions of knowledge and of politics, or into visionary expectations that the revival of civic education could transform Australian political culture and rebuild civil society – if only the curriculum was both socially critical and democratic (see Yates, 1995). To be democratic, it was urged, the curriculum should be able to express the authentic democratic commitments of the community, which were taken to be vested in active citizenship, dialogue and tolerance (e.g. National Centre for Australian Studies, 1994). It was not hard to locate these commitments, it was contended: community consultation and ‘dialogue’ would give them voice (Horne, 1994). Since community-based ‘core values’ were enlightened, it was urged, there should be no problem teaching and assessing them within a core and compulsory curriculum. Not surprisingly, it did not take long for objections to arise from less ‘enlightened’ sections of the community (e.g. Crittenden, 1995; Knox, 1995). There was little dispute that the school system had a responsibility to form the ethical capacities of citizens and to acquaint them with points of national moral and political arguments, however contentious. But this was seen to be quite different from the compulsory inculcation of values, especially where these were likely to conflict with the various allegiances and commitments to be expected in a multi-ethnic and multi-faith society (see Kymlicka, 1995; Hindess, 1993; Milner, 1993). At such moments the normative and bureaucratic role of the school system clashes with popular democracy, understood as the representation of moral community. Arguably, though, opening the school door to marginal political and moral enthusiasts who speak in the voice of the community may undermine the secular settlements on which mass State education was established at the turn of the twentieth century. The risks of founding the public governance of education in
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communal will are starkly apparent at points such as this, where private morality, partisan politics or religious doctrine threaten to overwhelm the common forms of civil intercourse created by bureaucratically uniform schooling. The social settlements informing civil education will become more, not less, important if the trend to privatisation and devolution continues. Nevertheless, the civics example cannot be taken to demonstrate that Australian education is ‘in crisis’. After all, it involves issues that have been with us for at least a century: the place of moral doctrines within secular State school systems; the links between bureaucratic reform programs and organised community representation; and the relationship between a professional teaching corps and the educationally concerned parent. None of these problems is a product of the marketisation of education – although deregulation and privatisation may exacerbate them. Each problem area shows how messy the mixture of regulation and self-management can be. Each has a history that indicates the irreducibility of educational policy to matters of general principle. This history shows the range of purposes served by school systems, from state-building and industrial competition to the maintenance of civil accords and social settlements.
Conclusion: the role of government in education What are the implications of this history for current doctrinal enthusiasms for deregulation, choice and devolution? Are the governmental settlements described above really irrelevant to a new marketised education system, to new communities living under the star of global citizenship? Much depends on the status of the forms of national governance whose history we have been reviewing. To end on a speculative note, our framework suggests that there may be inescapable limits to the push for small government. It may be that the attempt to steer the entire system through economic governance may be self-limiting. By this we mean that it may be impossible for states to neglect certain non-economic ends of government – associated with the achievement of basic civil and social education (‘socialisation’) – in the long run. Some of the original tasks of mass education in securing a pacific and governable citizenry may be incapable of ‘market’ formulation and would seem to require the permanent and large-scale governmental planning and funding. Even if education ministries continue to
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devolve the administration of school systems, education will continue to be attached to a technical infrastructure that will statistically register phenomena such as educational attainment, vocational destination, unemployment rates and living standards. Familial expectations and electoral forces will maintain the pressure on governing parties to demonstrate their grip on the technical and distributive functions of education and training, and their competence in negotiating with professional educational and industry groups. Competent government cannot afford to divorce itself from the long-standing commitment to monitor the distribution of educational participation and training outcomes. This means that, even if political parties are committed to freeing themselves from the ‘shackles of the state’, government cannot afford to dispense with the mechanisms that monitor standard of living and educational attainment. The concept of the educational market or of ‘rational choice’ cannot do this work (even if it is deployed as if it could), because such heuristics or predictive models do not do the empirical work of data collection or analysis. Nor is there any point in imagining that statistical indices could be transformed into the personal moral understandings of students and teachers. Democratic political discourse and the technical vocabulary of bureaucratic planning and calculation belong to different domains of reasoning. Nevertheless, the combination of socially and numerically normative prescription that goes into the statistical monitoring of education systems is indispensable to political reform, ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’. Such imperatives provide powerful – albeit morally unfashionable – arguments for the role of government in education.
Notes 1. This is not to say of course that all teaching actually takes this form. The model of pastoral maieutics is not the only one available for structuring the teacher–student relation. The European grammar school is the source of a different organisation in which the student enters into a less inward and more imitative relation to a teacher whose role is to model the rhetorical and ethical skills needed in public life. For its part, modern mathematics and science teaching deploys the model of expert demonstration and training in technical procedures. Nonetheless, the model of pastoral supervision is the dominant pedagogical form in the public school systems that emerged from the 19th Century program to provide elementary education to the lower classes.
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2 Education and economy: a review of main assertions GERALD BURKE
This chapter provides an overview of the quantitative indicators of the changes that occurred in education and training in Australia in the 1990s within a changing economic and policy context. The main policy instruments used were: • putting more publicly funded education and training into competitive markets; • expansion of charges in public education; • increased public subsidy to fee-charging private institutions; • mandating or exhorting increased expenditure by employers; • restraining or cutting public funds; • developing a new structure for vocational education and training (VET) based on competencies and the recognition of training however acquired; and • changing the management structure of public education. The policy reforms can be seen to be directed at four main objectives: • To increase the levels of investment in education and training, at limited cost to government. 24
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• To equip both young and older Australians to be flexible members of the workforce. • To achieve more equitable outcomes from education and training. • To maximise the education and training outputs achieved from the resources involved. This chapter focuses on these four objectives and the extent to which they were achieved. Following is an overview of the economic and policy context within which the supply of VET has changed. The questions that are addressed are: • Did investment in training increase? • At what cost to government finance? • Were Australians better equipped for work? • Was equity in education and training improved? • Was the education and training delivered more efficiently?
Economic and policy context The reforms to vocational education and training over the last decade were made in the context of an economy increasingly exposed to international pressures and with an agenda for economic reform that stressed smaller government and the wider establishment of competitive markets. A major factor stimulating changes in education and training at the beginning of the 1990s was the high level of unemployment and the poor employment prospects for school leavers and low-skilled workers. The importance of training and retraining the existing workforce, including those at the operative level, was receiving increasing recognition. The training needs of the existing workforce were emphasised by the changes occurring in the industrial and occupational structure. The factors contributing to this were the reduction in protection, globalisation, new technologies and changes to management, work practices and industrial relations. The majority of the Australian workforce had no post-school qualifications and little formal training in the workplace. Many had literacy skills that were inadequate for the new tasks. Supervisors and managers were viewed as lacking the skills necessary for the satisfactory performance of the new tasks confronting them.
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At the same time as the need for increased training was emphasised, economic reform required that public outlays be contained and that publicly funded activities demonstrate increased efficiency and responsiveness to client needs. The policy reforms to achieve this include measures to introduce greater competitiveness among suppliers, to reform regulation and management and to increase accountability requirements. A growing share of public funds for education and training has been made available for competition by the private sector. In universities, where the expansion in student numbers has been greatest, students and their families have been required to bear an increasing share of the costs. Support for apprenticeship includes subsidies to employers. Reforms to the support for apprenticeships in the 1990s shifted part of the burden of cost to the trainee by allowing the wages of trainees to apply only to time on the job and the development of the ‘training wage’. Support has been provided for the organisation of Group Training companies which employ and take responsibility for training apprentices and trainees. By 1998, Group Training Companies employed 14 per cent of all apprentices and trainees (NCVER, 1999a). The latest development, ‘user choice’, introduced in 1998 allows the employer and the trainee under the New Apprenticeship system to choose the training organisation to be funded by government for delivery or assessment of training. The most intense pressures to adapt to the needs of the economy have been felt in vocational education and training. Participation of teenagers in VET had, on the data available, been low. VET courses that incorporated work-based training were largely confined to traditional male-dominated occupations where employment was diminishing. The challenge was to extend work-based training to other areas and create combinations of on- and off-the-job and institutional training, including training in secondary schools. VET qualifications were to be based on industry-determined competencies, however acquired. An enhanced role for industry in vocational education and training was sought, including in determining competency standards. National Industry Training Boards have been given a major role in establishing industry competency standards. A major development of the late 1990s is the development of ‘training packages’, which focus on units of competency and modes of assessment. At every level of education and training there has been a move to
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devolve greater responsibility for finance and staffing to provider institutions. There have, though, been considerable differences across the States and sectors, with the greatest level of autonomy in the university sector.
Did investment increase? Enrolments Table 2.1 shows the distribution and growth of student numbers across the major sectors of the formal education system. This shows little change in school enrolments in recent years. There has been substantial growth in higher education and VET. School enrolments have changed largely in line with population changes. Much of the growth in higher education is due not to demographic factors but to increased participation. The total population aged 15–29 fell slightly in the period 1990–98 whereas the numbers of higher education students rose nearly 40 per cent. The changes in VET may not be as substantial as shown in Table 1, due to the introduction of a new classification that substantially affects comparisons over time. The introduction of a new statistical standard from 1994 led to the reclassification as vocational of many courses previously regarded as ‘Recreational, Leisure and Personal Enrichment’. Combining VET with the ‘Recreational, Leisure and Personal Enrichment’ category indicates a growth in the 1990s of somewhat less than for higher education. Overall access to post-secondary education has increased substantially. Table 2.2 gives an indication of the size of the increase in participation rates in Australia. The participation of those aged 17–24 in the formal education system has increased from around 40 per cent to over 45 per cent in the 1990s. However, Table 2.2 also indicates that most of the increase occurred by the early 1990s. The largest increase in participation in the 1990s is in universities, among 20–24-year-olds. However, the TAFE system is very important for older persons. About 10 per cent of the population aged 25–29 and 6 per cent of the population aged 30–64 were enrolled in TAFE in 1997. The very rapid growth in the population aged 45 and over now occurring suggests that the role of TAFE may become even more important in the future.
nearly 100%
100%
2665
2701
2808
5%
% Full-time
1990
1993
1998
Apparent growth 1990–98
39%
672
576
59%
1535
1121
967
VET data relate to students in streams 2100 to 4500 enrolled at any time in the year.
A new system of VET data collection was introduced for 1994 with further changes in later years.
Notes:
Source: ABS, Catalogue No. 4221.0, DETYA (1999d), NCVER (1999c) earlier publications
4%
391
398
485
approx. 15%
VET
–30%
380
661
539
0%
Recreational, leisure and personal enrichment
27%
1915
1782
1506
Total VET & recreational, leisure and personal enrichment
15%
5785
5456
5033
TOTAL
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59%
Higher education
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School years 11 & 12
28
School to year 10
Table 2.1 Students in education and training, Australia, 1990, 1993, 1998 (’000)
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Table 2.2 Education participation rates, Australia, 1990, 1992 and 1997 (per cent) Age
7–14
15
16
17
18
19
20–24
25–29
30–64
1990
99
100
93
77
60
49
27
15
8
1992
99
99
95
84
66
54
31
16
9
1997
99
98
95
84
65
54
33
17
9
Source: DETYA (1999a)
Training in the workplace The data in Table 2.1 apply only to the formal education system. ABS survey data provide a broader insight into the extent to which structured training extends beyond the formal education system. The ABS from its 1997 survey estimated that nearly 4 million persons had undertaken a training course in the previous 12 months. The estimated participation in in-house training (training mainly attended by persons working for the same employer) fell in the early 1990s and had not recovered its 1989 level by 1997. A more optimistic note is given by looking at external training (training mainly attended by persons not working for the same employer and only partly financed by employers). The percentage of wage and salary earners reporting this form of training rose from 12 per cent in 1993 to 20 per cent in 1997. Other data from the surveys indicate a 30 per cent decline in hours of in-house training per employee trained: from 52 hours in the 1989 survey to 38 in 1993 to 36 in 1997 (Wooden et al., 2000). However, because there are nearly 4 million persons being trained, this is still a very large activity. The total of training hours delivered appears to be about two-thirds the size of that delivered by public VET providers.
Summing up enrolments and training numbers Overall enrolments in both VET and university have been expanding quite rapidly. On the other hand the amount of training provided in the workplace declined in the early 1990s and had not recovered in the mid to late 1990s.
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Cost to government One of the major concerns in recent years has been to achieve the expansion of education and training without excessively increasing the burden on governments. Before reviewing outlays on education and training in Australia there is some value in making comparisons of outlays across OECD countries. These indicate that Australia does not have a high level of public expenditure in general and only an average level of public outlay on education. The message from this is that while efforts to encourage private spending and efficiency in public spending should be pursued there is no indication that the levels of public spending in Australia are too high by world standards. Table 2.3 shows the changes in total government outlays on all their activities and education outlays in the 1990s. Government outlays were about 35 per cent of GDP at both the beginning and end of the period. During this time there was a shift in the composition of government outlays. Cash benefits grew as a percentage of GDP and interest payments and capital expenditures declined. Education outlays fell slightly as a percentage of government outlays. Table 2.3 General government total outlays and outlays on education, Australia 1990–91 and 1997–98
1990–91 1997–98
Approximate total government outlay $ billion
As % GDP
Government outlay on education $ billion
As % GDP
139.7 200.9
35% 35%
18.4 25.1
4.6% 4.4%
Source: ABS Catalogue Nos 5510.0, 5204.0
There has been a sustained policy to contain public sector expenditure for the last 20 years. Australia has managed to hold back the level of public outlays despite increased demands for cash benefits caused by an ageing population and a sustained high level of unemployment. A range of measures has been taken to contain public expenditure for a given level of service, to privatise services and to privatise a range of government trading activities. This has noticeably reduced debt and interest payments and shifted the payment for some activities to the private sector.
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It can be noted that in the comparison to other OECD countries, Australia has a relatively low level of government outlays. This is illustrated in Figure 2.1. Figure 1 70 60 % of GDP
50 40 30 20 10 en
ce
Ne
Sw ed
s nd er
la
m
th
er
Fr an
an y
da na Ca
Th e
Source: OECD, 1999
G
UK
d an al Ze
Ne w
US Ja pa n
lia tra
Au s
ea
0 Ko r
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Only Korea is shown to have a lower rate of total outlay than Australia. Table 2.4 provides comparisons with a range of OECD countries for educational outlays. Australia is further up the list: there are several countries with lower public expenditure. It is notable that Australia has a higher rate of private expenditure than the European countries with high levels of public expenditure. Only Korea, US and Japan have higher rates of private expenditure. Table 2.4 Public and private educational expenditures as percentage of GDP, selected OECD countries, 1990 and 1995 Public expenditure and subsidies 1995
Private 1995
Total 1995
Total 1990
Japan Korea Italy Australia The Netherlands USA France Canada Denmark Sweden
3.6 3.6 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 5.8 6.3 6.6 6.6
1.2 2.6 0.1 1.0 0.1 1.7 0.5 0.7 0.5 0.1
4.7 6.2 4.7 5.6 5.0 6.6 6.3 7.0 7.1 6.7
4.7 m 5.8 4.9 m m 5.6 5.7 6.4 m
Unweighted average
5.2
0.9
6.0
5.5
Source: OECD, 1998 and 1999 m = missing data
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Table 2.4 also shows that in several of the countries listed expenditures on education had increased in the period 1990–95. In most cases this means a growth in public expenditures. Australia’s private spending has been growing relative to public outlays on education.
Australia’s expenditures The expansion of post-secondary education and training in the 1990s required either an increase in expenditure on education by government, reduced expenditure per student; or an increase in private spending. A mixture of these has occurred, though it is not easy to document the changes precisely. Table 2.5 summarises the changes in public and private outlays on both public and private education. It shows a decline in public expenditure as a proportion of GDP. There is a rise in private expenditure, though the private expenditure (net of any subsidies received from government such as grants to non-government schools) is still only about 15 per cent of total outlays on education. Table 2.5. Government and private expenditures and outlays on education, Australia ($billion and % of GDP) Net private expenditure not financed by government: $ billion
Net private expenditure as % GDP
Gov’t outlay ($ billion)
Gov’t outlay Total outlays as % of GDP as % of GDP
1989–90
na
na
16.7
4.3%
na
1992–93
3.0
0.7%
20.9
4.9%
5.6%
1997–98
4.6
0.8%
25.1
4.4%
5.2%
Source: ABS Catalogue No.5510.0 and unpublished data
The percentage of GDP devoted to education, which was at a historically low level in the late 1980s, rose in the early 1990s – at the same time that enrolments were rising quickly. Another factor pushing up expenditures in the early 1990s was a catch-up in teacher salaries, which had lagged in the late 1980s.
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The share of the GDP being spent on education is affected by: • change in the GDP; • change in the actual resources of teachers and other inputs to education and training; and • change in the prices of those inputs relative to the overall price level. Real growth in the GDP has averaged 4 per cent per annum since 1992–93 or about 20 per cent in the period 1992–93 to 1997–98. In these circumstances a declining share of GDP can still represent increased resources. However, offsetting this is the change in relative prices. The increase in prices in the GDP averaged only about 1.5 per cent per annum, but teacher salaries and other appear to have increased at over 3 per cent per annum. Overall it looks as if there has been an increase in resources of about 7 per cent over the period 1992–93 to 1997–98.
Sectors Across the whole of education and training the average picture is of resources expanding in line with student numbers and with a small increase in the share borne by the private sector. However, the averages hide much more diversified changes across the sectors and States. Before considering this, note the distribution of public outlays, including student benefits, in the main sectors. About 60 per cent goes towards schools, nearly 20 per cent towards universities and a little over 10 per cent towards TAFE.
School expenditures Much of the growth in school enrolments (shown in Table 2.6), and therefore in expenditure, has occurred in ‘Other non-government’ schools, which are largely privately funded. The savings to governments are offset to some extent by the growth in government funding of non-government schools in recent years. The documentation of this is a matter of current study. There has been an apparent growth in government recurrent funding of government schools. The nominal amount increased over 40 per cent from 1989–90 to 1997–98. If we deflate by an index of school costs, based mainly on teachers’ salaries, then the result is an increase in
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Table 2.6 School enrolments by type of school, Australia, 1990 to 1998 (’000) Government
Non-government Catholic
1990 1998 Change 1990–98
Total
Other nongovernment
Total nongovernment
2193 2239
596 630
252 329
848 959
3042 3199
2%
6%
30%
13%
5%
Source: ABS Catalogue No. 4221
resources of only 7 per cent over the period. This still exceeds the increase in enrolments. The approximations involved in the calculations mean that we cannot be sure whether resources per student have really risen at all in government schools. Other information, such as student:teacher ratios, shown in Table 7, suggests they have not risen and may even have fallen. The average ratio of students to teachers has risen from 15.0 to 15.3 in government schools and fallen in non-government schools from 16.1 to 15.2. Table 2.7 School students and teachers (’000), and student-to-teacher ratio (STR), Australia, 1990 and 1998 Government
Non-government Catholic
All schools
Other nongovernment
Total
1990 Students Teachers STR
2193 146 15.0
596 34 17.4
252 18 13.7
848 53 16.1
3042 199 15.3
1998 Students Teachers STR
2239 146 15.3
630 38.0 16.6
329 25.0 13.1
959 63.0 15.2
3199 209 15.3
Source: ABS Catalogue No. 4221.0
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There is wide variation in the changes across States. Clearly there has been an increase in expenditure in several States. However, there have been marked reductions in Victoria and South Australia, which had above average expenditures at the start of the decade.
VET revenue and expenditure Changes in the nature of the VET sector and major changes in the data collections mean that considerable courage is needed to make comparisons over time. The total government share of revenues is shown to fall from 87 per cent to 82 per cent of the total. The share of public funds coming from the Commonwealth increased markedly, with the various growth funds in the 1990s up to 1997. The other notable change is the growth in ‘fee-for-service’. There has not been a marked change in student fees, as State authorities tend to cap the level of fees at about $1 per contact hour. As with schools, there are very marked differences across the States in cost per hour of teaching delivered, which reflect differences in State management, funding and staffing policies. These need to be explored in detail and linked to measures of quality before conclusions can be drawn as to the relative success of different State policies.
Higher education – expenditure per EFTSU It is in higher education that the government has achieved the greatest expansion in enrolments for a relatively small increase in its outlays. This has been achieved through cutting real expenditures per student and increasing the share of the cost borne by students. The share of expenditure borne by students was affected mainly by the decision in 1996 to increase substantially the level of HECS charges for certain courses, to increase the rate of repayment and to reduce the threshold income at which the repayments had to begin. Total Commonwealth grants per planned EFTSU minus HECS receipts in constant prices appeared to fall by 13 per cent in the period 1990–98. However, the real fall is much greater. Since 1996, the Commonwealth has only partially adjusted its funding for price increases in higher education. The Commonwealth Adjustment Factor (CAF) reflects mainly movements in the Safety Net Adjustment determined by the Industrial Relations Commission: ‘The CAF does not measure actual movements in higher education salary and non-salary costs’ (DETYA, 1999c, p.208). University resources provided by the
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Commonwealth may have declined in real terms at 2 to 3 per cent per annum more than indicated in the official data.
Employer expenditure One area of private expenditure did not expand as expected. Overall, training expenditure as a percentage of wages fell in the early to mid1990s, a pattern also observed in the US (Thurow, 1999). This is compatible with the findings on decline in the amount of in-house training discussed above. Despite its sluggishness the size and pattern of this expenditure are notable. In the last quarter of 1996 employer expenditure totalled nearly $1.2 billion or nearly 1 per cent of GDP. Three-quarters of this expenditure are undertaken by firms with more than 100 employers. Most large firms undertake expenditure on training. Only about half of employers with 20–99 employees were undertaking training in 1996, well down on the level of 1993 when the Training Guarantee Levy was in force. Less than a fifth of small employers with fewer than 20 employees undertake training.
Expenditures – summing up There was a shift from public to private spending on formal education. The private share increased in higher education mainly because of HECS. There was also a relative increase in enrolment in private feepaying primary and secondary schools. In VET, fee-for-service increased, but fee paying by students appeared to remain about the same percentage of revenue. The data available make it difficult to conclude what the overall change in resources per student was in VET and schools. There is an apparent decline in resources per student in higher education.
Is the workforce better equipped? A major thrust of reforms in the 1990s has been to make education and training programs more relevant to the needs of clients, particularly to industry. In part this thrust was supported by reforms to funding, encouragement of a training market, reforms to the curriculum, recognition of learning, assessment and qualifications framework For those likely to enter the full-time labour force from school (still about 50 per cent of an age cohort) two main reforms have been pro-
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moted for schools. The first was the attempt to identify and incorporate in schools what were called ‘employment-related key competencies’. The second was the extension of recognised vocational education into schools. Ensuring that young people acquired employment-related key competencies was a major recommendation of the Finn Committee (1991) and elaborated by the Mayer Committee (1992). The integration of key competencies with the separately developed statements and profiles in eight key learning areas has been piloted within the States. It included information campaigns to teachers, parents and business. Vocational education has been expanding rapidly in the final two years of secondary schooling. By 1999, an estimated 30 per cent of students in years 11 and 12 were taking programs including VET modules and many are undertaking programs involving work placements (see Chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion of vocational programs in schools). In the VET sector a major reform was to base certification on industry-determined competency standards. A vocational competency comprises the specification of the knowledge and skill and its application to the standard of performance required in employment within an occupation or industry. A system of State and national industry training boards, with employer and union membership, advises on industry standards across occupations covered by VET sector training. The establishment of national standards has largely been achieved. Industry competency standards define a ‘product’ and thus are important in the development of a training market, but there has been criticism of the effects of competency-based teaching and assessment. This centres on the application of behaviourist approaches and neglect of more holistic approaches to competencies. ‘Training packages’ focusing on assessment procedures and units of competency to be achieved are being introduced. A particular aim is to facilitate training in the workplace. There has been ongoing criticism of the operation of the framework for the recognition of training. Attempts have been made to simplify the processes for accrediting courses and recognising providers. Also, industry training boards have had difficulty in carrying out some of their roles, in particular the offering of advice on the quantity of training needed for particular industries (their role is reviewed by Wooden, 1998). Similar reforms have not been extended to higher education. Though competency standards have been developed for some profes-
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sional groups (such as nurses), universities have remained in control of their curricula. Various schemes of collaboration of universities and industry have been supported and universities have actively sought industry funds for courses, consultancies and research. For schools and VET, as well as higher education, there has been a move to increase the specification of outcomes, set out in profile agreements, and devolution of the methods by which the outcomes are reached. Profile agreements include the broad distribution of activities, quality assurance requirements and equity objectives. In universities, financial incentives were also provided to speed up the adoption of quality assurance procedures. Performance indicators have been developed in higher education and VET as a means of monitoring provider performance. In higher education, public funding is provided by the Commonwealth, and the universities operate as autonomous institutions in raising private revenue, in allocating their expenditures and in making contracts in Australia and internationally. The TAFE institutes, in some States, have been given almost similar autonomy, as the role of the State authority has changed to one of purchasing training hours from Recognised Training Organisations, rather than managing the TAFE sector. At school level there is also a movement to greater autonomy in management of government schools, again with considerable variation across States. Since the mid-1980s there has been growth in the tendering out of the provision of publicly funded training in VET. In its national strategies, Australia National Training Authority (ANTA) has urged the development of a market for training as a prime means of increasing the responsiveness of VET providers to the needs of industry. It has encouraged State and Territory authorities to increase the proportion of Commonwealth funds allocated by open tender. In 1998, over $240 million was paid to VET for delivery to ‘non-TAFE providers’ such as private providers, secondary schools and independent rural colleges (NCVER, 1999d, p.14). For the year 2000, about $440 million or over 10 per cent of public VET funds are to be contestable by public and private providers (ANTA, 1999b). The provision of training under Commonwealth labour market programs from the mid–1980s was also put to tender, though most of these programs were abolished by the Howard Government after 1996. TAFE institutes have also been encouraged to undertake fee-for-service activities. Following a review of training reforms that advocated greater emphasis to the demand side (Allen Consulting, 1994), ANTA funded pilot projects for ‘user choice’ in training. This was the basis for the
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provision of training under New Apprenticeships from the beginning of 1998, and is discussed further in Chapter 3. A report to ANTA by KPMG noted generally favourable responses to user choice from employers, providers, apprentices and trainees though a number of concerns such as increased paperwork were reported (ANTA, 1999c). An investigation of the quality of traineeships in Queensland last year resulted in strong criticism of the current modes of operation, particularly of wholly on-the-job training and of the effects of user choice in the mode introduced in Queensland (Schofield, 1999).
Qualifications We do not have good measures of the skill levels of the workforce. One inadequate proxy is the level of qualifications of the workforce. Changes in the type of qualifications and in the data collections severely affect our capacity to measure even this over time. Table 9 shows a growth in the proportion of the labour force who hold a post-school qualification from 46 per cent in 1993 to 50 per cent in 1999. The greatest growth is in the proportion with degrees, not surprising given the rapid growth in higher education enrolments since 1988. The apparent sharp changes in the numbers with skilled vocational and basic vocational qualifications may be the result in changes in methods of data collection. Table 2.9 Labour force aged 15–64 by highest level of qualification, Australia, 1993, 1996 and 1999 (May `000) 1993 Degree or postgraduate 1059 diploma
1996
1999
12%
1359
15%
1670
18%
Undergraduate and Associate diplomas
882
10%
891
10%
823
9%
Skilled vocational
1393
16%
1482
17%
1241
13%
Basic vocational
572
7%
595
7%
864
9%
With post-school qualifications
3906
46%
4326
48%
4599
50%
Total labour force
8551
100%
8967
100%
9212
100%
Source: ABS Catalogue No. 6227.0
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Young entrants to the labour force The proportion of 19-year-olds who have reached year 12, are still participating in education and training or have completed some recognised training was about 70 per cent in 1990. It had risen (mostly in the early 1990s) to over 80 per cent by 1998 (ANTA, 1999a, Vol.3, p.21). The proportion of 22-year-olds who have attained qualifications at AQF level 3, or are pursuing education and training towards qualifications of that level or a higher level, has risen from a little over 40 per cent to 55 per cent. These changes are in line with the changes in participation noted earlier.
Apprentice and trainee numbers One indicator of the success in equipping the workforce is the extent to which specialist needs are met. About a third of school students in the final years of schooling – around 130 000 students – now undertake some VET studies in school (ANTA, 1999b), leading to at least some of the competencies required for a VET certificate. There is some information on the destinations of such students, but very little evaluation of the effects of such training on employment and further training has yet become available. A major form of special training for young persons is the apprenticeship system, supplemented from the mid-1980s by traineeships. Considerable attention has been given to the fall in trade apprenticeship numbers and their failure to rise again to the level of the 1980s. The rise in traineeships, which can generally be completed in a year, is not seen by critics as compensating for the decline in apprenticeships in relation to the skill needs of the workforce. Against this, it should be noted that employment in some industries such as manufacturing, where apprenticeship has been common, has declined. The fastest growth in employment has been in a range of service industries where apprenticeship was not common in the past. A further factor is the decline in full-time employment for young people. The number of persons aged 15–24 in full-time employment was about 25 per cent lower in 1999 than in 1990, whereas apprenticeship numbers were only about 20 per cent lower. Also, the age range of apprentices has moved up – largely in line with the increased retention to the end of school up to the early 1990s. However, it is worth noting that for young males apprenticeship remains a very important source of jobs and training. In 1990 about 21 per cent of
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19-year-old males were apprentices. In 1999, the figure was about 18 per cent. There has been a recent rapid rise in traineeship numbers. The effects of this on the quality of the labour force are yet to be analysed. Some traineeships are undertaken entirely on the job, and there are complaints about the quality of training provided in some cases (Schofield, 1999; Smith, 1999). Completion rates for traineeships have been about 60 per cent, but in recent years have fallen to around 56 per cent (DETYA, 1999e, p.1). Apprenticeships and traineeships represent an important part of VET. However, total clients in VET exceed 1.5 million. In the TAFE system, apprentices and trainees make up about a third of clients aged 15–24, but only a tiny fraction of older enrolments (NCVER, 1999b).
Existing members of the labour force in employment or changing employment Australia has a high rate of participation in the formal education and training system for older persons in comparison with selected OECD countries. Australia is second only to Finland in the 20–29 age group, heads the list for the 30–39 age group, and is second to the United States for ages 40 and over. Most of the older students are in VET. Australia’s performance is more modest when training in the workplace is included in the comparisons. As already discussed, employer training expenditure and provision tended to decline in the early 1990s. There is some indication though that training for older workers in the workplace held up better than for younger workers in the 1990s (Wooden et al., 2000).
Have more equitable training outcomes been achieved? The evidence on equity is mixed. Aggregate measures for target groups tend to show some improvement over time until the early 1990s. However, a matter for further investigation is whether the combination of several forms of disadvantage means that some subgroups are in fact more disadvantaged than a decade ago. The cause of this may not necessarily lie in the education and training system, but rather in the structure of employment, income and families.
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Young persons All education sectors produce data to monitor the progress of designated target groups. School data are reported by MCEETYA (1999a), university data by DETYA (1999b), and VET data by ANTA (1999a). Reports are made by gender for: • persons with language background other than English; • Indigenous peoples; • rural and isolated persons; • persons with a disability; and • persons of low socioeconomic background (data for schools and universities). There is little indication, in aggregate, of disadvantage by gender or of disadvantage for those with a language background other than English. There is strong evidence of continuing disadvantage for the other groups. Indigenous persons appear to be well represented in TAFE, though the types of courses and module completion rates (ANTA, 1999a, p.67) indicate disadvantage. They are clearly underrepresented in the other sectors of the education and training system in enrolment, attendance and completion. Persons of low socioeconomic background have a lower rate of school completion and participation in universities. Males from low socioeconomic backgrounds suffered the largest fall in school completion rates in the years 1993–97 (MCEETYA, 1999a, p.94). Persons of low socioeconomic status, who comprise 25 per cent of the population, made up 15 per cent of all university students in 1991, but 14.5 per cent in 1997 (DETYA, 1999b, p.57). Similar data for changes in VET are not available due to changes in the data collection. Census data for 1996 indicate that persons of low socioeconomic status are clustered within particular parts of major cities and country towns. There is indication too that the disparities in economic and social disadvantage in society are widening, so the education system may have greater problems to address. Persons from a rural background have a slightly lower rate of completion of schooling (Productivity Commission, 1999), but a noticeably lower rate of participation in higher education. DETYA (1999b, p.58) notes a decline in their rate of participation in universities in the 1990s and a particularly low rate of participation of those from an isolated background. On the other hand, participation in VET from persons in
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these groups is somewhat above their share of the population (ANTA, 1999a, p.64). Results from longitudinal surveys of young Australians show that for the period from the early 1980s to the early 1990s: • differences in completion of Year 12 associated with socioeconomic status, region, and school type declined, but the advantages of females and students from a non-English-speaking background were at least maintained; • the advantages in higher education participation of young people from a higher socioeconomic background and from urban areas were unchanged; advantages associated with a non-English-speaking background and attendance at an independent school declined; and advantages associated with being female increased; • attendance at a non-apprenticeship TAFE course was the most equitable form of educational participation in Australia. Young people from a lower socioeconomic background, rural areas or who had attended a government school were more likely to enrol in a non-apprenticeship TAFE course. Compared with the early 1980s, advantages that had favoured females disappeared by the mid1990s; advantages that had favoured students from a higher socioeconomic background were reversed; and the advantage of students from rural areas increased. (Long et al., 1999)
Disadvantage among older persons Much of the data on disadvantage relates to young persons. There is a growing concern for the education and training needs of older persons for economic and equity reasons. Older persons have been severely affected by economic restructuring. The workforce participation rate of adult males over 45 has fallen notably (though the participation rate for females has risen). It should also be remembered that the population is ageing and that there are increasing numbers of older persons who may seek education and training for economic or other reasons. The population aged 45–64 increased by 25 per cent in the period 1990–98 compared with an overall growth in population of only 10 per cent. Australia has a large number of adults with low levels of literacy and skills, many of whom are very disadvantaged in the labour market. Australia compares poorly with Sweden, Germany and The Netherlands, though better than most other OECD countries for which
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data are available in the proportion of the population at the lowest level of assessed literacy. A higher proportion of older persons than of younger persons have low levels of literacy: about 10 per cent of 15–24-year-olds in Australia are at level 1, over 20 per cent of those aged 45–54 and well over 30 per cent those 55 and over (ABS Catalogue No.4228.0). Persons with low levels of literacy are not likely to receive compensating education and training in the workplace. Those with high levels of literacy are much more likely to receive training. Australia does not appear to rank well in the international comparisons in this regard. The fact that further education and training is concentrated not on the least educated, but on the best educated is well documented across countries. Australia’s performance appears about the average and certainly better than Switzerland and the US. Continuing education and training is similarly linked to higher status and full-time employment.
Output of quality education and training per unit of resources The aim of the reforms in vocational education and training included maximising the returns to government outlays on education and training; in other words, improving the efficiency of the system. There are several aspects to this. Firstly, there is the quantitative question. Have more students been given education or training for a given outlay? As already discussed, this appears to be the case. The data are most clear for government outlays in universities. Secondly, there are questions of what the students have achieved. One measure of this is completion rates at school, VET and university. For schools, the usual measure has been the ‘Apparent retention rate to year 12’, which rose rapidly until 1992, but subsequently declined. It is, however, very difficult to isolate the influence of schools, as changes in employment prospects seem to be a major influence on school retention. Retention rates went up in the recession of the early 1990s and declined in the following years of economic recovery. There is now annual reporting of the completion rate for modules in VET, though not of completion of qualifications. There is good evidence that a large proportion (perhaps 50 per cent) of students in the VET system undertake modules successfully, but do not proceed to complete a qualification (Foyster, Hon & Shah, 2000). Module completion rates in recent years have averaged about 80 per cent; and the
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changes occurring do not appear substantial (ANTA, 1999a). At university there is some indication of a recent rise in the proportion of students who complete undergraduate degrees, though data on a consistent basis over time have not been analysed. There is relatively little variation among the States now in expenditure per student in government school systems (MCEETYA, 1999b). Universities are funded by the Commonwealth and (ignoring research-related funding) their public funding for teaching per student varies primarily according to course mix. There is considerable variation across the States and Territories in cost per annual hour of curriculum in VET. The factors underlying the cost differences need further analysis. The lower costs in particular States largely reflect the lower provision of public funds per student contact hour. In Victoria the higher level of devolution of control of TAFE institutes has allowed them to seek various forms of coping with lower levels of funds. One major method of cost saving has been the delivery of a greater proportion of teaching by casual or sessional staff for whom the cost per hour of teaching delivered is lower than for a full-time ongoing staff member (Malley et al., 1999). There is little indication of differences in the quality of the training delivered by high- and low-cost States (ANTA, 1999a). Indicators such as module completion rates, student and employer satisfaction and student destinations do not seem to vary consistently among highand low-cost States. That is not to say there are not differences in quality that may show up over a longer time span, just that the available data do not indicate clear differences. The recent concerns about quality, leading to reviews in Queensland and Victoria, can be noted in this regard. The increased use of flexible delivery modes, including training delivered in the workplace, has the potential to reduce the cost of training, or at least the proportion of cost borne by government. ANTA (1998b) has reviewed recent experience. A major finding is that training delivered by distance modes or in the workplace usually involves considerable up-front fixed-cost outlay before any training is delivered. Unit operating costs of delivery may subsequently be lower than in conventional classroom delivery. However, there is considerable variation in the composition of costs and in who bears the cost burdens in the various forms of delivery (Symmonds et al., 1999). Very little attention has been given to capital costs in the delivery of education and training, although some attention has been paid to current practices in relation to governments’ varying roles as purchaser, asset manager and service deliverer in VET and possible future
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changes (Selby Smith & Selby Smith, 1997). It may be an opportune time to undertake a careful analysis, especially as the introduction of accrual accounting is now making the annual cost of capital more transparent (e.g. NCVER, 1999d).
Conclusions The supply of formal education and training has expanded in the 1990s, but most of the expansion in participation rates occurred in the early 1990s. The increase in provision appears to have been handled by shifting some of the costs to the private sector and reducing the unit cost per student. This is most evident in higher education. Employer provision of training has not kept pace with the training in the formal education system. It is too early to tell if the development of training packages is leading to a revival of employer training. There is insufficient data over time to confirm that the reforms are leading to more relevant education and training. The decline in apprenticeships compared with the 1980s needs to be seen against the changing structure of employment. Apprenticeships remain a robust form of education and training for young males. Traineeships and vocational programs in schools have expanded, but the long-term consequences are not yet clear. The conclusions on equity are limited. There does not appear to be much improvement and in some cases it is possible that equity has diminished. However, this may be due primarily to economic and social forces outside the education and training system. Those who suffer from multiple disadvantages appear to be cause for particular concern. Costs per student or trainee have been contained and, in some areas, have fallen. On the face of it, this is a valuable achievement, but the consequences for quality are not established clearly. New developments in flexible and workplace delivery may reduce costs – especially recurrent costs – and shift the burden among the parties who contribute to the total costs of vocational education and training. There are a number of issues identified for further research: • the costs and quality of new forms of organisation and delivery of VET; • the expenditure of education and training across the various sectors;
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• the costs of capital facilities in education and training and potential efficiencies; • analysis of the effects on equity of various forms of charges for education and training; • the methods of providing effective incentives and learning environments to less advantaged youth and adults; • effectiveness of various forms of stimulus to training by enterprises; and • analysis of the needs for teachers and the appropriate forms of training.
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3 Competition in Australian higher education since 1987: intended and unintended effects SIMON MARGINSON
Commonwealth Government reforms of 1987–89 restructured Australian higher education as a quasi-market with expanding zones of commercial activity. It was expected that competition, by making higher education more contestable and contested, would lead to improved efficiency, customer responsiveness and innovation. However, these imaginings did not consider the segmented or ‘positional’ (Hirsch, 1976) character of education. A culture of competition was established, yet competitive pressures and the increasing reliance on private funding tended to strengthen the dominance of the leading institutions and forced a greater conformity with established models of the good university. Ironically, in this environment the incentive to improve customer responsiveness, efficiency and innovation has actually been reduced rather than enhanced. In the even more marketised regime that was created by the reforms since 1996, the degree of protection afforded to the leading institutions was further increased. Overall, in the 1987–97 period it appears that in the higher education 48
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market the eight strongest universities (‘Sandstones’) were strengthened in relative terms, the four leading universities of technology (‘Utechs’) moved up the hierarchy, but most of the other ten pre-1987 universities (‘Wannabee sandstones’) lost ground.
Competition reform During the last decade in Australia, one of the purposes of government-driven reforms in sectors such as education has been to install or enhance relations of competition. Higher education serves many purposes and houses many and contrasting forms of subjectivity. The behaviours of people and institutions are not predestined to be competitive, or, for that matter, ‘economic’. But in competition reform, the market and competitive aspects of higher education are brought to the forefront. Competition is seen both as an end that must always be striven for and as an ever-existing natural state of affairs (‘human nature’). ‘Competition is the key to improving performance, flexibility and productivity across the economy’, states the Productivity Commission. ‘It provides enduring incentives for firms to lift their performance and serve their customers well’ (PC, 1996, p.59). ‘Enhanced competition’ is an unambiguous good, states the Hilmer report. It puts producers on their mettle; it improves efficiency, productivity and service; it reduces prices; and makes the economy competitive. All in all, ‘the committee is satisfied that the general desirability of permitting competition ... [is] so well established that those who wish to restrict or inhibit competition should bear the burden of demonstrating why that is justified in the public interest’ (Hilmer, 1993, pp.xv–xxxix, 1, 18 & 26). In these statements competition is presented as an end in itself and the creation of a culture of market competition becomes a fundamental objective of micro-economic reform in higher education.1 Competition is also justified with reference to external objectives. Increased competition is meant to improve responsiveness, flexibility and innovation; to increase the diversity of what is produced and can be market-chosen; to enhance productive and/or allocative efficiency; to improve the volume and quality of production; and to strengthen accountability to student-customers, employer-customers and, where competition is for government funding, governments. There are also indirect objectives, such as fiscal reduction, creating university– business links, internationalisation via international marketing and so
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on. But it is this imagined line of causation from competition to consumer sovereignty to better efficiency and quality that is the ideal at the core of micro-economic reform in higher education. The assumption behind this competitive strategy is that when higher education becomes contested, rather than operating cartel-fashion, the effect of market pressures on producer institutions will be to generate the desired effects automatically. In all industries competition reform is designed to increase contestability – the capacity for new producers to enter the game, create new approaches and place more pressure on the existing producers – by dismantling what the Hilmer committee called the ‘excess power’ of certain existing producers (though it must be stated that in the university context the definition of ‘excess’ has never been clear). Thus, one key question in analysing the effects of competition reform in higher education is whether the strong producers are contested by existing producers or by new producers and, if so, whether they experience the pressures imagined by competition reform.
Forms of market and competition ‘Marketisation’ is the introduction or extension of some or all the forms of a competitive economic market. The main elements of economic markets – whether in the private sector, public sector or both – are as follows: • a defined field of production units (in this case higher education) coupled with defined producer units (universities); • the production of scarce commodities (courses of study, degrees, research) with potential exchange value for customers; • monetary exchange between producer and consumer (fees); • competition between producer institutions (in education there is also competition between consumers, as is discussed below); • contestability; that is, the capacity for new producers to enter the market; and • market subjectivities; that is, the attributes and behaviours needed to succeed in production, consumption and exchange (Marginson, 1997b). Markets are ‘social settings that foster specific types of personal development and penalise others’ (Bowles, 1991, p.13). All of these characteristics are necessary for fully developed economic markets. Newly marketised services such as education usually
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exhibit some market characteristics, but not all. ‘Quasi-market’ describes this intermediate zone. In a quasi-market in higher education, for example, there might be competition between institutions, corporate-style management and some commercial activity, but the number of student places may be affected by factors other than supply and demand (for example, public funding of tuition costs and the planning of student load) and degrees and academic standards may remain regulated by universities, public authorities or by custom and decree. Most OECD higher education systems, the national training market in Australia, and some State and Territory government school systems in Australia, are now organised in the form of quasi-markets.2 The installation or the enhancement of quasi-market competition in education is more than a merely economic move: it also has implications for the system of government-institution relations and the role of education in distributing social rewards. For example, in the market framework in contrast to a system of direct public service administration governments can steer education institutions from a distance by setting the conditions within which the autonomous institutions must compete with each other. The installation of a market also encourages the development of market subjectivities, thus triggering an upward spiral of market formation in which structure and agency, the structure of market competition and the attitudes and values needed to make competition work, tend to catalyse each other. Hayek, doyen of market reformers, remarked that the introduction of relations of competition made it ‘necessary for people to act rationally in order to maintain themselves. Competition is as much a method for breeding certain types of mind as anything else’ (Hayek, 1979, pp.75–6). The qualities that enable ‘competitiveness’ are unequally distributed. ‘Competitiveness rests not only on attitudes but on material resources as well. Not all parties enter the contest with the attributes needed to compete successfully, and the game of competition between institutions (like the game of competition between individuals) has implications for the hierarchical relations between them. The operations of any competition tend to favour the interests of some and harm those of others. Nevertheless, competition also constitutes a post hoc defence of hierarchical starting points and hierarchical outcomes. Once competition is accepted as a fair and neutral process – as a signifier of justice – the outcomes of competition are easier to defend than are the seemingly more arbitrary and interest-ridden decisions of state officials, representative assemblies, or professional educators. It seems that this virtue of competition (if virtue it is) applies no matter how unequal the starting relations between the parties to the contest.
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All competitions share common features such as rivalry, combat, rules of combat, and the rank ordering of outcomes. Most competitions are also subject to a primary ordering of the outcomes which is binary in character (win/lose). On the basis of these common features, there are many kinds of competition. Competition can be more or less intense or relentless in character. It can be more or less ‘pure’; that is, it varies in the degree to which competitive behaviour is ‘uncontaminated’ by other purposes such as altruism or cooperation to achieve common goals. It can be more or less ‘perfect’; that is, it varies in the degree to which the competitive market is subject only to voluntaristic choice making that is unconstrained by government intervention (Waters, 1995, p.410). Competition is not always associated with economic markets. All economic markets involve actual or potential competition to some degree, but the reverse is not the case. Competition played a role in pedagogies and student ordering long before economic markets entered education. Competition between students smoothed the way for the extension of relations of competition to the organisational relationships in and between institutions. It provided training in the attributes of mind necessary to sustain a more broad-based, more intense and ‘purer’ struggle for supremacy.
Positional competition in education Micro-economic reformers have not reckoned with one crucial feature of education that has the potential to divert the objectives and outcomes of competition reform. That feature is the positional character of modern educational systems and institutions (Hirsch, 1976; Marginson, 1997a, 1997b). Education produces positional goods. These are status goods that tend to be largely monopolised by people from social groups with the best capacity to compete for them. The effects of competition reform in higher education are articulated with the already established practices of positional competition. In orthodox neo-classical economics, competition and monopoly are seen as mutually exclusive. But in Competition, Auerbach (1988) explains that, in the real world, this dichotomy breaks down. Modern capitalist economies have seen both the extension and intensification of competition, and the centralisation of capital through mergers and the creation of oligopolies and monopolies. At times, strong producers use reductions in competitive pressure to protect their interests. Yet
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when competition becomes fierce, it is often again the strong players who benefit. This general point about the co-existence of economic competition and economic concentration has a special resonance in education because of the role education plays as a producer of positional goods. Positional goods include places in education that provide students with relative advantage in the competition for jobs, income, social standing and prestige (Hirsch, 1976, pp.20–2). Education institutions and systems select people for social positions, including the upper reaches of the professions and management. Places in elite schools and soughtafter university faculties are the most desired form of positional good because these places are associated with a high probability of career success. Many other places in education confer more modest competitive advantages. Whether positional goods add value to the social advantages already possessed by elite students is something research has not settled. However, the relationship between school and home does not determine the value of positional goods as status goods. What matters is that positional goods are generally seen to constitute relative advantage for those who acquire them. Positional goods have two unusual features that shape the character of competition in education. First, positional goods are not only scarce, like standard economic commodities, but they are scarce in the absolute sense. The number of positions of social leadership is inherently limited by factors outside the control of the education system. When the size of the elite is limited, person A gains admission only at the expense of persons B, C, D etc. This is a zero-sum competition. Only certain places in education can provide superior opportunities, or those opportunities would cease to be superior. Thus if the number of high-status degrees in Medicine and Law increases, their average value falls. Positional goods cannot be expanded infinitely to meet demand, even high fee demand. Education is therefore as much a competition between student consumers as between institutional producers. This is the second critical feature of positional goods. High value positional goods are always sold in a sellers’ market. Markets in education operate like markets in other positional goods, such as masterpieces by a deceased artist or waterfront properties on Sydney Harbour. As demand increases, the number of the goods is constant so competition intensifies and prices rise, often spectacularly. Positional competition is not about the intrinsic content of education, but its symbolic value. The quality of teaching and learning is incidental to this competition, except as a post hoc rationalisation of
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elite placement. In most people’s eyes, educational ‘quality’ is determined by where the status goods are found, rather than status being determined by the quality of education found there. ‘Quality’ education tends to be uncritically associated with the leading schools and university faculties, with sandstone and ivy, rather than with literacy rates or student evaluation of teaching. This does not mean that elite institutions do not provide good education. Rather, the point is that in elite institutions good teaching and learning are produced not by competition per se but by other factors, such as the concentration of private resources and education competent families. Positional goods are not the only social goods or individual attributes produced in education; far from it. But the more competitive education becomes, the more it tends to be determined by the dynamics of position. When the private cost of fees rises, families want to secure maximum economic value, and in this context the goal of improved learning achievement in itself (whereby everyone could be a winner) becomes less important than it might otherwise have been. Instead, where that learning takes place tends to become more important than it might otherwise have been. The elite institutions become more sought after and more elite, and attract a growing proportion of total educational resources. The theory of positional goods suggests that, if the competition is directed towards the allocation of positional advantage, an increase in the role and intensity of competition tends to weaken the extent to which the strongest producers are contested, and thus also to weaken the pressures on them for improved product, efficiency and consumer response. As competitiveness is ratcheted upwards, the sellers’ market is enhanced for producers at the top. The leading schools and university faculties have long waiting lists. These institutions are able to choose the student-consumer rather than allow the student to choose them. They do not need to become cheaper, more efficient or more responsive to gain support, and to expand would dilute their positional value. The waiting lists become longer. Excess demand for highvalue positional goods increases, but the top segment of the education market is not contestable. Here the barrier is not economic so much as social-cultural. New institutions might claim that they are genuine elite producers, but such claims are unable to convince many people no matter how good the marketing campaign. This is because there is no room for growth in the size of the elite, except in the distant future; and the already existing elite institutions block the entry of would-be new elite producers. The existing elite institutions have established
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their credentials in the long, slow accumulation of social investment, reputation and cultural authority, and they are not about to vacate their hard-won ground. Nor are people from the most powerful and wealthy social groups and professions likely to welcome the devaluation of their own educational credentials that have typically been awarded by the long-standing elite institutions. It is only at the bottom of an education market-system that competition operates as the textbook suggests. Institutions that have difficulty filling their places are contestable, and tend to compete on the basis of efficiency and consumer focus. They spend more on marketing than successful institutions. Nonetheless, their efforts are constantly undermined by the preference of students to be associated with more prestigious competitors. Further, real improvements that non-elite institutions might make in learning and efficiency will tend to be under-recognised. However good the educational programs offered by these institutions, they are constantly being stymied by the popular consensus that institutions with low positional status do not provide a good-quality education. Thus educational competition is segmented. The vertical divisions between the segments are maintained by the character of positional goods. In the upper segment the market does not clear and is not contestable. The leading institutions are market immune. The laws of supply and demand do not operate. The lower segment is tied to low positional value and low social support, with inevitable effects on the potential for teaching, learning and research. Thus, when competitive pressures are stepped up there is no necessary tendency to across-theboard educational improvements. Adam Smith’s invisible hand does not work. The benefits of market reform that were imagined by market reformers ‘mysteriously’ fail to appear.
The unified national market Before the formation of the quasi-markets in higher education and training in 1987–89 by Labor Minister John Dawkins, positional competition in Australian education took an economic market form only in elite private schooling and commercial training. In universities there was competition for status in research and professional courses, but tuition was free except for international students. Student enrolment numbers were set by government and public funding was distributed pro rata on the basis of enrolments and discipline mix. It was assumed
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that all universities (though not CAEs) were doctoral institutions of world standard with comprehensive research profiles. From the mid-1980s onwards there was a general international movement towards a more American model of higher education based on market competition between institutions, mixed public and private funding of a mixed group of public and private institutions, and a de facto ‘Ivy League’ group of elite institutions. All the features of this model, except for government-supported private institutions (Marginson, 1997c), were introduced by the Australian Government into the pre-existing higher-education system, reshaping its form and character. Here the outcomes of market reform were shaped not only by the dynamics of market competition itself, but also by the circumstances in which competition was installed. On one hand, there was a pre-given positional hierarchy between institutions. On the other hand, the government introduced a range of competitive policies in 1987–92, such as 42 per cent enrolment growth, abolition of the distinction between universities and CAEs in the new Unified National System, creation of 18 new universities alongside the 18 then existing universities, decrease in per capita public funding, and corporatisation of institutional management. In forming a quasi-market by the early 1990s, the then Labor Government translated the positional competition between individual students – grounded as it was in an informal pecking order of courses and institutions – into a formalised national economic-positional competition between the universities. The Unified National System was explicitly designed as a competitive market. ‘Institutions will be able to compete for teaching and research resources on the basis of institutional merit and capacity,’ stated the Government (Dawkins, 1988, p.28). The Relative Funding Model used to distribute Commonwealth funding was designed to establish a standardised funding base, ‘a “level playing field” to allow institutions to compete on an equal basis’ (Milligan, 1990). Institutions were encouraged to sell courses to international and vocational postgraduate students, and to raise more research funds from industry. Following the introduction of a visa charge for international students in 1980, a $250 Higher Education Administration Charge in 1987, and full-fee international marketing in higher education in 1987, the commencement of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) at $1800 per full-time student was the first universal charge at a substantial level. The HECS legitimised a general ‘user pays’ regime. The mergers of 1988–90 led to a reforging of institutional missions and structures, quickened the growth of com-
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mercial activities, and encouraged a new group of entrepreneurial managers to emerge. The Government stimulated the development of a culture of competition by increasing its own use of national competitive mechanisms in research funding, and by creating special funds subject to competitive tender for new initiatives and investigations and improved university teaching.3 One-off initiatives such as the piloting of Open Learning Australia were also subject to tender. The rank ordering of institutions in the three rounds of quality assessment in 1993–95 made official the practice of recognising a pecking order in higher education. This further entrenched competitive behaviours. The capacity to raise commercial income was more crucial to some universities than others. The Australian National University enjoyed such high public research funding that only 25 per cent of its 1993 income came from non-government sources, compared with 45 per cent at Macquarie University. The older universities, with their positional standing and large alumni, raised additional non-commercial private income in endowments and donations. Nevertheless, the proportion of total funds that was subject to competition increased quickly. Between 1983 and 1993 the government share of funding of higher education fell from 91 to 60 per cent. The HECS provided 13 per cent of income, and commercial fees more than 7 per cent, including almost 6 per cent from international marketing and 2 per cent from postgraduate and upgrading courses. Adding industry investment, the strictly commercial element was 10–12 per cent, and rising (DEET, 1996b). Adding non-commercial research and special government funds, the proportion of all income subject to direct competition was about 20 per cent.
Effects of the Labor reforms The Labor reforms to higher education were successful in establishing a culture of competition (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Marginson & Considine, 2000). While there was little evidence of consumer activism – consistent with the weakness of consumer sovereignty in a positional market – there was a pronounced increase in competitive producer behaviours. Competitive behaviours were more pervasive than were relations of economic exchange. Institutions had become defined as self-supporting economic agents rather than as governmentdependent, but their evolution was only partly determined by
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textbook economic logic. This was not just because reform had stopped at creating a quasi-market rather than a fully-fledged economic market. Even if higher education had been made a full-fee economic market in 1987, positional factors would still have shaped the character of that market, especially at the top of the hierarchy. Within the quasi-market, in which non-market public funding remained the largest element, the commercial markets in international education, postgraduate and continuing education, and research and consultancy operated as expanding ‘islands’ of capitalism. These activities were mostly linked to global markets (international education, postgraduate business training, research and development) that had open-ended potential for growth and market share. Prices were affected by supply and demand, and there was some market perfectionalism and consumer sovereignty. Scarcity was economic, not administered, being regulated by price. Indeed, in his study of commercialisation in Australian science, Leslie (1993) finds that market competition generated a ‘new ethos’ and ‘great excitement’ despite the often low levels of income it generated. The new ethos was spread through devolution reforms that allowed departments and centres to retain part of the income they generated. In certain respects these new commercial markets operated differently to the market in positional goods. The positional market was largely national and State/Territory-based rather than global, though a global market in postgraduate business training did emerge with a limited number of strategic opportunities in the leading global corporations. The positional market was subject to absolute scarcity, whereas the international market was expanding in an open-ended fashion because of the qualitative increase in international education taking place all over the world. Overall, the national positional dynamic tended to dominate in Australian higher education. Despite the emerging notion that they ought to become global universities, the leading Australian institutions were still largely focused on the domestic Australian population. In any case, as Leslie notes, most universities tend to be ‘prestige maximisers’ more than ‘profit maximisers’. Indeed, one Australian vice-chancellor told Leslie that in relation to market activity ‘it’s not the money, it’s to make your mark as a university’. While ‘revenue optimalisation’ in itself is one of the sources of prestige, there are also potential goal conflicts between prestige and revenues. Market-generated revenues are bled for ‘prestige maximising
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ventures’ rather than ploughed back into the business (Leslie, 1993). In the Unified National System, international marketing became the primary source of discretionary income, supporting non-commercial activities through the funding of casual teaching, academic allowances and new developments. Commercial research led to a shift in research priorities, yet at the same time it was also used to support basic research. Moreover, academic prestige provided universities with an advantage in the commercial markets. Thus the traditional academic activities and the newer commercial activities tended to feed each other, though the relationship varied by university. Both sets of activities, academic and commercial, contributed to the status of institutions. But this mix was unstable and, with the decline in public funding per student after 1989, the importance of commercial practices in generating university income was increasing.4 The heightened contest between universities for students and the entry of 18 new players in the market might suggest that performance pressures on the existing universities greatly increased. This reckons without the primacy of positional factors in a segmented market, in which the leading universities have been able to monopolise high value education while protecting themselves from the sharp end of competition. The formation of the Unified National System led to a sorting-out period in which a new market segmentation was established, but the position of the leading institutions has remained unchanged and, except for one group, new institutions have remained low in the pecking order. Symes (1996) maps the ‘more aggressive promotional strategies’ introduced by institutions in the wake of the Dawkins reforms. There were two imperatives: to position themselves in the mainstream, and to differentiate themselves from each other. The new marketing strategies, expressed in student prospectuses and advertising in newspapers, magazines, television, cinemas, billboards and even buses and trams, were ‘designed to create an unambiguous image profile of a particular university … a brand name for its educational approach’. Increasingly, university advertising provided less information to aid student choices, and more statements about positional value. Some institutions also began to claim that not only did they provide career opportunities, but also their graduates had an advantage over graduates from elsewhere (Symes, 1996; Kenway et al., 1993). At the same time, there were no prizes for being unique. The Government’s requirement that comprehensive universities enrol at least 8000
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students, coupled with the need for universities to compete successfully for students and corporate funds, forced a higher level of conformity then ever with the recognisable models of the good university. Institutions have tended to define themselves within three segments that are rooted in the pre-1987 positional structure. The first segment includes the older ‘Sandstone’ universities in each State and the Australian Capital Territory (Universities of Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland, Adelaide, Western Australia), plus the first three modern universities (NSW, Monash and the Australian National University) which are similar in role. The University of Tasmania could be included in this group as a weaker ‘Sandstone’. The Labor reforms had the effect of forcing these universities to modernise their internal operations in order to retain their existing position, but all did this to the degree necessary except Sydney, which was perhaps so strongly placed that it was able to forgo a thorough modernisation. The ‘Sandstones’ claim leadership in research, the academic disciplines and professional training. Their marketing emphasises cloistered campuses and academic values. The University of Melbourne’s motto is ‘More than a “degree”’. The other ten pre-1987 universities trail after the ‘Sandstone’ group. This segment includes Macquarie, New England, Newcastle, Wollongong, La Trobe, Deakin, Griffith, James Cook, Murdoch and Flinders Universities. These can be designated the ‘Wannabee Sandstones’. The ‘Wannabees’ drew back from a distinctive pitch of their own, either individually or as a group. They make the same claim to social prestige as the ‘Sandstones’, but with less plausibility and conviction despite their academic achievements. Some had been founded in a determination to be different to orthodox universities – for example Murdoch, Griffith and La Trobe – but the competitive national market has forced on them a new conformity to orthodox models. It is not so much that competition has penalised institutional innovation as that it values innovation only within the terms of the market and penalises other forms. Competitive markets are not kind to innovations from ‘left field’. The third segment is the four strongest of the new Universities of Technology that were based on the largest of the former CAEs: the University of Technology in Sydney, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Melbourne, Queensland UT, and Curtin UT in Western Australia. These can be designated the ‘Utechs’. The University of South Australia is marginal to this group: it faced certain
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difficulties not shared by the others, partly because of the size of the former teachers’ college activities that it has been required to absorb. The ‘Utechs’ had existing strong reputations in business training, the technologies, and applied research in industry. They now emphasise their industrial and social relevance and the employability of their graduates. Queensland UT’s slogan is ‘A university for the real world’. The fourth segment is the other post-1987 universities: it includes the Universities of Western Sydney, Charles Sturt, Southern Cross, Victoria, Ballarat, Swinburne, Southern Queensland, Central Queensland, Edith Cowan, Canberra, Northern Territory, Australian Catholic University and Sunshine Coast University College. These ‘New Universities’ were founded from smaller CAEs and were not able to compete on the basis of cloisters, research or large scale employability. They emphasise access, teaching quality, customer friendliness and regional factors. The University of Southern Queensland calls itself ‘A university for students’ (Symes, 1996, pp.137–8). Table 3.1 Positional typology of Australian universities Sandstones (older pre-1987 unis*)
Sydney NSW Melbourne Monash Queensland
Utechs
Wannabee Sandstones
New universities
(largest former CAEs)
(other pre-1987 unis)
(other post-1987 unis)
UT Sydney New England RMIT [Melbourne] Macquarie Queensland UT Newcastle Curtin UT [Perth] Wollongong Uni of South Australia
Western Australia Adelaide
Deakin Griffith
ANU [Canberra] Tasmania
James Cook Murdoch Flinders
Western Sydney Charles Sturt Southern Cross Victoria UT La Trobe Ballarat Swinburne UT Southern Queensland Central Queensland Sunshine Coast UC Edith Cowan Northern Territory Canberra Australian Catholic
*Excluding UNE which was founded in 1954, before Monash. However, in other respects it belongs to the ‘Wannabees’. Italics indicate an institution that is in some respects atypical of the group.
11.5 9.5 9.4 9.3 8.4 7.2 5.4 4.6 4.4 3.9 2.9 2.2 2.1 2.0 1.8 1.1 1.4
Australian National [1] # NSW [1] # Melbourne [1] # Sydney [2] # Queensland [1] # Monash [2] # WA [1] # La Trobe [3] # Adelaide [1] # Macquarie [4] # New England [5] # Flinders [3] # Griffith [3] # Tasmania [3] # Newcastle [5] # Technology, Sydney [4] Murdoch [5] #
10 150 26 534 29 905 29 600 24 891 38 998 12 516 20 429 13 127 17 370 13 815 10 919 18 135 11 892 17 047 20 706 8128
%
Share of research spending, 1993
35 20 19 20 18 15 17 13 20 11 15 14 13 13 13 11 14
$s
265 016 163 849 605 902 901 263 435 992 366 870 262 971 443 312 094
Income per unit stud. Load, 1994/95
949 3594 1725 1667 1233 4431 1286 560 1002 1289 477 594 1053 982 623 7941 8981
Fee-pay overseas students, 1995
74.8 31.6 47.3 36.3 74.5 34.8 86.2 6.3 61.4 8.8 0.5 16.5 5.2 n.a. 5.7 5.7 2.1
%
Entrants in top quintile 1993c
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n.a. 23.065 26.643 24.924 20.616 17.235 13.112 5.513 14.148 5.544 4.822 6.864 3.040 5.396 5.390 2.250 3.393
$million
Research quantum funding, 1995b
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Enrolled students, 1995
62
University, and ranking in first assessment by Quality Assurance Committee (1994)
Table 3.2 Competitive position, individual higher education institutions 1993/1995, five different measures
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1.7 1.6 1.5 1.3 1.3 1.2 1.0 0.6 0.5 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.0 100.0
2.668 3.345 3.311 3.663 2.173 3.490 0.625 1.525 0.711 0.306 1.319 0.384 0.522 0.509 0.812 0.163 0.140 0.325 0.000 212.878 14 716
11 313 15 453 13 386 12 992 11 725 12 054 11 319 11 361 10 917 10 478 11 367 13 322 11 131 10 138 21 808 11 017 9470 9300
1435 355 1539 3123 1118 4431 1700 983 867 964 1540 609 663 945 110 116 174 2024 169 46 520
9.3 5.5 0.2 n.a. 22.2 5.8 0.5 1.8 1.3 1.7 1.2 1.8 25.2 0.1 n.a. 0.6 n.a. 3.7 ——-
COMPETITION IN AUSTRALIAN HIGHER EDUCATION SINCE 1987
Sources: DEET, 1994; 1995b; 1996a; 1996b
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604 177
27 097 7859 11 641 20 104 22 185 25 669 14 494 24 856 8919 17 546 22 803 8357 8477 18 483 4132 4160 8868 13 692
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a. Minor institutions excluded. b. Additional Commonwealth grants allocated according to the quantity and quality of research outputs. The ANU Institute of Advanced Studies is not funded as elsewhere. c. commencing students only: universities where a high proportion of entrants are school leavers are advantaged by this measure.
Queensland UT[4] James Cook [5] # Wollongong [2] # Curtin UT [5] South Australia [5] RMIT [3] Victoria [6] Deakin [4] # Swinburne UT [6] Edith Cowan [6] Western Sydney [6] Central Queensland [5] Canberra [5] Charles Sturt [5] Northern Territory [6] Ballarat [6] Australian Catholic [6] Southern Queensland [6] other total
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In one respect the formation of the Unified National System (UNS) ensured that the market became more contestable. The four ‘Utechs’ have strengthened their role and moved above the pre-1987 universities that were outside the ‘Sandstone’ group. Even so, they form a division of labour with the elite group. The ‘Utechs’ compete with the ‘Sandstones’ in some areas, such as Engineering, Business, Computing and Communications, but overall the ‘Utechs’ are lesser players in research and the non-vocational academic disciplines. They have no presence in Medicine and are of marginal importance in Law. Overall, the formalised competition has strengthened the relative position of the ‘Sandstones’. Table 3.2 shows their continuing presence in research and in attracting students in the top quintile. Competition naturally favoured the institutions that had entered the Unified National System with the capacity to compete. In 1988, only ten universities had significant research libraries and nine had two-thirds of all research students (Karmel, 1992). The former colleges received some funds for research infrastructure, but otherwise research grants have been distributed on the basis of quality of proposal and track record. In 1992, 90 per cent of Australian Research Council project funding went to pre-1987 universities. In 1993, the ANU, NSW, Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland accounted for 48 per cent of funded research activities as measured by the Commonwealth (DEET, 1995a). Funding for research infrastructure and the research quantum were linked to competitive research performance, which has meant that success bred success and failure bred failure. Commercial research has also gravitated to the most prestigious institutions. The ‘Sandstones’ have actually enjoyed a higher proportion of the commercial research income than they did of the Commonwealthprovided research income.
The Liberal-National Party reforms The first Liberal-National Party Budget (Vanstone, 1996) changed the settings of the quasi-market, with effects on both the character of competition and the position of individual institutions. The economic market aspect was enhanced. The slope of the hierarchy was steepened. It appears that the relative position of the ‘Sandstones’ and ‘Utechs’ again improved. This outcome was largely the result of three decisions. First, the Liberal–National Government reduced operating grants and decided
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not to supplement those grants for expected increases in salaries. The result was an effective 12–15 per cent cut in public funding over 1997–99. Second, the level of the HECS was raised by 35–125 per cent depending on field of study. In Law, Business, Arts and Social science, the HECS was fixed at more than half average costs. The annual income level at which compulsory HECS repayments begin was lowered from $28,495 to $20,701. These changes reduced the cost differences between the HECS and upfront fees, and provided stronger economic disincentives to participation in higher education than had previously existed. All else being equal, this was certain to lead to a decline in potential demand for higher education and, if the decline was large enough, in some institutions and some courses actual numbers would fall. Third, institutions were permitted to charge upfront fees to up to 25 per cent of students in any course, in addition to the fees already paid by international students. These changes were bound to have differential effects on institutions, depending on the segment of the market in which they were located and on particular circumstances affecting them, such as their course mixes, cost structures and the patterns of local demand. No decline in demand occurred in the prestigious institutions, where in most courses excess demand persists. Its impact has been felt disproportionately in the New Universities, especially those subject to regional demography. Further, income from fee-paying undergraduates is now more likely to be concentrated in the two strongest groups of institutions, and especially in the professional and business faculties of the ‘Sandstones’. Universities that had difficulty filling their funded student load quota have been effectively excluded from the market in fee-based undergraduate education because the Government had specified that any institution that offered fee-based places and failed to reach its agreed level of government-funded student load would be fined $9000 per fee-paying undergraduate. In the current higher education market, the status effects and economic effects tend to reinforce each other. The ‘Sandstones’ easily raise the most dollars from private industry, and have the most postgraduates, undergraduate fee-paying students, and alumni. The increase in tuition charges now emphasises the positional differences, while enhanced positional prestige further increases the ‘Sandstone’ share of all forms of private income. First, direct fee charging for undergraduates has created a new measure of elitism – the capacity to charge fees in what is still a largely HECS-based system. Second, the increases in HECS have forced students and their families to focus more closely on
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maximising value for money. This has led to a ‘flight’ of students to what are perceived as the stronger and safer choices. There were signs of this happening as early as 1997. In Victoria, applications for the University of Melbourne increased although overall State applications dropped below the 1996 figure. Longer queues outside the ‘Sandstones’ could be expected to have feedback effects, which have increased both their positional status and their capacity to raise private monies. At the same time, in an environment in which public funding is declining it is possible that in future some ‘Sandstones’ might divest themselves of less prestigious courses and even sites that are heavily dependent on public funding. The decision of the University of NSW to divest itself of the St George campus is a case in point. In the new market the ‘Utechs’ also gained for similar reasons. They were already seen by many people as a superior vocational investment, and they have used their capacity to increase income from industry, from international students (for example at RMIT), from postgraduates (for example at UTS), and from alumni. In contrast, the overall position of the ‘Wannabee’ group has deteriorated. They had been developed as comprehensive universities with research and doctoral programs at world-class levels. This profile was sustainable when universities were largely publicly funded on a common basis. But when direct fees charging and other private income generation became important, relative status came into play and, all else being equal, the number of high-quality high-prestige institutions was bound to fall. Economic markets rank institutions in a hierarchy, and concentrate wealth and high-quality goods on select groups of producers and consumers. To enhance the economic market was to enhance these effects. The pattern has not been uniform across the ‘Wannabee’ group. Some were better placed than others. For example, Macquarie, Griffith and Flinders are very strong in certain areas of research. Wollongong has developed an effective role in the commercial markets. But some faced a protracted crisis of role. As for the ‘Sandstone’ group, those ‘Wannabees’ that had absorbed large CAE populations often faced more difficulties than their compatriots. For the group as a whole, their prospects of moving up the hierarchy and entering the ‘Sandstone’ group are now less favourable than before – not least because their capacity to build a reputation on the basis of innovations in disciplines and university organisation has been circumscribed. Economic markets mostly support only those innovations that generate direct returns, and tend to penalise bold innovations that challenge the ‘Sandstone’ norms. This conservatising effect of markets
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undermines the course of development followed by the more organisationally creative ‘Wannabees’, notably Griffith and Murdoch and to a lesser extent La Trobe, Deakin and James Cook. In the post-1996 system, the ‘New Universities’ have been confirmed in their junior status, and in many, if not most, cases their relative position has deteriorated. These institutions have been particularly hard hit by reductions in public funding because they had not had sufficient time to establish student numbers, much less to consolidate their academic reputations. Few are likely to make much money from undergraduate or postgraduate fees. Some will need to work hard to maintain their university status by grounding themselves in their localities while incorporating aspects of TAFE provision, or by developing niche specialities.
Conclusion: consolidation at the top The problems faced by the ‘Wannabees’ in the post-1996 market do not derive from a decline in the quality of their teaching and/or research. These problems are the consequence of heightened competition within an already segmented market. By the same token – regardless of their product quality, efficiency, or sensitivity to student-customers – the competitive position of the ‘Sandstones’ and the ‘Utechs’ appears to have improved simply as a result of system redesign. It is a striking illustration of the manner in which intensified competition – rather than placing the market leaders on notice and opening up the system in a meritocratic fashion – leads to a ‘flight’ of students, money and prestige to the top institutions. Because it is a zero-sum contest, these institutions have been reinforced at the expense of other institutions, their staff and their students. The full evidence is yet to be gathered, but there is every sign that market segmentation in higher education has become more deeply entrenched. With direct fee charging of undergraduates, the leading institutions are able to function in the manner of elite private schools and cater to a similar financially selected clientele (See Gronn, Chapter 4, this collection). In this context, price and status barriers coincide, and the local ‘Ivy League’ becomes better protected from consumer sovereignty. The competition is also developing a global dimension, and it is the ‘Sandstones’ and ‘Utechs’ that have the best prospects of becoming global players, alone or in concert with other institutions. It has become increasingly difficult for the newer universities to challenge
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the top 12 institutions. In such a system the climate might be competitive but the market leaders are relatively secure and the market in high-value education is scarcely contestable. Research has yet to determine the effects of reform on trends in efficiency and consumer responsiveness. What this chapter has argued is that improvements in productivity, efficiency and consumer responsiveness in the leading institutions are incidental to competition reform – which suggests that any credit for such improvements should be claimed, not by government, but by the institutions. While the spirit and the mechanisms of competition have become entrenched, the automatic effects intended by reform have not. At the bottom end of the market, institutions find themselves cutting costs and marketing harder, but this does not lead to any improvement in their status and it probably takes place at the expense of teaching and learning quality. What of the unintended outcomes of a decade of formal competition? The positional element has become more important than before in determining the quality of education. The social position of the leading universities is stronger, which pleases some and causes concern to others. Despite the 18 new universities, with the significant exception of the ‘Utechs’ the meritocratic element in institutional performance is in decline. This parallels the history of competition in American higher education where, despite the vast growth in that system, there has been little change in the composition of the Ivy League since the 1920s. These unintended outcomes are not incidental. They are the direct and predictable result of the splicing together of positional competition and market economy. In sites other than education, market competition is welcomed by liberals, but opposed by many conservatives because of the potential of market relations to corrode tradition and property. There seems a paradox here, for in education hyper-competition and market reform tend to be strongly supported by most conservatives. But this support is a paradox only if the outcomes of competition reform are seen as unintended. For classical conservatives, the conservation of hierarchy and social power are ends in themselves. This suggests that the paradox lies in the support of liberals and meritocrats for the competition reform agenda.
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Notes 1. It can be noted only in passing here that given the central role of higher education in allocating social rewards and forming subjectivities, the move to a competitive culture in the universities has immense long-term implications for all social relations (see Marginson, 1997b). 2. Niklasson (1996) defines quasi-markets in terms of the degree of government intervention. By contrast in this article ‘quasi-market’ is understood as an economic rather than political definition: it is simply a market that is only partly formed. The problem created by Niklasson’s definition is that governments may intervene even in fully developed capitalist economic markets. (For more discussion see Marginson 1997b, ch.2 & 8.) In the real world there is no such thing as perfect competition uncontaminated by secular influences (and if there has to be an imaginary utopia, it’s not clear why anyone should prefer that one). 3. The Priority (Reserve) Fund, the Evaluations and Investigations Program, the Commonwealth Staff Development Scheme, and grants from the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching. 4. If HECS payments are counted as private expenditure, between 1975–76 and 1992–93, government final consumption expenditure per unit of student load fell by one-third (Marginson, 1997a, pp.218–20). The average student:staff ratio deteriorated from 12:1 in 1987 to 18:1 in 1994 (ABS, 4224.0). Universities had to strengthen activities capable of generating commercial income, relative to activities that were not. ‘All production aimed at direct use value decreases the number of those engaged in exchange, as well as the sum of exchange values thrown into circulation,’ notes Marx. Hence the tendency of capital to ‘continually enlarge the periphery of circulation’, and to ‘transform it at all points into production spurred on by capital’ (Marx, 1973, p.408).
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4 From lucky country to clever country: leadership, schooling and the formation of Australian elites PETER GRONN Elites play an important social leadership role in the political, economic and cultural sectors of a society. The focus of this discussion is the emergence and consolidation of Australia’s meritocratic elite, and the role played by schooling systems in the allocation and distribution of elite membership. Meritocratic elites are defined by their memberships’ access to and control over the production and transmission of specialised knowledge. In this chapter, studies of Australian elite formation, recruitment and reproduction are reviewed and synthesised. These sources highlight the dominant representation of two States (New South Wales and Victoria) among key sectors of the national elite, and the significance of a handful of prestigious non-government and selective State high schools as nurseries of the meritocracy. The discussion shows that residues of pre-meritocratic social norms (e.g. family connections, social status and position) continue to be influential in securing elite membership. But with knowledge capital and new leadership norms increasingly providing the standards by which elite performance in a globalised world is judged, those schools which have 70
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been able traditionally to guarantee admission and passage to desired career locations continue to prosper. Emerging benchmark comparisons of national elite performance, however, highlight the inherent danger and dysfunctional consequences of narrowly based elite membership, and caution against the reproduction of elites as concentrations of closed, almost guild-like strata. In explaining the meritocratic evolution of Australian sectoral elites and the crucial role played by schooling, this chapter does three things: Firstly, it synthesises recent research data on the educational background of Australian elites. Secondly, it shows how educational institutions have acted as nurseries of elite formation and as conveyor belts for elite recruitment. Thirdly, it documents the historic emergence of credentialing programs for managerial elites in key institutional sectors and the recent emergence of desired prototypes of leaders. It is argued that during periods of economic restructuring and institutional redesign the process of elite formation – and therefore school systems as moulders of elite dispositions – assumes increasing significance and warrants close scrutiny. This attention is justified because the adequacy of – and the consequences of long-standing adherence to – particular cultural values, and the connection between culture, advantageous global market positioning and the performance of national elites, have become the subjects of considerable interest among commentators. Thus, in the UK the alleged adverse effects of a post-imperial cultural and economic malaise – labelled ‘the British disease’ – were fuelled by conservative elements of the political establishment in the 1980s, and then used to justify the dismantling of the welfare state (Cockett, 1995; Collins & Robbins, 1990). With the emphasis on intensified international economic competitiveness, the attempted re-shaping by elites of the collective consciousness of recruited cohorts according to preferred styles and models can be expected to increase. In Australia a portent of this trend is neatly captured by the symbol of the nation as a clever country. The transition from feudalism to modernity and the era of nationstate pre-eminence saw the emergence of three contending, superordinate principles by which to politically regulate civil societies and to institutionalise the allocation of valued but scarce economic resources. These mechanisms – which succeeded inherited privilege and class patronage (‘Old Corruption’) – were: • collectivism, represented by varieties of public ownership, monopoly, distribution or regulation;
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• markets, expressed in the reliance on private ownership, entrepreneurialism, contract and market forces of supply and demand to regulate exchange; and • professionalism, represented by the utilisation of knowledge and technical expertise to solve social problems (Perkin, 1990). Varieties of collectivism and market theories have constituted the broad polar ideological underpinnings which defined and legitimised political partisanship and conflict in nation-states, particularly in regard to whether desired economic and social outcomes are best delivered by government policies of intervention or deregulation. Cutting across this cleavage, the rise of various professional strata reflected the evolution of service-based economies, and the increasing dependence of the wealth and prosperity of developed societies on merit-based elites. Meritocratic professionalism found institutional expression in public and private sector career hierarchies, and in salaried and fee-for-service occupations. The 1980s, however, saw the collapse of the broad Western political consensus that had lasted nearly 50 years. The hallmark of this consensus was a reliance on Keynesian-welfarist, demand-management intervention policies (compared with command society statism) which was shattered by the re-emergence of individualist, laissez-faire and economic rationalist doctrines that privilege various forms of marketisation. A significant element in this trend has been an increased emphasis on international economic competitiveness as part of a globalised economy. A reassessment of the role of national sectoral elites and their contribution to the relative international standing of competitor nations is currently underway (Fukuyama, 1995; Perkin, 1996a, 1996b). Against this broad canvas, then, this chapter considers the formation and composition of Australia’s elite and leadership strata, as the nation grapples with institutional and sectoral redesign under the impress of market principles.
Elites and elitism An elite is an aggregation of strategically positioned, well-connected and privileged individuals who have effective veto power and control over institutionalised resources to an extent disproportionate to their small, minority numerical size. Elites are located across a range of sectors (e.g. corporate, human service, government) and at all levels (vil-
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lage, neighbourhood, community, nation etc.). Elite rule ranges in quality from benevolence to hegemony and tyranny, and is grounded in combinations of political power, inherited wealth, social status, expertise, psycho-personal resources or various forms of capital (financial, social, cultural etc.). Effective elite rule depends on the extent of intra-elite value consensus or dissensus, the nature of elitemass tutelage and the circumstances of elite evolution and consolidation (e.g. revolution, coups, postcolonial struggles or parliamentarism). A traditional, significant basis of elite power and control has been knowledge. In England – generally acknowledged by economic historians as the first modern nation – recognition of this importance began with civil service reform in the 1850s. Reliance on talent rather than social class or status of origin represents recruitment by merit. To the extent that a society maximises the exploitation of systematically codified knowledge in its key sectors, relies on institutionalised expertise in the form of career hierarchies, and employs accompanying processes of remuneration and reward, then it may be deemed a meritocratic society. The apotheosis of meritocratic elitism occurs during the transition to a predominantly service-based economy. Elitism is one form taken by ruling groups. The two most important approaches to understanding the reproduction, circulation and transformation of ruling groups have been class theory and elite theory. Both approaches have been invoked to account for the emergence of, and shape assumed by, national and subnational institutional power and leadership structures. Elite theory has had a chequered history: explanations of institutional power and status have surfaced, disappeared, resurfaced and then disappeared again, and have not been subjected to the kind of progressive elaboration, refinement and sophistication that has typified class theory. This irregular development is partly due to the historically close association between normative elite theories and neo-elitist understandings of democracy. That is, revisionist, neo-elitist, Schumpeterian-style political theories have been juxtaposed to rival classical or traditional democratic theories and cast by proponents of the latter as legitimising oligarchic tendencies within modern democratic regimes. However, some commentators (e.g. Wintrop, 1992) have argued that democratic and elite theory is not inherently antagonistic. Few other ideas in social and political theory so readily coalesce or collapse normative (or prescriptive) and empirical (or descriptive) levels of understanding as does elite theory. This tendency occurs because to describe a national systemic or sectoral elite is to be readily drawn
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into wider concerns about elite function and purpose. One preoccupation of Cold War era, end-of-ideology theorists, for example, was to try to ascertain the necessary and sufficient conditions for the stability and persistence of democratic regimes, and the role played by (either monolithic unitary or competing plural) elites in the maintenance of that stability. The recent post-Communist, neo-Hegelian end-ofhistory thesis (Fukuyama, 1992) expresses similar concerns about stability and elitism – particularly the relationship of elites to civil society and the state, and their normative contribution to national integration and competitive international advantage (Fukuyama, 1995). Indeed, the overriding normative agenda of contemporary elite theorists is a historicist concern with democratisation – that is, with as wide, speedy and painless an evolution and diffusion of democratic norms, institutions and values beyond the Anglo-European–North American theatre as possible. A variety of strategies to resolve intraelite power struggles (e.g. elite contestation, consolidation and settlements) and to assist mass political participation (e.g. autonomous elite plurality to countervail government power) has been identified by elite theorists (e.g. Cammack, 1990; Etzioni-Halevy, 1993). Such factors tend to be cited by proponents as either barriers or bridges in an inevitable transition from command regimes (Eastern Europe) and authoritarian regimes (East Asia) towards full democratic nationhood. An important but neglected dimension of elite theory is formation: the socialisation role played by formative agencies – especially schools – in moulding the collective consciousness of various leadership and elite sectors. Within elite theory, formation is typically subsumed under elite recruitment but it merits separate treatment. Concentration on the recruitment mechanisms thought to be essential to the attainment of elite positions (Pakulski, 1982, p.21), for example, leaves the dynamics of formative institutional preparation undisclosed. Yet, given the increasing propensity of political regimes and sectoral agencies to emphasise the role of preferred leader prototypes in the delivery of desired economic outcomes (see below), this neglect of formation represents a significant knowledge lacuna.
The traditional leadership of Australian elites One of the earliest appraisals of the quality of Australia’s elites was Horne’s (1964) The Lucky Country. Published during the unparalleled affluence of the ‘Ming Dynasty’ (the Menzies era) – the halcyon years
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for Western political elites (Field & Higley, 1986) – Horne argued that, despite its overall prosperity, such character traits as lethargy and complacency pervaded the outlook of those who had headed Australia’s key social institutions during the period of European settlement. Australia’s manufacturing leadership, for example, lacked enterprise and resisted the need for training (Horne, 1964, p.129–30). Likewise, federal civil servants, Horne (pp.165, 166) thought, comprised conservative, orthodox men ‘self-taught in practicality’ and over-concerned with ‘the subtleties of administrative finesse’. The Treasury, in particular, although highly qualified and responsible, was ‘cautious and conventional, Canberra-proud, academic [and] remote’ in style. Horne (p.183) concluded that, for the most part, those who ran Australia were mediocre, conservative, paternalistic, imitative and boring. The nation’s strategic elites comprised second-rate people who were largely uninterested in talent, and ‘who cling to power but fail to lead’ (Horne, p.73). Two or so decades later, Stretton (1986, p.210) also attacked mediocre leadership in the business and government sectors. He detected a historical trend of unimaginative elite performance and argued that innovative Australian leadership tended to be exhibited by first-generation immigrants while largely unadventurous, nativeborn Australians chose to play safe. One of the more benign ways in which the timid, conservative elites assailed by Horne and Stretton endeavoured to institutionalise their values was through moral exhortation. A good illustration of the selfproclaimed moral leadership of national elite came at mid-century when Australians celebrated the jubilee year of the Commonwealth of Australia. On Remembrance Day (11 November) 1951, leading judges and religious leaders issued a rather loftily worded document, entitled A Call to the People of Australia, that was given wide coverage in the daily press and read over the ABC. Nearly 1.5 million copies of this plea for moral order were printed and distributed. The Call railed against the evil of moral and intellectual apathy. Its authors were partly concerned with Cold War threats of ‘evil designs and aggression’, but the document focused mostly on an individual citizen’s duties: fair dealing and honest work for ‘the development of true community’. Half a century later, on the eve of the centenary of Federation, what strikes the reader is less the Call’s gravitas – its paternalism and its universalistic, absolutist moral pretensions – than its emphasis on the sinews of tribe and community. Its authors invoked the language of citizenship, commonweal values and responsibility – a far cry from the contemporary governmental emphasis on choice, efficiency,
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outsourcing, downsizing, contracting-out and privatisation associated with an atomised model of society as an aggregation of individually defined interests, and the pursuit of so-called market solutions. In its affirmation of robust nationhood, and a vigorous civil society and culture, the Call is a useful indicator of the ideological gulf between the public rhetoric of mid-century and the new millennium. Despite criticism (e.g. Wolfsohn, 1964) of the efforts of the 12 signatories as a selfstyled supra-national elite which invited ridicule or indifference, a nationwide network of organising committees sponsored similar annual Call-related activities before fading from the public gaze (Hilliard, 1997). Like ‘tyranny of distance’ and ‘cultural cringe’, Horne’s ‘lucky country’ symbol has become part of Australian public discourse; so too has the former Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s 1990 electoral slogan claiming that Australia needed to become a ‘clever country’. Implicit in the meritocratic overtones in this metaphor was an acknowledgment that more than luck was required to best position Australia in a globalised era of competitive free trade. ‘Clever’ signified that Australia needed to explicitly foster its reserves of talent as it approached the second millennium (Melleuish, 1997). This symbolic switch from ‘lucky’ to ‘clever’ prompts the question of whether, more than three decades after Horne’s review, anything has changed? Can it be claimed, for example, that the alleged sluggishness and laziness which Horne attributed to the nation’s elite strata are things of the past? Next, what made it possible for the native-born timidity detected by Stretton to take hold in the first place? Finally, to what extent is the situation described by both commentators to be explained by regularised patterns of leader and elite formation? Answers to these questions are provided in the next two sections.
Recruiting Australian elites Elites sustain their privileged status and rank against rival claimants, in the face of threats (from within and without) to usurp their position or to subvert and dilute their power, by reproducing themselves. There is a twofold reproductive concern: first, to guarantee an ongoing flow of replacements and then, second, to ensure that each generational cohort recruited conforms to a requisite type. To deal with these succession problems elites rely on institutionalised processes of intergenerational leadership recruitment and formation (Gerth &
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Mills, 1953, p.173), particularly schooling and higher education (Armstrong, 1973). Systematic treatments of Australia’s meritocracy began with Encel (1970) who concluded that Australia was run neither by a ruling class, nor a power elite, but instead by ‘a loose collection of elite groups linked together by what may be called a governing consensus’ (Encel, 1970, p.4, original emphasis). Meritocracy was not Encel’s prime focus but, in a comprehensive study of social stratification, he synthesised a disparate body of data on sectoral elite membership and schooling backgrounds. This corpus shows persuasively the increasing dominance of highly educated professional occupational groups, a tendency which had begun during what Encel (1970, p.69) termed the ‘bureaucratic revolution’ ushered in by the expansion of Commonwealth Government activity during wartime. Talent was especially evident in the Department of Post-War Reconstruction where about 30 people were employed in research and policy (Encel, 1970, p.72). Whitwell’s (1986, pp.61–79) data on the academic economists recruited by the Commonwealth (Mills, Walker, Madgwick, Melville, Coombs, Giblin etc.) – virtually all of them avowed Keynesians – confirm the growing extent of meritocratic influence at the highest levels of policy at that time. Against the backdrop of the prevailing national ideology of egalitarianism, Encel (1970, pp.102–8) ranked education third (after occupation, and ownership and control) among nine factors which differentiated Australian society on the basis of class, status and power. These three strata interlocked closely in the case of the professions – especially Medicine and Law – ‘with high correlation between income, education, social role, and occupational prestige’ (Encel, 1970, p.103). His six-class system included the elite of the medical and legal professions in Class I, and professional men and women, managers and administrators in Class II (Encel, 1970, pp.106–7). Between the Census of 1921 and of 1966, the professions as a whole had nearly trebled in size and the most highly regarded occupational groups were ‘professional occupations requiring university education’ (Encel, 1970, p.119). Closer scrutiny of the highly esteemed legal profession showed that the judiciary was dominated by the Victorian and NSW bars, and by former pupils of ‘the exclusive Protestant private [i.e. fee-paying] schools’. Moreover, 80 of 104 judges of the seven superior courts between 1930–62 had attended these same schools – although there was also some overlapping of enrolments for these 80 in Catholic and State schools which they had also attended (Encel, 1970, pp.76–7).
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Encel’s data were mostly obtained from postal questionnaires, surveys and Who’s Who. By the mid-1960s, Who’s Who entries confirmed the expansion of the professions for, in the space of just 40 years, the listings of entrants’ professional occupational backgrounds had trebled to 20 per cent overall. Encel also noted the increasing reliance of State bureaucracies on experts and argued that, after a slow start employing graduates – only 80 in Commonwealth Public Service (CPS) in 1940 – ‘the triumph of meritocracy’ was complete by the 1960s. Regardless of sector, the educational backgrounds of each elite were predominantly Protestant private schooling, and then within that grouping were concentrated within a small number of older established Associated (Victoria) or Greater (NSW) Public Schools. Thus, of 148 federal, non-Labor Cabinet ministers 85 attended private schools – 36 of these from APS or GPS schools, with just 11 schools accounting for 42 ministers (Encel, 1970, p.238). And of First and Second Division CPS officers, 72 of 280 surveyed in 1956, and 79 of 278 in 1961, had attended Headmasters’ Conference schools (a select group within the non-government sector), with six schools of the GPS-APS category in 1956 accounting for 42, and for 57 of the 79 in 1961 (Encel, 1970, p.279). Particularly noteworthy was recruitment to the diplomatic service (including senior Department of External Affairs officials). Of 201 entrants between 1942–62, 70 were from Victoria – 62 of these from private schools. Nearly 50 (or one-quarter) of the 201 were from just four private schools, one of which, Geelong Grammar School, provided 22 (about 10 per cent overall). Melbourne Grammar School supplied 11, and Shore (Sydney) and Scotch College (Melbourne) eight each. Of the 65 NSW recruits, 35 were private-school educated, with the highest representation coming from academically selective State schools: 11 from Sydney Boys High School (a GPS school) and nine from North Sydney Boys High School. Encel (1970, p.280) noted that Geelong Grammar ‘appears to have particular success in producing the characteristics which the Department seeks among its applicants’ (see also Gronn, 1992, and the discussion below). The 1975 interview survey of 370 strategically placed individuals across eight elite sectors conducted by Higley et al. (1979) confirmed Encel’s picture. Across the business, trade union, political (State and federal), public service, media, voluntary association and academic sectors, the elites identified were overwhelmingly male, WASP-ish, salaried, comfortably affluent and aged in their early 50s (Higley et al., 1979, pp.64–9). These sectors interlocked among themselves through multiple position-holding and through extensive personal familiarity,
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as well as through connections with non-elite groups (Higley et al., 1979, p.72), all of which suggested ‘a substantial concentration of organisational power in a comparatively small number of hands’, but with the concentration greater within sectors than between them, and with no one elite supreme over the others. Most elite members were found to have ascended to their positions of leadership and influence after a lengthy climb through large bureaucratic hierarchies, although so-called ‘pre-modern’ characteristics (such as attachments to pre-World War II position-holders formed through family membership and school friendships) ‘appeared to advantage a relatively small number of persons inordinately’, according to Higley et al. (1979, p.106). Encel’s ‘scions’ of already powerful position-holders signalled a similar lingering, residual ‘who-youknow’ ascription criterion overlaying the progressive trend towards meritocratic achievement (see Armstrong, 1973). The persistence of such personal connections was sufficient ‘to exclude most Australians from the recruitment process at or near its beginning’ (Higley et al., 1979, p.106). In addition, Higley et al. (p.171) affirmed the meritocratic competition among their respondents as well as a readiness among the business and voluntary association sectors to appeal to liberal, selfhelp virtues. This Australian Leadership Study also confirmed the pattern of educational concentration and segregation established by Encel. Thus, ‘43 per cent of all the Australian-educated elites [in the eight sectors] attended a mere 23 of the several hundred secondary schools that were operating during the 1930s and 1940s [i.e. the formative years of their elite sample]’ – 18 of these non-government (Scotch College, Geelong Grammar School and St Peters, Adelaide, producing 40 elite members between them), and five of them State schools, all academically selective (Higley et al., 1979, p.87). The most detailed analysis of the schooling of elites was undertaken by Peel and McCalman (1992) who processed nearly 9000 entries in the 1988 edition of Who’s Who. Here they followed Encel, and also Hansen (1971) who, in an analysis of Victoria’s six APS boys’ schools, had processed 1962 Who’s Who entries. Hansen discovered that the six APS schools alone educated 10 per cent (or 903) of all the entries, which was about half the entire Victorian entries – of which 40 per cent came from just three schools: Scotch College (the highest number), Melbourne Grammar and Wesley College. Peel and McCalman undertook a State by State comparison. Their most significant finding was that there was an extraordinary difference between the schooling of Victorian and NSW sectoral elites.
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‘Selective high schools dominate the education of Sydney’s elite’, they noted (Peel & McCalman, 1992, p.12). Thus, of 2096 NSW men listed in Who’s Who in 1988, 1146 (or 54.7 per cent) attended State schools, 1027 of them selective State high schools. Indeed, more attended selective State high schools than Catholic and Protestant independent schools combined (i.e. 920 or 43.9 per cent). The two largest NSW entries in Who’s Who for non-government schools were Shore (138 and eighth ranked nationally) and Sydney Grammar (117 and ranked eleventh). Sydney Boys’ High was the highest ranked NSW school (169 entries and sixth overall ranking), Fort Street Boys’ High (132) was immediately behind Shore in ninth place, while North Sydney Boys’ High (127 entries) just pipped Sydney Grammar for tenth place nationally. Apart from St Peter’s, Adelaide (173 and ranked fifth), the other five places in the highest ranked ten schools were all from Melbourne: Scotch College (247) first, Melbourne Grammar School (222) second, Melbourne Boys’ High (209) third, Geelong Grammar (178) fourth and Wesley College (142) seventh (Peel & McCalman, 1992, p.93). On these figures the strength of the Sydney selective high schools is clear. On the other hand, Peel and McCalman detected a declining number of male NSW State school entrants in Who’s Who who were born after World War II. While Fort Street Boys’ High, Sydney Boys’ and North Sydney Boys’ High between them provided 21 per cent of the elite educated in Sydney and born before 1945, they provided only eight per cent of those born after 1945 (Peel & McCalman, 1992, p.19). Breaking down the NSW and Victorian entries by profession makes the Sydney–Melbourne contrast even more dramatic. Peel and McCalman took six profession categories (Medicine, Academic, Judiciary, Business, Public Service and Law) and compared the schools of their entrants. In NSW, the highest number of entrants from all six occupations was educated in State schools; and in three occupations (Academic, Business and Public Service) the percentage from State schools was higher than Protestant and Catholic schools combined. But in Victoria the picture was almost exactly the reverse: in five of the six professional occupations (all except for the Public Service) more entrants were educated at Protestant schools. And, in each of those five professions (i.e. Medicine, Academic, Judiciary, Business and Law) Protestant enrolments outnumbered the combined Catholic and State figures (Peel & McCalman, 1992, p.24). This ‘Victorian Ascendancy’, comment Peel and McCalman (pp. 25, 27), ‘is very much a Protestant one’ concentrated in the five APS schools of Melbourne and Geelong (i.e. over 40 per cent of the Victorian elite). Finally, this
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ascendancy is overwhelmingly male: the school with the highest number of female entries in Who’s Who was Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC), Melbourne with 18, which would have ranked it equal seventy-third with Manly Boys’ High among the male entrants. Sydney CEGS, the second highest girls’ school with 15 entries, would have been further down in equal eighty-second place (Peel & McCalman, 1992, p.100). To this point the summary of data has highlighted the dominant role of Victorian and NSW schools (located especially in Melbourne and Sydney) as sources of elite recruitment, while the overall picture highlights the historical educational pre-eminence of a handful of socially prestigious schools as nurseries for recruitment to the professions. Like Higley et al. (1979), Hansen (1971, p.269) pointed to the lingering importance of pre-modern ascriptive factors such as the ‘right’ social background. But is there any direct evidence about the kinds of within-school processes which have formed or shaped the schools’ products by seeking to capitalise on such factors?
Forming Australia’s elites Of 2221 Victorian male entries in Who’s Who for 1980, McCalman (1989, p.79) concluded that Geelong Grammar was (along with the Jesuit Xavier College) the ‘great improver’ since Hansen’s 1962 summary of the entries, and that in 1980 16 diplomatic heads of mission had been educated at Geelong Grammar, compared with Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar’s five apiece. The 1930s was the formative period for the 1980 Who’s Who cohort; so what was happening on the shores of Corio Bay in that Great Depression decade which, 30–40 years later, was to lift Geelong Grammar’s numerical profile in the nation’s only social register? Except for Hansen (1971) – who used a battery of surveys of teaching, interviews with pupils and ex-pupils, school records, school magazines, and personal observations – researchers into elites have mostly ignored the dynamics of teaching and learning in accounting for elite recruitment. Two other neglected sources have been admission records and school heads’ correspondence files. Combined with alumni or exstudent records, however, enrolment register data make possible a comparison of the social class and family origins of enrolment cohorts and their occupational destinations, and of intergenerational mobility patterns, both within and between school families (Gronn, 1992).
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Using similar records, and extensive surveys and oral history interviewing, McCalman (1993) has broadened the potential of this comparison to encompass a number of geographically contiguous elite Melbourne schools and generations of their former pupils. Similar sorts of information as these indicate what was happening at Geelong Grammar School after February 1930.1 They show that a very young, English-born headmaster, James Darling – the embodiment of the first-generation innovative immigrant identified by Stretton – was given a free hand by the school council to expand the school, to raise its national profile and to institute a veritable educational renaissance. By the eve of World War II, a decade after Darling’s appointment, Geelong Grammar had been completely reorganised. An extensive building program, undertaken despite the Depression, had provided upgraded classrooms, new laboratories, a proper library and general amenities. Enrolments were lifted and a new boarding house constructed. Separate art and music schools were built. School clubs and societies multiplied and flourished. The school produced three Rhodes Scholars in that decade. Huge-scale pageant plays were performed. Dignitaries and public figures flocked to the school, and every conceivable speaker of note or international visitor to Australia was ushered down to Corio by Darling to meet and converse with the boys. The school timetable was completely restructured and, most important of all, in 1935 the curriculum was given a major overhaul. Darling’s curriculum reforms were decidedly meritocratic. Briefly, he instituted specialist curriculum tracks (defined according to the anticipated career destinations of the boys: business, land and the professions), broadened the range of senior secondary subjects, extended the Leaving Certificate curriculum over two years and created a Sixth Specialist Form to foster preparation for university entry. One of Encel’s (1970, p.155) claims about Geelong Grammar is that, like the King’s School, Parramatta, it has always been the cradle of landed wealth. While there can be no disputing the long-standing connection between Victoria’s Western District and the school – only the extent and significance of it – Darling never intended to sever this link but constantly encouraged boys to seek alternative career options to landed pursuits and to direct their talents towards community service, particularly in the professions. In this policy he had some success. Boys from landed backgrounds comprised only a third of the enrolments in the 1930s and in fact the largest percentage of boys came from families with fathers employed in professional occupations followed by those from business backgrounds. Furthermore, there was a mar-
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ginal overall decrease for the decade in the percentage of sons returning to the land (31 per cent from landed families enrolled; 29 per cent of all exiting students returned), and a small increase in the proportion of boys entering the professions upon leaving school compared with the proportion originally enrolling from professional backgrounds (39 per cent leaving as against 35 per cent enrolling). But these details are evidence of success with internal school measures. In other external matters Darling’s success was mixed. Central to the instilling of the character at which – in conformity with English precedent – elite schools like Geelong Grammar aimed was interhouse and inter-school sport. Perhaps the elite competition within the elite school community was (and still is) the annual APS Head of the River. And here, in an effort to curb what he viewed as the excessive publicity and euphoria surrounding the event, and the overenthusiasm of the old boys, Darling’s only genuine success lay in diverting the gate-takings on boatrace day away from the traditional charity distribution mechanism of the Lord Mayor’s Fund towards a social service project jointly sponsored by the six headmasters. Even here, his fellow heads’ enthusiasm for his new scheme was at best lukewarm. Much more fruitful for Darling, on the other hand, were his efforts to encourage Geelong Grammar boys to enter the public service. Central to this initiative was his attempt (along with his fellow school heads) to secure a federal legislative amendment (finally forthcoming in late 1933) to provide for graduate entry to the CPS. Sixteen Geelong Grammar boys who enrolled at Corio in the 1930s eventually entered the CPS, eight of these going into the Department of External Affairs (which is confirmation of Encel’s observation about the texture of the diplomatic corps, cited above). Beyond building on the kinds of pre-existing attributes of the pupils highlighted by Hansen and providing an enriched curriculum to secure admission to, and passage for, their pupils within their chosen careers, the fundamental task for the kinds of schools discussed here was to ensure that formal university entry requirements were met. Once out of the clutches of the educational institutions which have cradled them, elite recruits cross over and begin to be subjected to the rigours of occupational socialisation. These vary from profession to profession, depending on the degree of skill precision and uniformity of outlook desired for their graduates. But some professional occupational groups in Australia have been slow to institutionalise university level training or credentialing programs. Neither have they had an agreed-upon, tightly defined profile of their ideal practitioner. One
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such group for whom this observation remained true until fairly recently – the one highlighted by Horne – has been management. This sector is discussed below: firstly, because the above data (particularly Encel’s) have indicated a steady flow of elite school recruits into this sphere; secondly, because public schoolboys were always expected to become business and community leaders (relying on their character, rather than formal training, to act in ways consistent with the kinds of sentiments in the Call); and thirdly, because of the increasing attention now accorded formal preparation for leadership and management, in an effort to replace previous ad hoc approaches.
Institutionalising leadership and elite succession Historically, elites have provided for their succession by seeking to institutionalise processes of leader formation in which educational agencies have figured prominently. During the transition from preindustrial to industrial Europe, for example, the typical pattern of elite socialisation and recruitment was maximum ascription, broadly a system in which, at an early age, a small male cohort was selected in accordance with parental and family status, and for top administrative or leadership posts. Part of this ascriptive pattern of grooming included prolonged education at exclusive boarding schools, universities and academies, as exemplified by the English boys’ public school (see Gronn, 1999, pp.46–57). An alternative to ascription has been a progressive equal attrition model in which a formally qualified cohort of eligible recruits is credentialed, but remains in reserve and available for elite replacement when and if required (Armstrong, 1973, pp.15–23). Unlike ascription (the norm in Europe) attrition is a much more typical recruitment pattern in new world societies. One indicator of the transition from ascription or sponsored elite mobility to a meritocratic, contest or attrition-based achievement orientation is the establishment of formal post-secondary school vocational training. Attrition approaches quickly assumed importance in the sphere of management in the USA (where university business management courses were available at the turn of the century: see Bendix, 1956). In Australia, however, where the self-made tradition was strong, formal training for the private sector, managerial elite emerged only slowly. While it is possible to distinguish an antipodean version of the heroic age of laissez-faire capitalism in Australia – during which there were occasional strong pockets of entrepreneurialism –
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there were few wealthy fortunes comparable to those of the US robber barons to be made (and then mainly in pastoralism, woollen exports and retailing). In fact, there were only 30 Australian millionaires in the 150 years to 1939, whereas in the US there were 7500 in 1914 alone (Rubinstein, 1983, 1984). Apart from a few entrepreneurial, founder, owner-managers, many Australian career managers (as currently understood) were employed in state public instrumentalities, for example Peter Board and Frank Tate (education), Sir John Monash (State Electricity Commission of Victoria) and William Calder (Country Roads Board, Victoria) – and most learned their craft on the job in a robust practical-man tradition. The take-off for professionalised, meritocratic management in Australia, then, was somewhat delayed. A nascent professional managerial culture among Australian businessmen was first detectable between the two world wars (Spierings, 1990). F.W. Taylor’s theories of scientific management and efficiency – a key component in the development of ideologies of professional management (Bendix, 1956) – were circulating in management circles before 1920, for example, and employer groups and peak associations were invoking these in their lobbying of the Bruce-Page Government (Blackburn, 1996). Instances of a new career managerial type were beginning to emerge – the stockbroker Staniforth Ricketson, of J.B. Were, was a good example. Spierings (1990) notes how acceptance by the Australian commercial elite of the significance of training in industry for the redesign of work and production methods came in the 1920s. The Victorian Employers Federation, the Victorian Chamber of Manufacturers and other peak councils, for example, lobbied successfully for the establishment of a Commerce Faculty at the University of Melbourne in 1924. The first professor was Douglas Berry Copland, a 30-year-old New Zealander, then Dean of Commerce at the University of Tasmania. Copland was a free trader (although he later became sympathetic to Keynesianism: see Whitwell, 1986, p.62) and he developed close links with Melbourne businessmen. Commerce Faculty courses were well patronised, with rarely less than 400 students enrolled annually until early in World War II (Harper, 1986, p.42). Later developments in the formalising of education for managers in Australia included the establishment in Melbourne in 1941 of the Institute of Industrial Management, following the introduction of a popular course on foremanship at the Melbourne Technical College in 1938. The Institute – forerunner of the national body, the Australian Institute of Management (1949) – functioned as a discussion clearing-
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house and provided short courses on management. A handful of companies had already begun to undertake their own internal staff training programs, but in the 1950s there were moves in Sydney and Melbourne ‘to provide something more prestigious than the technical college programs and the evening courses at the Institutes of Management and other professional bodies’ (Byrt, 1989, p.82). The University of Melbourne began six-week residential summer schools in business administration in 1956 and, in the same year, Copland was appointed foundation Principal of the new Australian Administrative Staff College at Mt Eliza – a provider of advanced management courses modelled on the original staff college at Henley-on-Thames, England. It was only in the early 1960s, just before the publication of Horne’s Lucky Country, that Master of Business Administration degrees along US lines were provided by some Australian universities (Byrt, 1989, pp.87–92). By the late 1950s, then, the idea of formal professional preparation was replacing ad hoc, on the job learning for Australia’s managerial elite. At about this time, in other parts of the broad managerial sector, such as educational administration, professionalisation – as evidenced by the provision of university preparation programs – was also commencing. A Diploma of Educational Administration, for example, commenced in 1959 at the University of New England (Cunningham & Radford, 1963, p.20). A parallel development in the professionalisation of educational managers and leaders, known as the ‘Theory Movement’, began in North American university-based programs in educational administration at about this time. In the absence of postgraduate research degrees in educational leadership in Australia, waves of senior systems administrators and research students flocked to North American campuses (particularly the University of Alberta, Canada) throughout the 1970s to undertake doctoral studies in programs influenced by the Theory Movement. In 1977, the Victorian Government established its own statutory provider of short course, residential in-house programs, the Institute of Educational Administration. Higher education courses in educational administration finally began in earnest in a number of Australian universities in the mid-1970s, initially in the form of postgraduate diplomas, followed by masters coursework degrees and higher degree research in the 1980s. Courses such as these just outlined which have been intended to professionalise the preparation and practice of educational administration, have been characterised as a form of batch processing (Khleif,
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1975). This term describes the production of intensely experienced training outcomes in hothouse-style management programs, demanding full-time study, a tightly defined, coherent structure and in-house residential delivery. Yet, because many Australian universities have mostly operated on the model of core curriculum subjects plus electives (or have even provided entire smorgasbords of electives) for a substantially mature-age, part-time student clientele, they have often been unable to replicate such approaches. But that situation may be about to change. The recent report, Enterprising Nation (Industry Task Force on Leadership and Management Skills, 1995),2 promotes the idea of a desired managerial profile for the year 2010 – ‘The Leader/Enabler’ – and recommends that ‘the seeds of change, and the imperatives of the new paradigm [of management], have to be inculcated in the generation of managers who are undertaking postgraduate education and/or holding junior management positions in 1995’ (Industry Task Force, 1995, p.xi, emphasis added). For possibly the very first time in Australia, a prototype of a desired elite leadership model for managers has received official endorsement as part of the national training agenda (see Gronn, 1999, pp.61–3). The thrust of Enterprising Nation is to discredit as outmoded extended campus-based programs that are intended to facilitate personal professional development and to better equip students to rise through predefined and predetermined career roles. Management is claimed to be moving away from ‘a structural model of organisations’ and there has been too much emphasis on ‘the more analytical areas of business’ in existing programs (Industry Task Force, 1995, pp.x, xvii). Instead, a new focus is needed on strategic management skills for medium-size business units – that is, entrepreneurialism, a global orientation, soft skills, strategic skills and management development, but particularly teamwork skills. Why? Because ‘Australia is sliding down the league table of economic performance’ (Industry Task Force, 1995, p.xii). With this kind of assertion a direct connection is being made between the nation’s global standing, and the quality and contribution of the managerial elite to that performance – one of the themes signalled at the outset of this chapter. Enterprising Nation asserts that, to enhance international competitive advantage, enterprise and entrepreneurship subjects should be taught in schools, and in the vocational and tertiary sectors, in order to ‘promote the need for individuals to pro-actively take charge of their own future, including their own economic future’ (Industry Task Force, 1995, p.xxii). Such is the flavour of the new thinking: customised, continuous learning, role adaptability, mobility,
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flexible styles and workplace diversity in ostensibly down-sized and flattened organisational structures (Industry Task force, 1995, p.xxxviii). The keystone of Enterprising Nation’s proposed new enterprise culture is a new national leadership program to operate nationally and at State level under industry sponsorship, and through inter-linked, competency-based and networked program offerings (Industry Task Force, 1995, pp.xxvi–xxv).
Conclusion: the elite prospect In this chapter I have documented the genesis and composition of some of Australia’s key sectoral elites, and have analysed the role played by schooling in leadership and elite formation. The pattern revealed by the research evidence from a number of elite theorists is clear: historically, the leadership of Australia’s major institutions has been drawn mainly from, and shows every indication of continuing to be drawn from, a small group of academically and socially selective schools located in the two major metropolitan centres of the two largest States. On the other hand, the research evidence reviewed is far from complete, and the overall picture of elite composition would benefit from further fine-grained research: e.g., regular or periodic updating of the Who’s Who analysis conducted by Peel and McCalman, in conjunction with small-scale intensive archival investigations of school records to bring to light within-school processes and their connection with macro level trend data. Further, citing the example of private and public sector management, I have also drawn attention to the evolution of professionalisation – the most decisive indicator of meritocracy – in the form of university-level preparation and development courses among Australian managers. I have represented the transition to meritocratic professionalism with the switch in national awareness from luck to cleverness. Moreover, so serious has the attention given at senior political levels been to the need to produce a requisite managerial cadre that for the first time in Australia a prototypical leader model, and an accompanying nationwide training regime, have received quasi-official endorsement as in the national interest. In parallel with these trends, however, and throughout the world, professionalised managerial elites have recently been under attack. Field and Higley (1986, p 6), for example, have insisted that ‘virtually without exception’, Western elites grew complacent amidst the affluence and relative domestic political quiescence of the Cold War years
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and mistook temporary circumstances conducive to economic growth and underwriting of the welfare state as being permanent. Others, such as Perkin (1990), have detected a backlash against ‘professionalism and the corporate state it inspired’, which has split the meritocracy: ‘[this was] not a reaction against professional society but a rounding of the private sector professionals who ran the great corporations and their academic and journalistic supporters upon the public sector professionals’ (Perkin, 1990, p.473, original emphasis). Finally, the very idea of a meritocratic elite – embodied, in the view of critics, by US upper middle-class liberals – is attacked as a betrayal of democracy because ‘it drains talent away from the lower classes and thus deprives them of effective leadership’ (Lasch, 1995, p. 44). When Donald Horne criticised Australia’s elites in The Lucky Country for their reliance on luck rather than good measure, the implication was that they lacked appropriate leadership training and that the country had not properly utilised its pool of potential leadership talent. But now that the nation seeks to represent itself in its symbols as having become cleverer, the evidence surveyed in this chapter of the dominance of a small clutch of selective schools as nurseries for elite replenishment suggests that it may still have much to learn. Perkin (as well as others before him) has shown how England – for so long Australia’s main cultural point of reference for models of leadership – has paid a high price in respect of betrayal of the social contract as a result of the class-based nature of its elite strata, and because, historically, family and school connections created a closed recruitment system. Likewise, while European and Asian nations have also recruited their leadership elites off a very narrow social base, and may seem historically to have got away with doing so, biased recruitment processes carry with them potentially dysfunctional consequences. For Perkin (1996b, p.196) the biggest threat to the kinds of advantages bestowed by the meritocratic ideal (i.e. the maximisation of talent in the interests of all) is the tendency of professionalised elites to self-destruct by taking advantage of the relative autonomy and trust bestowed by those societies that they are intended to serve. In the light of these experiences, consolidation of an already skewed pattern of elite recruitment in a society like Australia, therefore – given the patterns of schooling described above – would appear to be questionable. Yet some commentators (e.g. Anderson, 1991) have pointed to public policy trends which seem calculated to further consolidate the pattern of Australian schooling outlined in the chapter. Thus, the recent financial squeeze on school education by parsimonious State
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authorities, as part of self-management and self-governing schools, is likely to strengthen the popularity of elite schools. For many parents, the fee-paying non-government sector – already well within reach of many middle-class families as a result of generous fee subsidies – has become a more attractive option than State schooling. And a federal policy which has further liberalised the conditions under which public funding can be obtained to establish new schools, and which also provides incentives for the States to further run down school education by, in effect, encouraging the transfer of families out of their systems for purposes of financial savings, only exacerbates such tendencies. Viewed against the lessons of the history of elites, this outcome seems far from clever and even represents unsound cultural stewardship by elites. And if, as Fukuyama (1995) has suggested, it is trust, and the strength of their civil institutions and sociability networks which determine the competitive edge of nations in a globalised economy, then it will be on their custodianship of the cultural and social fabric on which the leadership of Australian elites will be judged.
Notes 1. This section draws on Gronn (1991, 1992 & 1994) and unpublished work-inprogress. 2. Abbreviated hereafter to Industry Task Force (1995).
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5 Competition, education and class formation MARK WESTERN
In this chapter I draw on the previous two chapters, by Peter Gronn and Simon Marginson, in order to critique and build upon their arguments in relation to competition, elite institutions and elite formation. My central point is that educational institutions continue to play a central role in processes of class formation and the distribution of social inequality. In fact, I shall argue, education reforms since the mid-1980s have contributed to the exacerbation of class inequality in Australia. With the publication of Economic Rationalism in Canberra in 1991, Michael Pusey introduced a new term into the lexicon of Australian public life. Pusey argued that since the early 1980s key public sector economic agencies had increasingly been dominated by an ideology of economic rationalism born of neo-classical free-market economics. Economic rationalism, in Pusey’s view, became the basis for transforming not only the direction of public policy, but also the machinery of government, the institutional apparatuses of the state themselves. At the core of the ideology of economic rationalism is the view that competition among actors within freely operating markets is the optimal way to secure economic outcomes. The chapters by Gronn and Marginson in this collection parallel arguments raised by Pusey (1991) and are united by a concern with the impact of marketisation and competition on educational institutions and on processes of educational provision. 91
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Analyses of marketisation are clearly important to understand the conditions under which educational institutions now operate. But, from the point of view of class analysis, institutions of education are key sites for the reproduction and potential transformation of class inequalities. The analyses of Gronn and Marginson implicitly highlight some of the ways in which educational institutions figure in processes of class formation and indicate how, under conditions of institutional redesign, the links between education systems, class formation and class inequality are themselves reshaped. In this chapter, I take Gronn and Marginson’s work as a starting point to reflect more generally on the role educational institutions play in shaping class formation and class inequality, and to consider how the processes of institutional redesign they highlight may affect class reproduction and class inequality in Australia in the short-term. Competition is arguably the unifying theme in Gronn and Marginson’s work, and competitive processes also figure centrally in class analytical arguments. Thus I begin by considering how competition figures in the work of Gronn and Marginson, before examining what their arguments imply for class formation and class inequality.
Competition in Australian education: the arguments of Gronn and Marginson Marginson’s chapter addresses ‘reform’ in the Australian higher education sector since 1987. According to Marginson, the central objective of educational reform has been to establish market competition as the governing principle of activity in the sector. Market competition in higher education has a number of ostensible goals: to improve the responsiveness, flexibility and innovation of higher educational institutions; to make offerings more diverse; to increase efficiency; to improve the quality of teaching and research; and to increase accountability to students, employers and governments. However, in Marginson’s view, marketisation has not had these outcomes because the higher-education market is segmented and, in one segment, produces positional goods under a different set of rules than free-market orthodoxy assumes. In particular, within the market segment dominated by the established ‘Sandstone’ universities, higher education is primarily concerned with formally qualifying people for scarce privileged professional and managerial jobs and their attendant material and symbolic rewards.
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In the ‘Sandstone’ universities, student demand dramatically exceeds the supply of available places. Since both places at these universities and middle-class managerial and professional jobs are limited, and since there is a high level of correspondence between the two, competition between students to enter institutions and faculties with a high positional value drives up the price of education in the ‘Sandstone’ universities. Excess demand shelters the ‘Sandstones’ from simple price competition and frees them from the need to be accountable in the manner neo-classical economic theory predicts. Thus the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s to institutionalise market competition in the sector have increasingly stratified higher education. Under the new rules, the old established universities at the top of the hierarchy have been able to consolidate and improve their positions. The universities of technology have been able to exploit niche marketing around vocationalism and applied research to improve their relative status. But the ‘Wannabe sandstone’ and remaining post-1987 universities, which could be argued to be the only ones that genuinely operate in a competitive market, are the major losers. Competition also figures in Peter Gronn’s account of elite formation in Australia. However, Gronn is less critical of the consequences of competition than Marginson, and has a different view of what elite education actually provides. For Gronn, the emergence of Australian elites is an essentially meritocratic process. Modernisation and industrialisation increasingly require educated workforces and education consequently becomes an increasingly important vehicle for occupational attainment. With the shift from industralisation to service-based and knowledge-based economies, professional expertise becomes an increasingly important class resource, and educational institutions that qualify people for elite professional occupations (elite public and especially private secondary schools, and elite universities) consequently become increasingly important for elite reproduction. Whereas for Marginson perceptions of high quality at the ‘Sandstone’ universities explain their market advantages, for Gronn, elite schools are ‘nurseries’ of elite formation that really do provide high-quality educational experiences that are a precondition for entry into elite occupations. Despite the selective recruitment, Gronn notes, to elite secondary schools, higher educational institutions and occupations, postindustrial service-based economies like Australia are fundamentally meritocratic, because they depend primarily on the mobilisation of expert knowledge and they reward experts accordingly. Where expertise is particularly valued, the importance of education as a
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vehicle for social attainment justifies the claim that elites are essentially meritocratic. Both chapters therefore agree that education shapes access to socially privileged positions, but Gronn explicitly infers from this process that professional elites are meritocratic, because education, rather than social background, qualifies individuals for elite recruitment. He convincingly makes the case that certain influential secondary schools provided vehicles for elite recruitment and socialisation; his account of Darling’s reforms at Geelong Grammar is also important in providing insight into how elite socialisation occurs, and he is also, I think, correct, in arguing that Australian managers have been much slower to institutionalise elite recruitment around post-secondary education than have the traditional professions.1 Nonetheless, I think it is mistaken to identify Australian professional elites as meritocratic simply because the most immediate determinant of elite recruitment is elite education and because elites are now importantly constituted on the basis of expert knowledge, rather than, for example, property ownership, race or gender. For succession to elite social positions to be genuinely meritocratic, there must be both equal opportunity for all to compete and social positions and their associated rewards must be allocated solely on the basis of abilities and effort (Marshall, Swift & Roberts, 1997; Weakliem, McQuillan & Schauer, 1995). It is extremely clear on the evidence cited by Gronn, and previously Pusey (1991, ch.2) in relation to members of the Senior Executive Service in the Commonwealth Public Service, that Australian elites have not been meritocratic because they were not and are not meritocratically recruited. For a start, recruitment to elite schools has overwhelmingly been male, WASP and from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds, as Gronn notes. Indeed Gronn’s (1992, 1994) own work on Geelong Grammar in the 1930s shows that boys there essentially came from one of three backgrounds – the land, the professions, or business – and that they largely returned to these backgrounds on exiting from school. Viewed from the perspective of class analysis, landed backgrounds and business were ascendant privileged classes, while professional occupations were an ascending or rising privileged new middle class. According to most contemporary class theorists, professionals are one extremely influential arm of a privileged new middle class, who enjoy substantial advantages in life chances and access to socially desirable rewards, like health, leisure, consumption and the like (Butler & Savage, 1996; Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992; Wright, 1997). To say that
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professional elites are meritocratic because educational qualifications determine entry to elite positions, is to miss the point that institutions of elite reproduction, privileged secondary schools, and, to a greater extent, universities, tend to recruit selectively from particular privileged sections of the population. Thus, whatever one thinks about the meritocratic nature of competition within elite educational institutions, competition to enter them is both unfair and unmeritocratic because recruitment is highly selective.2
Higher education and class formation Gronn’s chapter in this volume, and his other research (Gronn, 1992, 1994), focus upon secondary schooling as the primary educational channel into elite professional occupations. However, the fundamental educational requirement for entry to these occupations is an appropriate university degree. Access to higher education is therefore particularly important for elite professional recruitment. Australian studies (Carpenter & Western, 1989; Lamb, 1997) and overseas research (Shavit & Blossfeld, 1993) repeatedly confirm that access to higher education is stratified by class and socioeconomic status, with university students being drawn disproportionately from privileged social backgrounds. Moreover, in almost all countries for which empirical research has been conducted, socioeconomic differentials in access to higher education have remained remarkably stable, despite in some cases dramatic increases in the proportion of relevant age cohorts going on to university. Academic studies of educational stratification in countries as diverse as the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, England and Wales, Switzerland, Taiwan, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Israel all show unchanged class and socioeconomic differentials in university access despite major expansion of the higher-education sector (Shavit & Blossfeld, 1993). This finding is so robust that sociologists of education have even proposed a name for it, ‘Maximally Maintained Inequality’ or MMI (Raftery & Hout, 1993). MMI has several components but the relevant one is that growth in the number of places in the education system will only offset class differentials in access to education when the demand for education in privileged classes approaches saturation level (effectively close to 100 per cent of middle-class students going on to university). On its own, expanding the number of places available in education improves the
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educational opportunities of formerly disadvantaged students by passing more of them on to higher levels, but it does not change the selection criteria that enable people to enter higher education. We therefore see increased opportunities for higher education among less privileged groups because there are increased opportunities for everyone when the higher education sector expands. But without specific interventions to ameliorate the effects of social background, class relativities do not decline (Blossfeld & Shavit, 1993; Hout, Raftery & Bell, 1993; Raftery & Hout, 1993). On the current Australian evidence (Chapman, 1996; Lamb, 1997), the dramatic increase in retention rates to year 12 of secondary school through the 1980s, and the subsequent expansion of higher education, have increased the proportion of students from working-class and lower SES backgrounds attending university, but has not changed class differentials in access (at the tertiary level). This is likely because middle-class demand for higher education has not yet been saturated. From the point of view of class analysis, class differentials in access to tertiary education matter for at least two reasons. First, tertiary qualifications are a prerequisite for access to privileged professional and, increasingly, managerial jobs, as both Gronn and Marginson note. But second, overall patterns of social mobility through the class and occupational structure can largely be accounted for by social closure processes at the top of the class structure; that is, among professional and managerial positions. The first point that access to professional and managerial jobs is governed by credentials is self-evident. But the other characteristic of professional and managerial jobs in most western industrial societies is that they are marked by typically high levels of social closure, or by disproportionately high levels of selfrecruitment. Australian and overseas research into intergenerational class mobility consistently finds that professionals and managers are disproportionately likely to come from professional and managerial families of origin, largely because of the success with which upper middle-class parents transmit educational qualifications and cultural capital to their offspring (Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992; Jones & Davis, 1986; Western, 1994; Western & Wright, 1994). However, disproportionate self-recruitment among professionals and managers not only explains the inheritance of class advantage from one generation to the next, but also largely explains the intergenerational reproduction of class disadvantage. Professional and managerial jobs are scarce, and offspring from professional and managerial
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backgrounds are disproportionately likely to have the tertiary qualifications required for such privileged middle-class jobs. But the scarcity of middle-class positions and employer preferences for suitably qualified/credentialed employees mean that they overwhelmingly recruit from managerial- and professional-class backgrounds. This process not only advantages those from middle-class families, it also limits access to middle-class jobs to those from working-class origins. Immobility at the top of the class structure consequently also accounts for the immobility within the working class, as well as for limited exchange between the lower-middle and working classes. The blocked opportunities of working-class children for upward mobility therefore arise largely because of the success with which people from professional and managerial origins enter professional and managerial jobs, thereby closing off these positions to offspring from workingclass families (Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992; Jones & Davis, 1986; Western, 1994). Class differentials in access to higher education therefore matter because access to higher education accounts not only for mobility closure among the middle class, but also for the overall level of societal openness from one generation to the next. This pattern holds true for many Western industrial countries, including Australia, even though Australia is more open to intergenerational mobility than some other western industrial countries (Jones & Davis, 1986; Western, 1994). If talent or ability is equally distributed throughout the class structure, as class analysts have tended to assume, inequalities in access to higher education are not only unfair, they are also economically wasteful, because they do not optimise on the abilities of offspring from working-class families, while they advantage less able children from middle-class families.3
Current education policy and implications for class formation Unequal access to higher education therefore matters, because class differentials in access largely explain how much social mobility exists in a society from one generation to the next. Moreover, current government policy on higher education appears likely to worsen class differentials in university access in the short to medium term. Other
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things being equal, this will increase the impact of social origins on socioeconomic outcomes, like good jobs and earnings, and will produce more mobility closure within the class structure. Class-based educational inequality is likely to increase for several reasons. At present levels, educational expansion does not saturate middle-lass demand, and is therefore unlikely to offset existing class differentials in access. As marketisation of the higher education sector proceeds more aggressively, positional competition between institutions will increase and the stratification of the sector will become more marked, as Marginson points out. The ‘Sandstone’ universities, in particular, will be able to capitalise on government initiatives such as the opportunity to charge full fees for undergraduate degrees, and demand for places in these institutions is likely to rise. Students from privileged class backgrounds will be particularly well placed to take advantage of fee-paying places in undergraduate degrees, which will have a particularly regressive effect on access to higher education in the ‘Sandstone’ universities. Coalition changes to HECS, to increase repayments and lower the salary levels at which repayments become compulsory, are also having a regressive effect on higher-education access. Marginson notes that HECS changes have already strengthened the disincentive effect for higher education, with a consequent lessening of overall demand in the sector. A situation of declining overall demand for places makes it harder to equalise educational access because, according to the theory and evidence of maximally maintained inequality, middle-class demand must first be fully satisfied before people from working-class backgrounds begin to catch up. This condition cannot be met when the higher-education sector is contracting from a position in which middle-class demand has not yet been saturated. At best, then, changes to HECS by the Howard Government imply that class differentials in university access will remain unchanged. It seems more likely, however, that the HECS changes will exacerbate class differentials rather than simply maintaining them. Under the Liberal-National Party Government the similarity between HECS and upfront fees for education has increased. Originally, HECS was deliberately conceived to be different from a system of upfront fees which create a significant barrier to entry to higher education for the socioeconomically disadvantaged who do not have alternative sources of funding with which to meet fees (Chapman, 1996). By tying compulsory repayments to average earnings, HECS effectively translated into an interest-free loan to students until their earnings capacity crossed
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some threshold. The connection between a student’s current financial circumstances and her/his capacity to afford higher education was comparatively weak under the first version of the scheme, and thus one would not have expected the scheme to be particularly regressive in its effect on class differentials in educational access. Although the original HECS scheme clearly did not improve access to higher education for students from disadvantaged class backgrounds (nobody expected it to), it did not worsen it (Chapman, 1996). Under the current version of the scheme, however, students in difficult financial circumstances are likely to see HECS repayment as a more serious burden, and thus the disincentive effect associated with the changes is particularly strong for those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged. In addition to strengthening disincentives for socioeconomically disadvantaged students entering higher education, Coalition policy arguably creates greater uncertainties about the value of higher education in the wider community and thus contributes more broadly to declining overall demand. Such a context is also disproportionately likely to affect students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, because sociological evidence suggests that parents and students from disadvantaged social backgrounds tend to have weaker preferences for higher education than parents and students from privileged backgrounds in the first place (Carpenter & Western, 1989). Students and parents from working-class origins are less likely to aspire to higher education for at least two reasons: they value its intrinsic benefits less highly; and they perceive it to be more costly than middle-class people do, both in terms of the opportunity costs of wages foregone, and direct financial costs of remaining in education. Their weaker preferences mean that it is easier to discourage potential working-class students from entering higher education than potential middle-class students, and perceptions of prohibitive cost figure more strongly in the calculations of working-class than middle-class students. In a situation where increasing uncertainty about higher education combines with perceptions of increased cost, working-class families with a comparatively marginal commitment to higher education will be more likely to withdraw from the sector than privileged professional and managerial middle-class families. The likely result is that class differentials in higher-educational access will worsen. The decline in the demand for higher education that is associated with increased positional competition between institutions under the Coalition Government HECS policy has particularly affected the
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newer universities, as Marginson indicates. Under these policies, demand that shifts away from the new universities may well go in two directions. Students drawn from the newer universities to the ‘Sandstones’ will primarily be those who can take advantage of newmarket initiatives like upfront fees. Students who cannot afford the ‘Sandstone’ route may well be drawn to the increasingly competitive TAFE sector given its marked vocational focus and relatively low cost. This process will again worsen class inequalities in university access. The marketisation of higher education that began under Labor in the 1980s continues rapidly under the Coalition, and embodies a number of tendencies that are likely to aggravate socioeconomic inequalities in access to higher education, with consequent implications for rigidifying mobility boundaries between classes. Many of these processes impact particularly on access to professional middle-class occupations rather than managerial middle-class ones, because, as Gronn notes in Chapter 4, the professions have traditionally emphasised postcompulsory university education to a greater extent than management has. In contemporary capitalist societies, the privileged new middle class comprises both those in professional occupations and individuals in managerial organisational positions (Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992; Butler & Savage, 1996; Wright, 1997). The mobility closure at the top of the class structure that I referred to earlier largely reflects disproportionate class self-recruitment among professionals and large proprietors rather than managers (Western, 1994; Western & Wright, 1994).4 Because access to managerial jobs in countries like Australia has typically not been credentialised to the same extent as professional occupations, parents in managerial jobs have not had a simple class mechanism (investment in their children’s higher education) which they could use to secure their children’s future access to management. However, as Gronn notes, new initiatives in managerial education mimic processes of professional credentialing in that formal educational qualifications increasingly determine access to managerial jobs. To the extent that this process becomes institutionalised, it is likely that managerial jobs will eventually demonstrate the same levels of mobility closure from one generation to the next as professional jobs currently do. This tendency will further heighten immobility at the top of the class structure because, at the moment, the comparative absence of managerial self-recruitment actually weakens immobility tendencies within the middle class. However, as managers come to look more like professionals in their processes of occupational recruitment, intergen-
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erational mobility patterns of managers and professionals will also converge because of increased self-recruitment within the managerial fraction of the new middle class.
Conclusion: credentials, class and inequality In the absence of countervailing factors, increased educational inequality will arguably be associated with an increasing impact of social origins on socioeconomic outcomes (a likely scenario because overall demand for higher education is falling and the declining effects of class origins on social outcomes are largely a function of educational expansion) and a consequent hardening of mobility boundaries between classes. Australian society will, in other words, be less open to class mobility from one generation to the next, and inequality that is directly linked to social origins will likely increase. However, there are some potentially countervailing tendencies to these patterns. These tendencies reflect the increasing insecurity of certain professional and managerial jobs – a result of the same competitive pressures that propelled the marketisation of higher education in the 1980s. Organisational analyses in Australia and overseas have highlighted the effects of increased competition on people in managerial jobs in the 1980s and early 1990s. According to this research, increased market competition throughout western industrialised economies in the 1980s and 1990s encouraged substantial organisational restructuring in the form of managerial downsizing and delayering. During that period, organisations progressively shed managerial and, to a lesser extent, professional employees, and moved to flatter, less hierarchical structures, in a bid to increase competitive efficiency (Litter, Dunford, Bramble & Hede, 1996; Scase & Goffee, 1989). Organisational restructuring in the face of increased competition has arguably been associated with a dissolution of traditional, predictable bureaucratic career paths, and has contributed to increased volatility over the worklife for professional and managerial employees (Leicht & Fennell, 1997; Halford & Savage, 1996). These processes potentially weaken the linkage between credentials, secure income streams and economic welfare. Arguments about the impact of increasing class differentials in access to higher education on social inequality therefore potentially lose some of their bite as the relative economic circumstances of middle-class people worsen (assuming of course that working-class people do not themselves become
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increasingly economically vulnerable – an untenable assumption given other changes occurring in the economies of advanced western capitalist countries). An alternative possibility is that in times of economic insecurity credentials matter more, not less, for economic welfare as individuals attempt to ‘insure’ themselves against the exigencies of the labour market through a process of credentialing and continuous reskilling. Under this latter scenario, class differences in access to higher education – and, equally importantly, to opportunities for training over one’s working life – will have further consequences for socioeconomic inequality and consolidate boundaries between privileged primary, and disadvantaged secondary, labour markets. The empirical evidence that might enable us to predict which of these scenarios is more likely to be realised is somewhat equivocal. It may in fact be too early to tell. In Australia, like many other western industrial societies in the 1980s and 1990s, earnings inequality increased (OECD 1993, 1996). In itself, this finding tends to contradict arguments that the economic circumstances of middle-class and working-class people are becoming more similar, because if this were happening we would expect earnings inequality to diminish rather than increase. In Australia, the largest increase in inequality during the period occurred among male employees (Borland & Wilkins, 1996; Gregory, 1993), and essentially went through two stages. Initially (in the late 1970s and early 1980s) earnings inequality in the bottom half of the earnings distribution worsened. More recently, inequality in the top half of the distribution has increased (Borland & Wilkins, 1996). If credentials increasingly determine economic welfare in a time of economic restructuring, we might expect that the rise in earnings inequality is due to an increase in the economic returns to education. Earnings inequality rises when the economic rewards for education, particularly higher education, increase – perhaps because economic restructuring increases the demand for expert labour more quickly than supply can keep up. While this argument seems to explain rising earnings inequality in the United States and the United Kingdom between the 1970s and 1990s (Borland & Wilkins, 1996), it does not appear to apply strongly in Australia. In Australia, earnings inequality worsened because the spread of earnings within educational groups (such as those possessing university degrees) increased. This result suggests, at least among full-time male employees, that education and earnings in Australia have become uncoupled to some extent, but in a way that exacerbates economic inequality rather than diminishes it.
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For Borland and Wilkins (1996) increased earnings dispersion within educational groups reflects the growing importance of unmeasured skills; that is, skills that are not captured by explicitly measuring education and experience. Recent research in class analysis, however, suggests other candidate factors. Martin (1998) has recently shown that, for those in professional and managerial middle-class jobs, earnings inequalities between public- and private-sector employees have generally increased, to the detriment of public-sector employees, while the relative position of managers with respect to professionals has essentially improved. The second of these findings suggests that the balance of middle-class power, at least as it relates to earnings, may be shifting partly away from those with professional expertise towards those with organisational or managerial authority. If this is the case, and management becomes credentialised in the manner Gronn describes, there may be some re-alignment in overall demand for entry to professional and managerial courses at universities. While this process would potentially re-order the positional value of managerial and professional qualifications within educational institutions, it would not re-stratify the institutions of higher education themselves. Moreover, if economic returns to organisational authority are rising at a time when universities increasingly determine access to managerial jobs, the central role of educational institutions in processes of class formation and inequality is guaranteed, even as those processes themselves change. The centrality of educational institutions in shaping processes of class formation and class inequality thus appears to be one of the enduring features of the contemporary period.
Notes 1. There is some ambiguity in Gronn’s treatment of elite socialisation. His analysis is closely informed by elite theory and associated arguments about meritocratic processes of elite recruitment and succession. Nonetheless, his conclusion clearly recognises that elite recruitment in Australia and Britain has been selective and thus unmeritocratic. 2. It is important to distinguish between considerations of fairness and considerations of merit when talking about elite recruitment processes (and social selection processes more generally). A genuinely meritocratic system of social selection allows everyone equal opportunity to compete for social positions, but individual ‘success’ and the rewards that flow from this, depend partly on abilities and talents that are genetically randomly distributed. Since the initial distribution is unfair, so are the unequal outcomes that flow from a meritocratic process (Marshall et al., 1997, ch.2).
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3. With the publication of The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray (1994) have recently challenged the view that ability is equally distributed across classes, at least in the United States. Herrnstein and Murray (1994) argue that cognitive ability is increasingly important for job performance in the US so that the link between ability (measured by IQ) and occupational level is becoming stronger over time. In addition, assortative mating means that people tend to marry others with similar characteristics to themselves (occupation, education, IQ and so on) and, given the genetic heritability of IQ, to have children whose IQs closely reflect those of their parents. These processes combine to ensure that cognitive differences will come to map more directly onto class differences and also imply that class differences in cognitive ability will increase over time. In Britain, Saunders (1997, 1995) has similarly (and correctly) pointed out that recent class mobility research has neglected the possibility that class mobility patterns might reflect differences in ability rather than processes of class advantage and disadvantage. The work of Saunders, and of Herrnstein and Murray has aroused considerable critical response. In response to Herrnstein and Murray, Fischer et al. (1996) have convincingly shown that ability and social origin matter for a range of social outcomes, while Weakliem et al. (1995) have shown contra The Bell Curve, that US class differences in intellectual ability are actually smaller in younger cohorts, not larger. The more compelling rebuttal of cognitive stratification arguments, however, is that differences in intellectual ability actually matter very little for overall levels of inequality. Eliminating differences in cognitive ability would diminish household income inequality in the US by at most about 10 per cent (Fischer et al., 1996; Fig.1.2) and stratification by cognitive ability cannot possibly explain the increases in income inequality that occurred in many OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s. 4. This point is admittedly contentious. (See Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992; Jones & Davis, 1986 for a contrary view.)
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6 Institutions with designs: consuming school children1 JANE KENWAY AND LINDSAY FITZCLARENCE
Compulsory education is one of the defining characteristics of modern childhood: to a degree therefore, any politics of schooling is also a politics of childhood, with inevitable implications for the lives that children lead and for the way that childhood itself is understood. (Wagg, 1996, p.8)
This chapter is concerned with the marketisation of schools in Australia and the manner in which students are inscribed within the marketisation process. It focuses specifically on the ways in which a group of working-class/under-class students in both primary and secondary schools read their schools’ commodification practices and write themselves within and around them. The first section provides some brief information on the main features of the marketisation of Australian schools, the gaps in the international research and the research projects which inform the chapter. The remainder of the chapter draws on ideas from the advertising industry and from cultural theorists’ discussions of advertising and commodification to interpret the marketisation of schooling and its implications for students’ identities and for adult/child and social class relationships. An understanding of such matters leads to the question ‘Is this the sort of education we want for our children?’ 105
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Policy developments, frames of analysis, strange silences Australian governments have spent the last decade redesigning educational institutions and education systems and schools have been reshaped in quite profound ways. They have been steered towards ‘free’-market mores, manners and morals but within the tight rein of State and Federal government policies which now imply that school systems are primarily investments in human and political capital and national and State identity. School systems and schools have been stripped of finance, staff, assets and previous educational ethics. Schools now are expected not only to operate within the tight and narrow frameworks developed by State and national governments, but also to operate as ‘free’ agents within such frameworks. A range of practices associated with such ‘devolution’ and with deregulation, dezoning, and deliberate disaggregation, have encouraged schools to see themselves as free-standing entrepreneurial small businesses. They are increasingly competing with each other for ‘clients’; namely parents and sponsors, and the money that flows from them. Parents and students are encouraged to adopt a consumerist stance to schools and to knowledge. In their governance, schools are expected to, and often do, draw inspiration from industry management models. Further, many are importing expertise from marketing and fundraising experts, developing marketing plans, establishing sponsorship/fundraising committees and undertaking advertising programs. Educational language is being subsumed by marketing language. Many businesses are now advertising in schools, using them for the production of brand loyalty and reputation. This broad set of changes is now commonly referred to as marketisation. Although with somewhat different manifestations, marketisation is now a feature of public schooling systems in the US, UK, New Zealand and much of Canada. The marketisation of schools in such countries has attracted a great deal of critical research. However, the focus has largely been on government policy, principals and parents and on associated issues of school choice, school management and, more broadly, social, economic and philosophical imperatives and implications. Such studies privilege the role of the economy, governments and educational systems and institutions and rely heavily on political, institutional and economic theories in their analyses. The cultural seems to be reduced to
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the political and institutional. These foci imply that such changes have little connection to changing cultures more broadly – that the marketisation of school education is unconnected to the rise of the commodity and the image in the 1990s and beyond. We believe that studies of marketisation require a richer understanding of the relationship between the economy and cultural forms of commodification and that current understanding can be greatly enhanced if they are complemented by insights from cultural studies. Cultural studies have the capacity to help us identify some of the more subtle educational and identity effects of such changes. Because so little attention has been paid to the cultural in association with the economic and social contexts of marketisation, we have very little sense of the ways in which schools’ marketing practices map onto other marketing practices, and how educational consumerism maps onto broader patterns of consumer culture. For example, it could be argued that the marketisation of education is an indicator of what Lee (1993, p.135) calls the: ‘dematerialisation’ of the commodity form, where the act of exchange centres upon those commodities which are time, rather than substance, based.
He suggests that there has been a rapid growth in the development of such ‘experiential commodities’ in recent times and that this represents ‘the push to accelerate commodity values and turnovers’ and is part of the more general ‘move to make more flexible and fluid the various opportunities and moments of consumption’ (1993, p.137). Relatively little serious attention has been paid to the semiotic and identity aspects of schools’ marketing practices. Further, until recently, little attention had been paid to the ways in which children/students are constructed within the discourses of marketisation despite the fact that the traditional family is placed quite centrally. Indeed, as Oppenheim and Lister (1996) point out, on such family/market matters there is a dual and somewhat contradictory emphasis within New Right thinking. On the one hand we see the individual ‘consumer and economic actor’ involved in maximising self-interest and, on the other, we see the family unit with all its incumbent gendered traditions of male/female, adult/child responsibility and obligation. Social conservatism is in strange juxtaposition to neo-liberalism. Nonetheless, the research literature does not show how parents’ educational consumption maps onto and accelerates their other habits of consumption and the implications for the construction of the family.
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Further, students themselves and the ways in which they participate in the market culture of their schools are also largely absent from this body of research. This reflects the more general marginalisation of children in the recent discourses of education policy. We have very little research on the implications for the construction of young people as educational consumers, the ways in which students’ educational consumption connects with the specificity of their other consumption patterns. Finally, we have few explorations of the consequences and implications of such matters for schools’ educational purposes as opposed to their management practices.
Research program Such matters have been central to a set of research projects we have conducted over several years.2 This chapter draws from those aspects that are concerned particularly with the semiotic work involved in schools’ marketing practices, with the identities offered to students and with the different desires, fears and fantasies such marketing practices produce and ignore. In considering the standpoint of students we go beyond well-known accounts of ‘choice’. We point both to the manner in which schools construct students as educational consumers and commodities, and to the manner in which students construct themselves as consumers and producers of schools’ semiotic value by drawing on the ‘worldliness’ they have developed through their engagements with consumer/media culture (Kenway et al., 1996). There is then a link to earlier work that has recognised students’ agency in ‘shaping’ the school culture in order to achieve particular, personal, ends. For example, Paul Willis (1977) in his study titled ‘Learning to Labour’ employed a socially critical and constructivist logic to explain how the subjects of his study were agential in their attempts to influence and shape their immediate social environment. For our purposes here, in examining consumer/media culture of the 1990s, it is pertinent to note that this culture has created a cohort of semi-sophisticates, prompting Guber and Berry (1993, p.14) to assert that ‘kids are worldly’. Holland (1996) calls them the ‘supermarket generation’. In part, their worldliness comes from access to the mass media and its reconstructions of children as active consumers of culture, partly through their direct engagement in consumption through ownership of disposable income, but mainly by virtue of their influence on their parents’ consumption behaviour. However, this
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worldliness is not politically neutral. It develops within a context of market relations that is deeply ideological. Market relations – or what Ball (1997) refers to as ‘the politics of choice’ – are ideological in the sense that responsibility for the positive and/or negative consequences of choice is directed back at individuals and their families. Ball (1997, p.9) elaborates: Education itself is commodified and the values and practices in which it is embedded are commercialized. Educational provision is increasingly made susceptible to profit and educational processes play their part in the creation of the enterprise culture and cultivation of enterprising subjects. Again the market and new managerialism are central to the active transformation of the practices and the meaning of education.
This chapter arises from interview and participant observation research conducted during 1994–95 in seven (anonymised here) schools in Geelong, a provincial Australian city. The students come from different primary and secondary school age groups, different sociocultural backgrounds and schools with different orientations to the marketing of education. However, the student data is mostly from a selected group of students (years 3/4, 5/6, 7, 10, 12) and three schools (primary, middle/ secondary and senior/college) in a suburb fictionally called Willis. The suburb is part of an area that is surrounded by heavy industry and which has been subject to intense industrial restructuring over the last few years. Several of the major industries of the area have recently closed down, while several smaller industries have set up. The overall unemployment rates are high on a local and regional basis and the suburb is stigmatised by those outside it. So, what are the marketing practices of these schools and what are their implications for our research students?
Advertising Direct advertising is now considered a normal and uncontroversial practice through which schools seek to attract students, finance and reputation. They mount billboards in schoolgrounds, sometimes supported by sponsors. They advertise in newspapers, on radio, in increasingly glossy brochures/prospectuses and at education fairs. Schools distribute professionally produced, multicoloured glossy booklets and folders complete with numerous colour photos. These usually depict attractive, happy, busy, often multi-cultural groups of children actively engaged in learning or play – usually uniformly uniformed.
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Let us go beyond description of such practices and seek to develop a deeper understanding of the processes at work here by drawing on cultural analyses of advertising. There are several points to be made. Firstly, advertising is central to the process of market exchange, so as soon as schools entered market relationships with each other it was virtually inevitable that they would advertise. Secondly, advertising is not only a key element of a market culture, but also pivotal to the growth of such cultures. At the same time, it establishes its own momentum – it feeds on itself and takes on a life of its own. Thus the more schools advertise, the more they will become absorbed within a market culture, and the more they will have to advertise. It is therefore predictable that an increasing proportion of school budgets will be diverted towards advertising and away from educational matters. Clearly then, advertising is a key element in institutional redesign. Thirdly, advertising is a complex type of communication. It is selective and strategic; it advocates and seeks to persuade. As Young (1990, p.291) says, ‘Advertising is a particular form of discourse where only the best side of a case is put forward, so that the virtues of the topic are presented to the relative neglect of the vices’. It is about ‘face value’ and ‘best face’. It thus stands in direct opposition to education in the sense that education, in its best forms, encourages students to consider issues from many angles and to look beneath the surface, to examine assumptions. Fourth, advertisements and the commodities they promote are bearers of the values of production and exchange. In this sense, school advertisements set certain educational agendas, establish priorities and seek symbolic closure around them. Fifth, advertising’s ‘art of social influence’ involves an understanding not only of the utility role of goods and services in the lives of consumers, but also the social and cultural value of goods and services to the consumer (sign value). As Lee (1993) argues, goods and services are used as a form of cultural expression by the consumer. However, the matter does not stop there because advertisements also ‘produce dreamscapes, collective fantasies and facades’ (Zukin, 1991, p.219). Through their advertisements, schools are constructing educational dreams – they tap into a whole range of fantasies, many of which are only indirectly connected to education. Enrolment times in Geelong result in a rash of advertisements in the local press. Schools are constantly on the lookout to identify the best value to add. Hence, their advertising is not just about the matters noted above or the communication of information, but also about product differentiation. Schools are now searching for their differences
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rather than their commonalities and thinking in terms of market share. They are searching for the right market signal – the key word, image or slogan that will mark them out as distinctive and attractive. The schools’ slogans published in local newspapers during the first period of our research in 1994 included: Quality Education; Latest Technology; Caring Community; New VCE Campus; International Reputation; Girls Set for Future; A Career Pathway; Preparing for Life. When reading such advertisements our research students responded in two ways, both worldly. First, they commented on the quality of the advertisements’ semiotics; on the pictures and the size and the structure of the message and the amount and type of information. The following remark was typical: That one is the best. Geelong College – because it tells you about it and it’s got a photo and it’s got some information here and the heading stands out. (Willis Primary, Year 5/6)
Secondly, students remarked on the slogans which attract them and why. They preferred the following: SG: ‘Latest Technology’, ‘New VCE Campus’ and ‘Securing the Future’. SG: I reckon ‘Career Pathway’, ‘Latest Technology’ and ‘Preparing for Life’ because you have to always pass VCE to get a job. SG: ‘Caring Community’ – that if you can’t cope with that school they care for you, like they understand what you are going through. (Willis Primary, Year 5/6)3
Advertising depends on touching something deep in the consumer’s psyche. As Williams (1974) observes, advertising is a social narrative which inscribes goods with a ‘narrative capacity’. It tells fictional tales about social identities and relationships and implies that the purchase of goods will fulfil the story’s promise. However, advertisements are not expected to fulfil their promises but rather to connect to their readers’ fantasies about themselves and their futures. Drawing on Berger and Haug, Lee (1993, p.19) argues that advertising is judged by the spectator/viewer according to its relevance to fantasies or yearnings, rather than its capacity to fulfil its promises or its connection to reality. ‘Seductive illusion’ is what sells. Advertisements also have the potential to provoke plaisir – the pleasure which is derived from a recognition that ‘the text’ acknowledges a group’s distinctive values and aspirations (Barthes, 1975). All three can be seen in the students’ responses.
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Recurring themes emerge from discussions with children about the desirable features of school life. Students of all ages were most responsive to themes about social dynamics, the new and the future. They showed a marked preference for advertisements that stressed caring relationships. Such foci are not surprising. Further, the anxiety generated by social and political change is registered in the students’ concerns that schools are secure and safe environments. Accordingly, the way schools ‘appear’ (friendly/safe/pleasant compared with hostile/unsafe/alien) is fundamental. As Mackay (1993) and others make clear, young people are being educated during a period of massive social uncertainty and redefinition. Schools are integral in their search for security; but security is elusive, particularly for students from Willis. At the same time, the students indicated preferences about matters that were deemed to be technological. These students are the ‘Nintendo generation’. Growing up with computers and video games sets many parameters of expectation and hope. Identifying problems and anxieties and offering them solutions through consumption is a standard advertising ploy and school advertisements are no different. They tap into parents’ and students’ fears of the present and the future (employment and unemployment) and promise them a consumerist solution – ‘success, happiness and wellbeing’ through the right choice of school. Students implicitly understand that advertising works in this manner, as the following response demonstrates: INT: If you made an advertisement for this school, what pictures would you use? SB: The new bike shed, the library, sporting facilities, artwork display, computer room, with kids playing football and netball. They would be having fun. People reading the books in the Library. Cooking. The kids would be in uniform or their sport’s uniform. A display of teachers reading books to the kids. The words they would use would be ‘good education’. Lost-property box, the stuff in the canteen. They want to hear that you have good discipline, a good range of subjects, happy students, safe. ... Secure, we have lunch passes, you can go only to your own house and then back to school. (Hall, Year 9)
Impression management Marketing, as opposed to advertising, involves a wide range of contrived semiotic practices, or, what Gewirtz et al. (1995, p.121) refer to
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as ‘symbolic production’. These include such things as product design packaging and imagery, product differentiation/positioning and repositioning when necessary, and product renewal involving redesign and redefinition. It may involve market segmentation and associated population targeting and ‘impression management’ associated with such concrete matters as location, architectural design, floor layout, and display. All schools promote themselves through a variety of impression management activities and techniques. These include open days for prospective students, open nights for parents, good-news stories in the local press, the ‘glossification’ (Gerwitz, 1995, p.127) of foyer/school entrances, and the ‘look’ of the school and logos on stationery. These times also require many schools to redesign themselves. In the context of interschool competition, those schools with historically poor reputations usually seek image redesign and repositioning. This is the case with Willis Senior College, the senior school of the group of schools that are the focus of this chapter. It was previously a trades-oriented technical school and attracted all the usual stigma of such schools. It now has a program catering specifically for year 11 and 12 students, with a dual focus on professional and trade subjects. The school is part of an amalgamated multi-site campus that combines three schools. There are two middle-level feeder schools. Hall is one of these. Features of Willis Senior College connect strongly with the needs of the local area and include a wide subject range, a focus on information technology, no uniform and free movement for students. The school is making a concerted effort to create a changed public awareness through such activities as advertisements in local newspapers/newsletters, students on radio talking about different programs offered at the school and displays in the local shopping centre about courses and classes. It has identified its niche and now seeks to persuade both insiders and outsiders of the school’s merits. This is no easy matter given the suburb’s bad reputation, even among some who live there. The emerging quasi-corporate style of schools is not addressed to students so much as to parents and potential sponsors. Nonetheless, students understood the importance of ‘the look’. They explain teachers’ apparent obsession with tidiness in terms of the school image and agree that such material factors are important for this reason. At Hall they said ‘they want to sell the place by making it look swish’ and ‘the school needs painting and dressing up a bit’. They are disgusted that
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‘some of the schools around don’t even have grass’ and observed that ‘having gardens is important’. The older students at Willis Senior College are particularly aware of the connections between a school’s physical appearance and its reputation and feel aggrieved at the way their school looks. They comment forcefully on the need to improve the grounds. For our research students in their final years of schooling, school visits and information nights had not figured prominently in their educational histories. Times have changed greatly in the intervening years and the reverse is true for the younger students. As Gewirtz et al. (1995, p.128) say of similar events in England, such events are ‘becoming slicker and are geared towards selling the school in a much more thrusting way’. When asked about the impact of school visits on them all students were articulate and thoughtful: INT: When you visit the schools on Open Day what would make you think ‘I would like to come here’? SB: I am going to Hall High because we went there with the school ... they had some good stuff there – the dark room where they do the video and the cooking and they have got a big library, for when you do projects. And the cooking and the computer groups. And they’ve got this room where when you want a job you can go and ask ... and they can look for a job for you. SG: I decided to go to Brunsdon Heights because they’ve got everything set out, like, there is a big hallway and they’ve got what is down that hallway, like, it says Technology and Maths, it’s a smaller school and you won’t get lost. And they’ve got tennis courts and basketball courts and they’ve got a big gym and they’ve got good stuff. At the other end of the school they’ve got a primary school and they use their oval as well. (Willis Primary, Year 5/6)
The school visits are geared directly to students, in various ways. Some schools seek to establish strict standards right from the outset, others seek to create an attractive atmosphere, and others seek to blend both. Our students enjoyed visits to schools that offered them handson activities, where obvious care was given to planning the day, where the teachers were friendly. They particularly appreciated being given food and drink. Their comments make it clear that such brief encounters count to some extent, although they are not necessarily the deciding factor in choice of school. The older students emphasised friendly relationships with peers and teachers. However, as the following remarks indicate, they usually wanted a friendly controlled environment, not one where kids were out of control.
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SB: I went to the Johnston Park Open Day ... you looked sideways and you’d get into trouble. You come here and can be chatting away and it seemed like a breeze. I wanted to come here. SG: I didn’t like the teachers at the other schools and the classes were out of control. I expected to see the teachers in control. (Hall, Year 10)
Students were also aware, however, that the schools were trying to make a good impression and commented with some bitterness about being sold out when the school did not live up to its image in the following years. Other school-image work includes making success visible and concealing ‘failure’. ‘Best face’ involves publicising successes in sporting and cultural competitions and in public exams, and making visible high-achieving students. While schools like to emphasise academic achievements, the students noticed sport and culture most. The Rock Eisteddfod, a national performing arts competition, had a particular impact. It performed a powerful marketing function for the winning school and was remembered long after by students from a range of schools. Winning was equated with being a good school, even when it was understood that resources were implicated. Indeed, good education was implicitly associated with resources in the students’ minds.
Working for the image And what of the school labour that goes into the production of the image of the school, but which is so frequently concealed beneath the smoothness of the school’s surface: its uniforms, its conformist behaviour? According to the edicts of the education market, all members of the school community are to play their part in the schools’ image work. Principals are expected to hustle for customers, reputation and resources – cultivating clients, seeking sponsors, they are now educational entrepreneurs. School councils are to accept the responsibility for favourably positioning the school so it can gain a competitive edge over other schools. School charters and image audits help them to fulfil this function – their audience is external, not internal. Teachers are expected to do their share of image work by devoting extra time and effort to those things that count in the educational market place. Again, this means teaching to the outside rather than the inside – to the image. In the educational market place, teachers are rather paradoxical figures for students. While students’ long-term and most heart-felt
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comments on their schooling are tied up with the quality of teachers, school advertisements almost never mention teachers. Until their senior years, most students believe that ‘strict teachers’ enhance the image of the school. A common view of a school with a good name includes strict teachers, good students and tidy grounds. Teachers who are not strict are seen as uncaring. Lifting the image is associated with teachers becoming more strict. Interestingly, students do not necessarily value and enjoy such teachers. As the year 12 students said of Willis Senior College: SG: We have better rapport with teachers here. There are not two levels. SB: There is not so much discipline so we can all relax.
While at one level students say they prefer their teachers to be ‘loving and caring’, they know that adults value discipline and that it pays off in enhancing the school’s name, which has flow-on benefits to them. It is ironic, however, in our bigger study that the schools with the worst reputations were those where the senior students spoke most favourably about their teachers, their relationships with them and their enjoyment of the atmosphere of the school. The better the reputation, the more critical the students were of the teachers and the atmosphere. Marketing provides the vital link between production and consumption. Thus it facilitates, mediates and arbitrates culture. As Kline (1993, pp.30–1) argues, advertising ‘forcefully communicates about the nature of social relations and ultimately asserts its place in shaping those relations’. He continues: By amplifying, augmenting, recycling and re-interpreting established social mores, values, attitudes and customs, marketing communication legitimates, guides and sets priorities for particular relations of consumption.
Clearly the education market reflects and refracts the power relations between adults and children. It also has important implications for the ways in which children construct themselves as learners. Children who, outside school, are actively encouraged to self-define as active consumers with a keen sense of what forms a desirable market identity, are placed in a contradictory position when they encounter strict teachers who position them as non-autonomous learners. In this sense the skills of ‘marketing communication’ learned outside school emerge as sources of contradiction inside schools.
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Parents and students as/and educational commodities In the market context of schooling, parents and students have become commodities. They are both consumers of the school’s use value, and producers of its exchange value; they have a double role, the second aspect of which is usually overlooked in the literature. Parents (usually mothers) are told to ‘shop around’. In this process there are complex psychological forces at work. At one level the task of choosing a school operates through the conventional discourse of education, including a focus on such issues as school facilities, appearance and ‘performance ratings’. On the other hand, this task activates a non-rational sphere of desires, fears and fantasies (commensurate with everyday shopping practices?).(See for example, David, West & Ribbens, 1994.) Within consumer culture, people’s lives are saturated with commodities and images that have the potential to generate dreams and desires, fears and fantasies, repressions and displacements. In this context, advertisers seek to ensure not only that consumption becomes a primary source of identity, but also that desire to consume becomes a primary motivating force. According to Lasch, such desire involves a restless narcissistic pursuit of pleasure, of self-indulgence – it promotes the id of society. And, as Seiter (1994, p.40) explains, because women and children are cast as the main consumers they are also cast as the irresponsible id. Educational marketing takes such levels of consciousness into account but, at the same time, implies that it does not. Having assessed all the market indicators, parents (mothers) and, by implication, students are to make an informed rational ‘choice’. Promoters of educational markets imply that such ‘choices’ are made on educational as opposed to other grounds, and that they represent a statement about the quality of the school. However, there are many non-educational reasons for school selection and, indeed, many intuitive and non‘rational’ reasons. Students at Willis point out that usually the decision about which school they will attend is predetermined by the range of schools within the immediate locality, by finance, or by the choices of friends. It is often made over a long period. The students point out that information evenings will therefore not necessarily have a major influence on their parents. Many reported that their parents did not attend them. However, they indicated that when there was a possibility of ‘choice’, such events could hold sway, but again for an interesting range of reasons. For example:
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Having made their choice/investment, parents are then expected to protect it by adding to their school’s resources and by advancing its reputation. Parents are expected to work hard at making their children work hard and to invest time and money in the school or, at least, to invest time and/or money in their child’s schooling. Despite their limited funds, parents in Willis pour many additional resources into the education of their children. At home, many students have encyclopedias, desks and computers. Many also attend dance, gymnastics, music, drama and tennis classes. In contrast with schools on the other side (up-side) of town, few have extra tutoring, but they say that their teachers give them extra help if they need it. Those parents who do not invest in these ways are increasingly regarded by all our research schools as negligent. All participants tend to believe that ‘best value’ parents (usually fathers) are those who deliver the following: networks into sponsorship circles, financial and other capital, including the appropriate intellectual capital for school governance – legal, accountancy and management skills are highly prized. Those who are prepared to offer other unpaid labour (e.g. mothers in school canteens) are also ‘appreciated’ but not necessarily prized. By implication, single parents, parents in poverty or, indeed, any parents who do not fit the middle-class WASP norm or who expect something different from the norm, are seen to add negative value. This suggests that critical analyses of education markets must account for power relations as constituted across a range of different axes. Let us elaborate. It is widely recognised that advertisements and commodities are used by both producers and consumers to ‘construct and articulate’ (Kline, 1993, p.12) the social relationships between social classes, races and the sexes. For example, gender identities and relationships are a central feature of consumer culture and of educational markets. Research has pointed to the ways in which school shopping adds to mothers’ consumption work and confirms the domestic and familial ideologies in households (David et al., 1994; Discourse, 1996, Vol.17, No.3). However, the point needs to be made that it also confirms the idea of the household as a consumption unit. It is clear from this literature that markets in schooling ‘construct and articulate’ the gendered power relationships within families. What is less evident in this litera-
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ture is the ways in which such markets ‘construct and articulate’ the social power relationships between adults (parents and teachers) and children. We suggest that while it does involve a certain level of negotiated reading, ultimately it does not involve much ‘semiotic democracy’ (Fisk, 1987). An understanding of broader marketing practices with regard to children is useful in coming to grips with the commodification of school education. The commodity and the media have been central in the social construction of the child/consumer, changing family forms, gender and age relations, and the connections between them. With the aid of advertising and new media forms, the market has increasingly separated children from adults and from each other, offering them identities based along a consumption grid. It has offered children consumption as a primary motivating force, and offered them cultural artefacts with which to construct their dreams, set their priorities and solve their problems They build their groups’ commonalities and differences, and establish their personhood, around such priorities. All of this has implications for the commodification of schooling and for students’ perceptions of it. In school education, children are implicitly defined as powerless and dependent, and the commercialisation of schooling reinforces this. Selling children’s school education to parents offers a strong message to children about who is in control and what matters. Advertising in consumer/media culture ‘promotes informality, impulsiveness and lack of deference to authority’ (Holland, 1996, p.164), and offers autonomy and pleasure. In contrast with the child of consumer/media culture, the child of school advertising is compliant and serious, attending constantly to the needs of the school and implicitly to those of adults. We do not know of anyone in the literature who has considered this, yet even students as young as years 3/4 know what parents want in a school. They do not want a ‘children’s space’ but rather one like the unattractive world of education constructed on the screen – serious, controlled, old-fashioned, puritanical, and disciplined; a place in which children must be restrained for their own good. INT: What do you think parents would look for in a school? What do you think they would see as important? SG: What type of people you will be mixing with. Like if they are nice. SG: Discipline system, whatever that is. SG: The behaviour. (Willis Primary, Year 5/6)
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Value-added students, those with ‘face value’, are those who lift the school’s academic, sporting or cultural performance and image, and who conform to the school’s and the teachers’ educational norms – only the good are good for the school. As a year 10 girl at Hall says, ‘Our school stresses on getting high marks. If you don’t get high marks you are gone and you are just a person that sits up the back.’ All students have similar perceptions and invariably the smart/dumb category is mobilised. Clearly this is an old story but with a market gloss. Low performing and/or badly behaved students, or those who place extra demands on the school, are also seen to add ‘negative value’. This is something that the students understand very well indeed. Again we see the students’ terms and the likely school’s terms alongside each other, but we also see that the students believe that they too have a vested interest in closing the gates on certain students. SG: Bad students, they kick people. SG: They tease people. SG: Punch you. SG: Without them it would be better because everyone would be up to the same standard and then they wouldn’t have to slow down that much. They could go at their own speed. SG: And learn more things because if they don’t know how to do one thing they can’t learn to do other things. INT: So you think the less brights would hold the others back a bit? SG: Yes. And all the naughty kids would make their grade miss out on all the good stuff. (Willis, Years 5/6)
Sociological and cultural, as opposed to economic, analyses of markets point to the various social and cultural uses to which all sorts of consumer goods and services are put: ‘consumed symbolically, as a social meaning or as a cultural good’ (Lee, 1993, p.17). They point to the dual nature of such commodities as both objects and symbols. For consumers, consumption performs a number of purposes above and beyond necessity. It plays an important role in group formation, identity, distinctions, differentiations and relationships. Consumption also works as a form of displacement and social control, and as indicated with regard to adults and children, relationships of power are refracted through practices and patterns of consumption. While there may not be a perfect fit between production/representation and consumption, unruly patterns do emerge and change, although less often.
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Style and reputation Style is a key ingredient of consumption and arguably in these imageconscious ‘designer decades’ (Lee, 1993, p.115), style has assumed an increased importance as we see ‘a shift away from notions of substance and content and towards packaging, aesthetic form and “the look”’(Lee, 1993, p.ix). Style can be understood in a range of ways. It ‘is a way that the human values, structures and assumptions in a given society are aesthetically expressed’ (Ewen, 1984, p.3). It can be seen to provide the impetus for markets in appearances, surfaces and mystifications. But style can also be understood as providing tools for ‘constructing personhood’, as a statement about who one is and wishes to be. Style allows people to imagine themselves differently; it provides an opportunity to define and redefine themselves. To quote Barthes, it can be ‘a dream of identity’, even a ‘dream of wholeness’ in an age of fragmentation and alienation. For all these reasons consumption is very closely connected to the world of the emotions. Even if they are not the schools’ most valued students, all students are expected to perform their part in the school’s circuit of exchange by being well behaved, ‘doing their best’, showing ‘pride in the school’ and not holding others back. They are to contribute to its semiotics; its style or tone. Indeed, school style has become a major marketing tool, another product which is implicated in the school’s system of communications. While, as noted, style can be seen as providing a tool for ‘constructing personhood’ it can also be seen as a tool for constructing the identity of the school and for constructing marketable power relations between adult and child. It often means an emphasis on the school’s appearance, its surface, and involves a form of mystification or mythification. Students’ behaviour is a major feature of school style and functions as a sign to adults. On matters of style, ‘hope and anxiety are never very far apart’ (Ewan, 1984, p.159). Good behaviour points to issues of order, discipline and adult authority over children, as distinct from the more permissive and unruly behaviour often associated with popular culture. Compliant and docile behaviour is taken as a sign that a school is functioning in a manner that fosters traditional and stable values, and producing ‘good’ students who: SG: Finish their work on time ... listen to the teacher. SG: Doesn’t do stupid things. SG: Have manners. (Willis, Year 5/6)
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In contrast, behaviour such as ‘back-chatting the teacher’ (Willis, Year 5/6) is what characterises a ‘bad student’. Most schools are obsessed with students’ appearance, and the uniform is a central feature of this obsession. Many students’ comments on the uniform show good cost sense and an understanding of its symbolic value. SG: I prefer a uniform because the other kids think that a uniform is pretty good and they might count that as a thing that they are looking for. SG: I would prefer not to have a uniform so your parents don’t have to pay more money with all the books and that. SG: We didn’t [used to have] a uniform but we got one this year because Mrs Scatty said that people were putting people’s clothes down. SG: The bad part about having a uniform is that if you lose it people can just take it home and if you bring your own clothes then you know whose is whose. (Willis, Year 5/6)
But school style is not only a matter of the uniform; it also relates to length and cut of hair, make-up and jewellery. Students, at work in constructing their identity through style, are frequently told to cut their hair, take off their make-up and jewellery, have a shave. This intrusion into students’ construction of person-hood has intensified along with marketisation. Going against the trend, Willis Senior College treats its students as adults when it comes to their choice of self-presentation, and has no uniform. Some of the students think this would be a positive feature of the school were it not for the following problem. SG: Parents don’t like a school with no uniform. SB: They think no uniform, no discipline. SG: I’d rather have the uniform. We seem too scruffy when we’re out and about, it’s feeding the reputation.
Reputation is an elusive thing, but everyone seems to know when a school has a bad reputation, and the fall-out for the school is significant. SG: I didn’t want to go to Willis Tech because it is not a good school and has a bad reputation. SG: It had a bad reputation when I was in grade 6 and Hall High had a better reputation so Mum wanted me to come here, I didn’t have any say.
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SB: I was going to go to Willis Tech but it had a bad name, drugs and all that. It was up to me and I chose here. SB: I was going to go to Willis Tech but it had a bad name so I came here. It was up to me to choose.
It is not easy to separate matters of style and reputation from students’ subcultures and information networks. Schools’ advertising and image management practices have difficulty dealing with the informal information systems about schools – the talk among parents and particularly among students, the rumours and gossip, the exaggerations and the innuendo which make and break reputation. Reputation is not easy to manipulate and control and, either negative or positive, has a tendency to feed on itself and fulfil its own prophecies. The students’ impressions and information networks are formed everywhere – in the cracks and crevices of the social and sporting life of the city and in the stories that family members tell each other. INT: How do schools get good and bad names? SF: If you meet a friend in town that goes to another school they tell you about it and you tell your friends and it gets around. SF: We get these ideas from other students and friends that go to different schools. We talk to them at weekends, holidays and after schools. We see them at sport and youth groups. We also hear from our brothers and sisters. (Hall, Year 10)
Sadly, for Willis Senior College (WSC), many younger residents within Willis have accepted the view that WSC is a bad place with bad people. The following comments were made by year 3/4 students about the school they will most likely attend in their final years of schooling. The implications of these views for the ways in which these children will anticipate and participate in their schools of the future look bleak. SG: Willis Secondary College hasn’t got a very good name because all these people, they walk past our school and they throw chips and call people swear words and that. SG: That one over the hill hasn’t got a very good reputation because of the type of children that go there and the teachers aren’t that strict. INT: What type of students go there? SG: There used to be people from our school and they were real naughty and they have all gone there. INT: What other sort of students go there?
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For students, a school’s bad reputation often centres on drugs, alcohol, female sexuality (‘young girls get pregnant’, ‘girls in short skirts’), troublemakers, and fighting and knives. Aware of this sort of thing, some students point to the safety of Hall as a selling point. ‘It is pretty safe, there is no one carrying knives and you don’t feel threatened walking around.’ But reputation is also intimately connected with the suburb and the habits and styles of consumption associated with it. As those outside this suburb imply, suburbs have ‘sign value’: SB: Schools are relative to the area. The schools in Highton are termed snobby, Willis is not the best place to live and the schools are judged accordingly. SB: From what I have seen there appears to be three classes of schools. Morley High is in the middle, the lowest is McRobbie. I say that from being on a bus with McRobbie kids and that is the only time I have been proud of this school, they were so rough and so below us. ... The other class is the private Colleges. If you know someone from College and say you go to Morley High you feel inferior. (Morley High, Year 12)
Particular and general identities are sometimes linked to the ownership of different commodities. Therefore, ‘nice’ suburbs go with ‘nice’ people. This logic extends to the impressions about schools in different districts. For instance, students from other schools and suburbs refer to Willis as ‘tough’ and ‘feral’. Students from Willis Senior College are aware of this type of stigmatisation and labelling. SG: We know that other kids say we are bad. SB: My friend at another school in town says that people there bag Willis. SG: Even people at Hall look down on us because of the area – Willis.
Most year 10 students from Hall, our middle school, understand the connections between their school, consumption and social class. INT: What type of a store would you suggest to represent this school? SG: A shop selling clothes. A casual style of clothing like jeans. A good quality basic. SG: A Reject shop. SG: Something cheap like Target, a department store like K Mart, nothing too flash.
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Lifestyle and consumer goods are representations of the personal and social characteristics of the owner. One of the reasons students at Willis Senior College actually do not mind uniforms is that ‘you don’t get comments on whether your shoes are Nike or Adidas’. Choice classifies, and classifies the classifier, argues Bourdieu in Distinction (1984). It is not possible to keep aesthetics, style and socially constructed meanings out of a consideration of the exchange process of schooling. Neither is it possible to ignore the connections between educational consumption and networks of social power relations.
Social class relations The literature about the role that education markets play in class formation, differentiation, distinction and mobility shows how parents in a position to exercise ‘choice’ use schools as positional goods in the class interests of their children and themselves (e.g. Gewirtz et al., 1995; Kenway, 1991). It implies that choice of school is more about parental ambitions, hopes and anxieties than those of their children. Schoolchange in the interests of marketing is implicitly built on this understanding and is often characterised by a process of ‘emulation’. Seiter (1994, p.48) points out that emulation involves a double movement; an imitation of those richer as well as differentiation from those poorer or less refined. Many schools model themselves on those perceived as better (usually private schools or State schools serving the ‘comfortable’ or privileged classes), and distance themselves from the ideas associated with schools of lesser standing (those usually serving those of lesser standing). For example, the principal at Willis Primary School says: My entrepreneurial dream is that some day somebody from the ‘other side of the river’ is going to walk in here and say ‘I want to send my child to your school’.
Further, the following comment is typical of the views expressed by students about private schools: SG: The private schools are really snobby and the rich people go there, the upper class people, so we are just like the Hall scum I suppose, we are the poor people that can only afford the uniforms. SB: You get a better education and the school looks better and you get a job easier if you’ve been to Geelong Grammar; you get preference over someone that had been to Hall.
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These students did not even consider going to a private school. Financially such schools are too far out of their league. Most Hall students were very positive about their own school, yet, if given the money, over half of them said they would move to a private school. A second feature of emulation is a process of ‘chase and flight’ (Seiter, 1994, p.46, quoting Simmel). In a socially mobile endeavour, the ‘lower orders’ copy, and are expected to copy, the ‘higher orders’, but, in order to maintain their distinctiveness and superiority, the higher orders move to establish new benchmarks for consumption practices. This results in an unending cycle of consumer desire. It is a brave school that seeks to break this emulation cycle, but Willis Senior College is one such school. It is trying to respond to the idea of a segmented educational market. It is too early to tell how successful it will be.
Conclusions Conventional analyses of marketised forms of schooling have tended to ignore the perspectives of students. In this chapter we have explained and interpreted some of the main features associated with the marketisation of schools and, as much as possible, adopted the stand-point of students. We have suggested that students are constrained but discerning, sophisticated but cynical participants caught on the horns of many dilemmas in the Janus-faced world of school marketing. This world celebrates surfaces, encourages conformity, hypocrisy and repression, and encourages a view of education which favours the interests of adults over children. Redefining the student as a consumer of schooling, maps onto and capitalises on some of the wider redefinitions of childhood introduced by consumer/media culture. However, it ignores those aspects that celebrate childhood and challenge asymmetrical adult/child power relations. Indeed, as we have demonstrated, consumerism in schooling can be used to re-instate traditional and oppressive educational practices. We have shown that educational consumption works as a form of displacement, and that social control and relationships of power are refracted through it. Generally, in putting themselves on the market, schools seem to make little attempt to connect to the interests, pleasures and yearnings of all students. It seems that those of the many are put in the service of the few ‘smart people’ and the ‘rich people’. Students clearly have
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difficulty articulating their desires in a market context that promises them reputation and advancement in exchange for their conformity. And, as they go through school, they learn that schools can deliver their promises only to some students. The students are informed and agential in this context, partly because they draw on the consumption skills learned outside of schools. They know how to put on ‘best face’, they know what the education market values, and they know that it does not value differences and genuine student agency – they know it is ‘two-faced’. They know what they have to sell and give away in exchange for the image and reputation necessary for school success; they know how to comply with illusion. However, as they go through school and become more sophisticated, disenchanted and cynical, they learn that more things are lost than gained in this process. It is our view that cruel dilemmas are posed for schools like those in Willis and the students that attend them. Such students are generally likely to accept that the education market rules in order to best survive in a system that makes their success difficult. However, our research also suggests that they turn elsewhere to construct their personhood; schools are on the margins of their identities. The general silence about the implications of marketisation for young people, and especially for young people from suburbs like Willis, is a disturbing feature of contemporary analyses. This issue is not a matter that should concern educators alone. The vagaries of the global market pose enormous policy dilemmas for nation states. Traditional policy logics were predicated on an assumption that the state is able to effect quite strong control over its citizens and is therefore able to intervene directly in shaping the patterns and directions of young people’s lives through the schooling/labour market nexus. As these conditions have changed – as witnessed by controversies surrounding how to control the flow of undesirable information on the World Wide Web – it has become apparent that new approaches to policy-making are needed if schools are to retain a primary position in the social process of shaping a sound and stable sense of citizenry. We therefore conclude with a direct assertion that what is required is a new form of debate, not just about the functional purposes of schooling but also about the form of education needed to foster a strong sense of democratic sensibility in the upcoming generation of globally interconnected citizens.
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Notes 1. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the Journal of Education Policy, 1998, Vol.13, No.6, pp. 661–77. The paper is reproduced here with permission. 2. All data and analyses come from Marketing Education in the Information Age (1992–94) and the Consuming Education: Contemporary education through the eyes of students (1995) research projects (Australian Research Council and Deakin University ). Other researchers were Chris Bigum, Janine Collier and Karen Tregenza. 3. SB = male students; SG = female students.
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7 Gender, teaching and institutional change: an historical perspective MARJORIE THEOBALD
In November 1866, Mrs Mary Jenvey, respected headmistress of the prestigious St Mark’s Church of England Girls’ School in Fitzroy, received from her governing local committee a terse notice of dismissal.1 As St Mark’s was an elementary Common School conducted in partnership with the state, this local palace coup had to receive the imprimatur of the central Board of Education. Mrs Jenvey was widely considered to be ‘one of the best … teachers in our schools’, and the powerful permanent secretary to the Board, Benjamin Kane, was clearly discomforted; he minuted the correspondence: ‘Unless the Board take some decided measures at once this school, which has hitherto been one of the best under the Board, is very likely to become seriously injured by the unwarranted interference of the Local Committee with the duties of the head teacher.’2 Kane’s discomfort was no doubt exacerbated by the fact that Mary Jenvey was due to give evidence before the Higinbotham Royal Commission on public education within days of his belated intervention.3 Jenvey’s standing in the educational community of early Melbourne is underscored by the fact that only four other head teachers were to appear, all of them men. Kane’s concern over 129
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the future of St Mark’s was not misplaced; by December, attendance had fallen from 110 to 34, as parents, who were not at that time compelled to send their children to school, withdrew their daughters in protest at the local committee’s action. The Fitzroy ‘community’ was by no means a monolith. The dispute between head teacher and local committee was at one level a straightforward struggle for control of the lucrative weekly fees paid by children in the Common Schools of the 1860s, exacerbated by a palpable dislike between Mrs Jenvey and the secretary to the committee, Robert Haig. Jenvey had been in the habit of collecting the fees and distributing them as she saw fit between herself and her staff, before handing over the residue to the committee for the upkeep of the school and other expenses. She complained before the Higinbotham Commission that her school – which consisted of one large room 60 ft × 25 ft – was in a very rundown condition. Like many schools inherited by the Board, it was used as a Sunday school by St Mark’s Church of England and the furniture was badly damaged from constant rearrangement. Jenvey was disillusioned by the failure of the church and the local committee to keep her school in good repair. In 1866 a largely new committee demanded that the fees be paid in toto to them for distribution under a formula less advantageous to the headmistress. Jenvey and her local committee were assiduous in their efforts to misunderstand each other, both appealing to the Board of Education in highly emotive language. In October, Jenvey wrote to Benjamin Kane: I wish to state that I have been employed as a teacher in public schools for 20 years (half of that time in this colony) and that until placed under the control of this committee I have always met with the approval and commendation of those with whom I have been engaged; but that the unjust and harsh treatment which I now constantly experience distracts me from my proper avocation and has of late seriously impaired my health, and that therefore I feel impelled to appeal against its continuance.4
There were other points of contention. Jenvey had no control over the staffing of her school. In 1866, the local committee appointed Mrs Maria Watts to a vacancy on the staff, over Jenvey’s preferred candidate. Jenvey and Watts were soon at loggerheads. Within months of her appointment Watts had resigned, writing to the local committee: I consider that the work and position of the assistantship … is such that none but a junior and half-qualified teacher could put up with except
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from necessity; while the bearing of the head teacher to her fellow workers is most arbitrary, and altogether such as no experienced teacher would bear from one whose superiority, perhaps, consists chiefly in her position in the school.5
In her evidence before the Higinbotham Commission Jenvey referred to a previous dispute with a member of staff in which she believed that her authority had been compromised: One morning I desired her to perform some duty … and she told me she would be directed by the committee not by me … This was said in the school, therefore it was known by the other teachers. I told her I must suspend her from duty, and I did so, and wrote immediately to the committee, and begged their support … but instead of being supported one of them came into the room that afternoon and spoke very rudely and loudly indeed, and asked me how I dared to dismiss an assistant, which was the power of the committee alone, and ordered me immediately to replace the assistant.6
On that occasion Jenvey was also served with a notice of dismissal unless she consented to apologise; in her account of the incident she refused to do so but continued to teach at the school. Local control of staffing also had its pitfalls. At another level the Jenvey affair opens up the politics which had developed around the provision of elementary schools under the Common Schools Act of 1862 – a politics which involved the central Board of Education constituted by the Act, the local committees attached to each school, the churches, the parents, and a powerful group of urban head teachers who had emerged by the 1860s. To these intricacies we must add the politics of gender. The St Mark’s case captures in microcosm a particular configuration of educational arrangements, its stake holders and their shifting alliances, its winners and its losers.
Entrepreneurial schooling in the 19th Century An experienced teacher of some years standing when she arrived in the colony, Mary Jenvey was recruited by the local committee and taught under a series of one-year contracts which could be terminated at a month’s notice on either side. The Local Committee was not above holding this over her head when disputes arose. Both her appointment
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and her dismissal had to be ‘sanctioned’ by the Board of Education, a term which was to prove slippery in the extreme. Jenvey’s base salary was paid by the central Board. This ill-defined division of powers was to engulf the Board in endless squabbles and costly litigation in the 1860s.7 By the mid-1860s it was clear to all concerned that, in the absence of compulsory attendance legislation, the success or failure of any school depended upon the ability of the head teacher to attract and hold a clientele. These relationships of the market place were especially marked in the case of girls, for whom links between breadwinning and school attendance were not apparent to parents. In her evidence before the Royal Commission, given as the Board dithered over her dismissal by the local committee, Jenvey made it clear that she considered herself to be in an entrepreneurial role at St Mark’s. When I took St Mark’s school it was very small indeed. It was attended by a very large number of free [destitute] children, and it was a kind of speculation that as soon as I could make it a profitable school the profits should be mine; but as soon as it became profitable, first one percentage and then another was taken off and then a larger one, so that I feel myself very much ill-used indeed.8
Jenvey also made it clear to the commissioners that her base salary of £80 was small change compared with the additional ‘performance’ rewards heaped upon the head teachers of large urban schools: weekly fees which placed a premium upon recruiting children and keeping them in regular attendance; State subsidies for destitute children; per capita payment for the results of her pupils at twice-yearly examinations; and a bonus for her classification in second-class honours, a classification which she shared with only sixteen other women in the service. The all-male Higinbotham Commissioners were bemused to hear that Jenvey’s net salary for 1865 was £316, roughly three times the average salary earned by male assistant teachers in the Common Schools era. In stark contrast were the salaries earned by her staff. At the time of her dismissal, Jenvey had two assistants and three pupil teachers, all female; the first assistant, Miss Watson, earned a base salary of £60, a payment of £3.15s as a percentage of the fees, and an additional small sum for ‘results’. Jenvey’s access to this state-subsidised education market rested precariously upon official policy to allow separate schools (or ‘divisions’) for boys and girls in the major centres of population. Her school was officially one of three ‘divisions’ – boys, girls and infants – which went under the name of St Mark’s Common School 563 in the records of the Board of Education. Not surprisingly, she defended single-sex
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schooling vigorously before the Higinbotham Commission. When asked to describe the relationship between the girls’ and boys’ school she replied: ‘We are entirely separated. My school is separate from the boys’ school, and my income is separate: the school is separate in every respect, except that they are called by the same number on the books of the Board of Education.’9 Jenvey insisted that girls in co-educational schools were in grave moral danger (the word ‘unsexed’ was used by one of the commissioners) and that if the sexes must be taught together, a mistress should be in charge of the school. Mary Jenvey’s standing in the eyes of the Board of Education and her alliance with the parents of Fitzroy ensured that a face-saving compromise was eventually devised to retain her services at St Mark’s. She retired in August 1883, aged 58 after 27 years of service. By that time Victoria’s educational institutions had been reconfigured in ways which had changed her professional life out of all recognition. Her career as the revered and highly paid head teacher of a prestigious city girls’ school came to an end as a result of the Education Act of 1872. Faced with the withdrawal of state aid to denominational schools, the Church of England made the decision to close its elementary schools and St Mark’s closed in March 1874. Mary Jenvey went into the newly constituted system of state co-educational schools, first at Hoddle Street, East Melbourne, then at Faraday Street, Carlton, but was demoted to first assistant, with catastrophic loss of salary and professional autonomy. The quasi-free market of educational provision which had shaped Jenvey’s sense of herself as a professional woman has been obscured in mainstream historiography of education by a focus on the long regime of the centralised bureaucratic institutions ushered in by the Act of 1872. Yet the educational arrangements which Jenvey colonised with such conspicuous success in many ways pre-figure the market/client arrangements in the 1990s, which are the focus of this collection. In the next section I examine the quasi-free market which grew up in the 1850s and 1860s, and trace its demise after the Education Act of 1872. My focus is on the fortunes of women teachers and on the intersections of gender and the institutions of education.
Education in colonial Victoria In the 1850s the sanctity of the marketplace as an ideology underpinning everyday understandings was opaque: it was not under systematic
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intellectual challenge of the kind which is the starting point for this collection. With respect to education, the very notion of governmentprovided schools, let alone suggestions that children should be forced to attend, was bitterly contested in the parent culture of England in the middle decades of the century. In the Australian colonies, interventions into market forces were a pragmatic response by a military governor in a society not far removed from its convict origins. These realities were reflected in Governor Fitzroy’s ‘compromise’ education legislation of 1848 inherited by Victoria upon its elevation to colony status in 1851; schools for the people were to emerge from a partnership between parents, churches and, only where necessary, the state.10 As there was no compulsion to attend, the power of parents was assured. Fees were payable on the assumption that a service given for nothing would engender the mentality of the pauper. In practice, this cautious State intervention into the schooling of the people fostered a quasi-free market of education in which anybody could offer services and nobody was obliged to buy. Two parallel systems of state-assisted schooling, that controlled by the National School Board and that controlled by the Denominational School Board, competed with each other, though they were never intended to do so. They were also obliged to compete with private entrepreneurs, from the child-minding school serving the very poor, to the select ladies’ school serving the daughters of the colony’s governing class. Though the urge to acquire literacy was strong, especially in a migrant society, links between school attendance and life chances were weak. The emergence of a teaching profession under these ground rules has received little attention from historians of education. At mid-century, there was no profession of teaching, though there were people who taught at some time in their lives and in a variety of settings. With the 19th Century dream of a literate and schooled society, two conflicting discourses concerning the identity of the teacher began to emerge.11 The first derived from the traditional notion of the educated gentleman who could turn his hand to the business of ruling in a multitude of ways. Such men could only be enticed into school teaching by lateral recruitment, that is, by creating the administrative possibility of entry at the top, privileging literary qualifications over what came to be known as the ‘art of teaching’. The first generation of school inspectors and administrators were also ‘gentlemen’ with no necessary expertise in education. The second discourse imagined the teacher as a secular missionary figure, enculturated as a pupil-teacher within a closed system of teacher training; this notion elevated the ‘art
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of teaching’ over literary qualifications. This imagined teacher was a more recent invention and was sufficiently related to the agenda of the educational state to entice a new and more humble clientele into school. This in-house recruitment of child-teachers, minimally educated in the state system, was to triumph by the end of the century. These discourses concerning the teacher carried with them the differing social purposes which were present in the free market of the 1850s, and both were to have profound implications for the gender of teaching in the colony of Victoria. Lateral recruitment was the main source of teacher supply in the 1850s and 1860s. A witness before the Royal Commission of 1866, R.H. Budd, Inspector-General of Schools, looked back nostalgically upon the ‘large influx of educated men and women’ who came to Victoria during the gold rushes and ‘fell back upon the schools’.12 It is salutary to realise that in the first two decades of its existence, the Victorian teaching service had more highly educated, idiosyncratic and ungovernable teachers, male and female, than at any other time in its history. As late as the 1870s, inspectors were still remarking upon the leavening influence of these men and women, middle-class migrants willing to re-establish themselves in an occupation which they might not have considered at home. The inability of the two Boards to collaborate in the establishment of a training institution, the reluctance of young men and women to enrol, the proclivity of male graduates to enter other occupations, and the periodic cutbacks in expenditure suffered under successive regimes, forced into existence a ‘stop/start’ policy of teacher training which characterised Victoria throughout the 19th Century. Under these circumstances, lateral recruitment of teachers was forced upon both the Boards by the exigencies of crafting a profession out of whoever was to hand. Both Boards also recruited overseas. In 1853, with the Melbourne Model School nearing completion, Benjamin Kane, then secretary to the National School Board, sought the help of the Education Office in Dublin in the selection of Arthur and Ellen Davitt as master and mistress of the new Model and Training Institution at a combined salary of £700. The National School Board also recruited through E.C. Tufnell, Inspector of Schools to the Committee of Council on Education in England, and David Stow, founder of the Glasgow Normal Schools. Lateral recruitment of teachers was not only a pragmatic response to an urgent need for teachers, it was also an artifact of local control and therefore of social purpose. Before 1872, the local governing committees attached to each school had considerable influence over the
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hiring and firing of teachers, a prerogative Catholic Archbishop Goold regarded as not negotiable. For highly qualified teachers like Mary Jenvey there were considerable rewards in local alliances, as clergy, local committees and parents could (and did) map their own agendas onto government policy. This close interweaving of state, denominational and family strategies had implications for the staffing and curriculum of schools. Regardless of religious affiliation, differing expectations for daughters and sons could more easily be accommodated with local control. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish the state-assisted denominational school for girls, where highly educated women and visiting masters taught modern languages, music and art, from that most conspicuously successful player in the free market, the middle-class ladies’ academy. For the sake of their sons’ education, middle-class parents colluded with local committees to appoint teachers who could offer Latin, mathematics, the modern languages and commercial subjects. Dublin graduate Patrick Whyte, the archetypal lateral recruit into the service, argued before the Higinbotham commissioners in 1866 that these alliances frequently undercut denominational affiliations by which he meant Catholic affiliations.13 The most successful of these de facto State grammar schools were Whyte’s own Model School and the Geelong National Grammar School, the only government-funded ‘elementary’ school to exclude girls. The lucrative teaching of these ‘higher’ subjects was not codified until the Education Act of 1872, when the government sought to discourage the practice. Nevertheless, this pipeline from the state-funded elementary school into the civil service, the commercial houses of Melbourne, the university and the professions, has been largely overlooked in the historiography of Australian education. The differing social purposes which characterised educational provision in the 1850s and 1860s meant that teachers with eminently saleable skills operated within a market place which made the creation of an orderly teaching profession difficult. Educational boundaries were permeable in ways which became unthinkable later in the century. Professor Martin Howy Irving went from the University of Melbourne to Wesley College as headmaster, and later became ownerprincipal of the private Hawthorn Grammar School. He was offered, but declined, the permanent headship of the new Victorian Education Department when Benjamin Kane died a matter of weeks before taking up the position in January 1873. Accustomed as they were to more democratic educational provision, the Scots in early Melbourne were among the most mobile of the school masters. George Morrison went
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from Scotch College to the headship of Geelong National Grammar School and in 1861 established the Presbyterian Geelong College. As R.J.W. Selleck’s study of the Miller teaching family reveals, this game of musical chairs was accessible to less illustrious players, as teachers played the two Boards off against each other.14 ‘For sale’ notices for schools in receipt of public funding were not unknown and teachers moved freely between funded and private schools. Indeed, the National School Board, which became increasingly frustrated in its efforts to wean parents away from denominationalism, crossed the border between public and private provision when it began to tempt into its stable private entrepreneurs of high repute, including the Mattingleys of North Melbourne and the Templetons of Fitzroy. The state could not remove itself from this market place until it legislated for compulsory attendance in 1872. In the meantime, its schools were obliged to compete for teachers and clientele; this early pushing and shoving in the marketplace is basic to an understanding of the staffing policies which may be traced through the successive regimes. With some perspicacity, the educational State became convinced that in the absence of compulsion, attendance depended in large measure upon the quality of the individual school and the exertions of its head teacher. These understandings were reflected in the low base salaries and ‘flat’ professional structure of the service before 1872, with an elaborate superstructure of performance-based rewards which have been noted in the case of Mary Jenvey, and which rewarded the head disproportionately to the staff. Successive administrations refined the ‘star teacher’ system, begun in the 1850s with the lateral recruitment of the educated middle classes, into a system which set rural teacher against urban teacher, assistant teacher against head teacher, and female teacher against male teacher. The system also created an underclass of poorly paid and disaffected teachers, and an underclass of schools in which nobody wanted to teach. When in 1866 the Higinbotham commissioners circularised the rank and file of teachers about their preference for local or central control of their labour, they were almost unanimously in favour of the latter.15
Women teachers and moral responsibility As the career of Mary Jenvey suggests, in the same decades there were no regulations excluding women teachers from the rewards of the free market and government-subsidised entrepreneurship. The presence of
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women in the teaching force configured the institutions of government, education and gender in new and complex ways. Women’s traditional relationship with children was acknowledged for the first time in the public sphere; their teaching labour was embedded in an embryonic career structure and endowed with the status of waged labour. Yet at mid-century the institutions of gender remained patriarchal: married women had no rights to property, no separate existence before the law, and no rights to the custody of their own children. Women, married or single, had no rights to citizenship; indeed their exclusion from the democratic institutions called into existence in Australia in the 1850s further diminished their status in relation to men of their own social class. It is crucial to an understanding of women’s historic experience of teaching to appreciate that their labour entered the marketplace when the newly dominant middleclass culture of separate spheres articulated an understanding that a ‘lady’ did not work for a living. The employment of women signalled more than a sullen acceptance of the ‘lady teacher’ where no man could be found to fill the post. Victoria’s women teachers too were subject to the market forces which shaped the policies of the educational state, but they were positioned differently from men. The discourses which surrounded their presence in the schools at mid-century had little to say about their natural endowments as teachers or their availability as cheap labour. The educational state forged its alliance with women on other grounds entirely. The presence of women in classrooms was legitimated by a persistent discourse of moral danger, at odds with the official discourse which insisted that the state-funded elementary school was productive of public and private morality. Dissonance between women and the public sphere ensured that, throughout the 19th Century, there were more boys than girls in the state schools, even after compulsory attendance undermined parental choice.16 While sons might be committed to the rough-andtumble of the publicly funded school, daughters were a different matter. It was girls who were withdrawn at the slightest hint of moral transgression and moral transgression was routinely detected in the arrival of an unmarried male teacher.17 The lady teacher too had her market value and the educational state was obliged to purchase respectability through a female presence in its classrooms. The preference of colonial parents for the teaching family began early and it tapped into deeply held beliefs about the relationships between the sexes.
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The mutual colonisation of the educational state and the teaching family facilitated the transition of women’s teaching labour into the public domain and preserved the ‘as of right’ precedence of the husband over the wife. Parental preference for the teaching family explains why marriage, child-bearing and domestic duties were not at first constituted as incompatible with duties of the school teacher. Maternity leave was never codified, although in practice women were given confinement leave of three weeks on condition that they paid a substitute teacher. The lure of the aggregated family income, invisible in the official calculations of teachers’ incomes, made teaching more attractive in the 19th Century. The first report of the new Education Department, published in 1874, contained an appendix which listed staff by individual school.18 Of the 1113 schools listed, 275 were small schools staffed by a headmaster and sewing mistress of the same surname. A further 122 schools were staffed by a headmaster and a female assistant of the same surname. And a further 87 schools had pupilteachers of the same surname as the head or first assistant. This crude head count does not reveal other relationships among the staff, as for example at Walhalla where Henry and Lucy Tisdall were head and first assistant and two of Lucy’s sisters, Alice and Clara Weekes, were second assistant and pupil-teacher.19 The most successful of the family fiefdoms was the Rae family at Ironbark outside Bendigo where John Rae was headmaster, his wife Emily was first assistant, daughter Barbara was second assistant, son William was seventh assistant, and three other children – John, Alexander and Helen – were pupil-teachers. Their aggregated family income was over £1000, more than the sum required to lure the first professors of the University of Melbourne away from the universities of England and Ireland. John Rae also had extensive mining interests in the Bendigo district with his brother William.20 The most common teaching family was the head teacher and sewing mistress in the rural school, but the category ‘sewing mistress’ often disguised a fully qualified woman teaching with her husband in a school which did not reach the enrolment required to employ an assistant. Successive regimes manipulated this possibility when budget cuts were forced upon them. The practice was challenged in the early 1860s by Mrs Maria Forster who, with her Cambridge-educated husband George was typical of the highly educated middle-class teachers in the system at that time.21 She protested when her salary and status were reduced to that of sewing mistress, taking her case (of necessity, in the name of her husband) to the Supreme Court, where she lost on
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the technicality that the new Board of Education was not responsible for the debts of its predecessors. A parliamentary select committee eventually awarded her husband £150 in unpaid salary. As late as the 1880s the Education Department candidly defined the duties of the sewing mistress as ‘needlework and the rudimentary instruction of the younger classes’.22 At the other extreme from the teaching couples in the country schools were the much-envied husband and wife teams who held the two top positions in the larger urban schools – among them Patrick and Jane Whyte of the Model School, John and Anne Drake of Collingwood, and Edward and Harriet Rosenblum of Ballarat. These families were urban gentry with fine houses, servants, and children who did not follow their parents into the profession of teaching in the next generation. The same moral imperatives which favoured the teaching family in the country led parents to prefer separate departments for their daughters in urban centres. These separate departments were encouraged by the dual Boards which allowed their girls’ schools in middle-class areas to become female academies in all but name. Under the patronage of the Denominational School Board and the Church of England, Mrs Tabitha Pike ran the St James’ Girls’ School as a de facto ladies’ academy for nearly 20 years, advertising music, painting and modern languages in her regular press advertisements. One witness before the Higinbotham Commission testified that Pike had ‘sixty to seventy young ladies who pay highly and provide their own masters, for accomplishments’, among them the daughter of the Church of England Dean Macartney.23 Many separate girls’ departments fell far short of Tabitha Pike’s school. Often the girls were simply taught in a different room, or divided from the boys by a curtain. The crucial point is that, as was the case at St Mark’s in Fitzroy, the senior woman in the girls’ department was accorded the status of head teacher and access to the entrepreneurial possibilities of the state-assisted school. Although its own regulations were silent on the matter, the Board of Education, which replaced the dual Boards in 1862, began to amalgamate these separate departments on the grounds of economy and ‘rational’ school organisation. Upon each amalgamation the Board demoted the female head to first assistant with considerable loss of salary, status and autonomy. Contestation around the issue of co-education underscores the problematical nature of gender for the educational state. There is evidence that where departments were amalgamated, parents removed their daughters altogether, often accompanied by the teacher who began her own private school nearby.24
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Acceptance of employment in schools under these conditions placed the woman teacher in an ambiguous position. The free market of education before 1872 shaped an elite of teaching matriarchs, respected by parents and inspectors alike, who were accustomed to wielding power. But it was power embedded in a melodrama of sexual danger. Their own accounting of this power, of their efficacy as technicians in the schoolroom, was implicated in this melodrama of sexual danger. In the records of the educational state, lady teachers like Mary Jenvey were often to be found staking a claim to a superior moral authority by virtue of their sex. They became adept at aggregating into moral pollution the smallest sexual transactions between boys and girls, and between male staff and female students, which they imagined they saw around them. They soon learned to hijack the elaborate technology of moral regulation which underpinned the school as an institution. Their target was nothing less than the opaque privilege of male sexuality itself, a form of sexual politics which anticipated the suffrage campaigns later in the century. Women teachers as willing agents of moral regulation have proved conceptually uncomfortable for feminist historians, who have deplored the oppressive structures which regulated their labour but ignored the professional selves which were shaped by those structures.
The Education Acts and government intervention Explanations for the political demise of the Board of Education and its replacement by the Victorian Education Department have been thoroughly canvassed, though these explanations usually focus upon the constitutional and religious settlement achieved by the 1872 Act. The Board itself had hoped for a resolution to the constitutional basis of public education after the Higinbotham Royal Commission, but this was not to be. Like the dual Boards before it, the Board of Education had been obliged to struggle on in a constant state of uncertainty until the knockout blow came in 1872. More important in the present context is the failure of the quasi-free market to provide an adequate system of schools for the people or a teaching service equal to the task. The Victorian Education Act of 1872 and its counterparts in the other states are acknowledged as the most radical reconfiguration of government, church and education in Australian history, yet the implications for the profession of teaching have remained largely unexplored.25 The Act reflected a hardening of social attitudes around state-funded education. On the one hand, it destroyed by default state
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funding of secondary education (there was no provision for state high schools); on the other hand, the compulsory clause swept into the schools thousands of children who had hitherto attended spasmodically or not at all. At the Model School, Patrick Whyte had to assure his middle-class clientele that they were still entitled to send their children. The Victorian Education Department, which was also created by the Act of 1872, came into existence burdened with potentially incompatible staffing imperatives. The need for greater control over recruitment, training and dispersal of its teachers had crystallised from the Common Schools experience of local control. Private and church provision of schools remained unregulated (though henceforth unfunded), but the compulsory attendance of children and the abolition of fees undermined alliances between teachers and parents at the grassroots level. The destruction of local control under the 1872 Act also gave the central authority control over its teachers for the first time. Yet at the same time the Education Department was most insistent upon the need to foster a psychology of professionalism among its teachers. Official discourse abruptly abandoned the entrepreneur superstar and began to speak of disinterested public service and professionalism. In the debates surrounding the Act, teachers, when they were remembered at all, were promised status as public servants, an orderly system of promotion, and retiring allowances. The humble and obedient servant of the state was also to be ‘professional man’. The contradictions inherent in these regulatory and professionalising agendas were complicated by two further factors. The first was the hypocrisy of the legislature through successive Ministries which proclaimed the virtues of mass education, yet begrudged every penny to a Department charged with bringing free education to children in every corner of the colony. The second factor was the incompatibility between the masculine project of professionalisation and the gender of teaching. The Victorian Education Department was the first administration to understand, at the level of policy implementation, that in the buoyant economy of colonial Victoria the generality of men would not consider school teaching as an attractive career. This was a pivotal moment in the institution of teaching. The 1872 Act had effectively dismantled the entrepreneurial basis of teaching at precisely the moment when mandatory attendance fuelled a voracious need for teachers. John Rae of Ironbark went before a Royal Commission in 1883 to complain that the bottom had dropped out of teaching.26 He was obliged to take in urchins who could not read and write at ten years of age, a
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fine new state school built in the neighbourhood had stolen his clientele, his income had dropped dramatically, and he had sent his sons into other occupations. For the last quarter of the 19th Century the Department’s dealings with its female teachers must be read in mirror image, for they reflect the struggle to recruit and reproduce a male teaching elite which was to preside over an underclass of female teaching labour enmeshed in the iron law of supply and demand. The experiences of teachers in the chaotic 1870s, as the system of state-assisted denominational schools was finally dismembered, has been largely overshadowed by the constitutional and religious settlements effected by the Act. Catholic lay teachers faced the difficult decision to go into the new state system or continue teaching in their own schools on the pittance which the church could now afford to pay. In due course those who did remain were replaced by the female religious who developed a women-controlled and decentralised system of parochial schools in the decades when the state system was moving in the other direction on both counts. Proprietors of private schools were affected in ambiguous ways. Those catering for working-class families could no longer compete with free state schooling; female schools catering for middle-class families forged new alliances with parents who would not countenance their daughters mixing with working-class children in school. By the end of the century, the movement of teachers between the sectors that had characterised the free market of the 1850s was minimal. In 1873, the Department began to implement its professionalising agenda with a revised system of teacher classification, which was little more than a modification of the flat, two-tier system under the Board of Education. More pressing was the decision that had to be made about salaries. As the fees abolished by the 1872 Act had been a major component of salaries since the 1850s, the Department was obliged to devise a new basis for the remuneration of teachers. In place of the previous flat base salary with its superstructure of rewards, the Department stretched the salary scale vertically, with a salary starting at £80 for heads of the smallest country schools to £380 for heads of schools with an enrolment of over 1000 children. Similar salary scales were implemented for assistants, a policy decision which narrowed the gap between assistants and heads. Thus the principal of payment by numbers remained, though the ‘farming’ of fees was no longer possible. Promotion in practice became the scramble for an appointment in a larger school, exacerbated by the fact that political patronage in appointments was rife. Teachers had other reasons to be disillusioned
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under the new regime, as the promises held out to them – an orderly promotion system, retiring allowances and status as public servants – did not eventuate. The hated policy of payment by results was retained, yet payment for honours was discontinued. Women teachers had additional reasons to be disillusioned. They were to receive four-fifths of the male rate; that is, a salary differential which had become naturalised since the 1850s was now official policy. Certificated first female assistants were the only women to be paid equally with men – unless they were teaching in their husband’s schools and this was in compensation for the fact that the 1875 regulations delivered the coup de grace to separate female departments. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the decision, both in the professional lives of women teachers, and in pushing middle-class daughters out of the state system. In New South Wales, by contrast, separate boys’ and girls’ schools were retained until the 1960s. However, it was not until the 1880s that the full consequences for women teachers of this re-alignment between state, education and gender became fully apparent. The first review of the system ushered in by the 1872 Act was the Rogers Templeton Royal Commission appointed in 1881.27 With respect to teachers, its main focus was political patronage in appointments and promotions, and the reconstitution of elementary school teachers as public servants free from political patronage was a major recommendation of its report. The minutes of evidence are also a digest of anxieties around gender at a crucial point in the evolution of the profession. Of the 86 witnesses called, 37 were male teachers (mostly heads) and nine were female. Mrs Jenvey was one of the few witnesses to give testimony at both the Higinbotham and Rogers Templeton Commissions.28 She complained that under the new regulations she had been demoted as head at St Mark’s, then transferred as first assistant into the new state system. She was still defending single-sex schooling. Her testimony, together with that of Mrs Jane Whyte, now demoted to first assistant at the Model School, revealed that in selected prestigious schools powerful teachers and parents had resisted the Departments’ edict that the sexes should be taught together. The male witnesses by no means betrayed their female colleagues; on the contrary, most were generous in their praise and many had teaching wives. But questioners and witnesses alike positioned the lady teacher within certain discourses of gender relations and the female mind and body.29 Women lacked ‘that robust spirit’ to teach the older boys. They were especially suited to teach the younger children,
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an ideological notion which was to be institutionalised by the development of infant departments and specialist qualifications in the next decades. Women should not be set in authority over men as head teachers. Their monopoly of first assistantships, achieved as compensation for the loss of headships, was called into question. There was a dense interweaving of anxieties around the person of the married female teacher. Ominously, the commissioners called for a list of married women employed in schools that showed the occupations of their husbands. Head teacher, John Sergeant, had a particular objection to female first assistants who were married to heads of large schools: ‘The lady teacher, his wife, visits the school, that is all it can be called, and draws a salary of £300, I think it is depriving the State of money that is not earned.’ Inspector Ross Cox drew attention to ‘objectionable cases where married ladies have to retire at intervals of twelve or fifteen months constantly’. Their presence in a mixed school was ‘really not nice’, though he did not see why women should be debarred on that account. Only one witness considered the consequences for the married women themselves of the double load which they carried (‘They have to get breakfast before they go in the morning, and when they get home they have to make baby clothes and so on’), and this was to be used against them by the commissioners. F.A. Nell of Carlton testified that ‘a married lady in a school has a very beneficial influence’, no doubt out of respect for his first assistant Mary Jenvey. It was also an oblique reference to the fact that heads were loath to ask single women to deal with cases of discipline involving sexual matters. At the other extreme was the head teacher who believed that ‘when a female teacher married she should leave the school’. The Rogers Templeton commissioners made their recommendations regarding the employment of women teachers in their third report. For younger children, women were ‘more fitted’ and older girls should be taught by women in separate classes. The married woman teacher was officially called into question for the first time, especially ‘wives of men without occupation or of men in various occupations altogether outside the profession of teaching’. If married women were to be employed at all, it should be only when their husbands were teachers in the same school and only when they were not engaged in the ‘performance of household duties’. These understandings were absent from the deliberations of the Higinbotham Commission 16 years earlier. With James Service as both Premier and Minister of Public Instruction, the recommendation of the commissioners to
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reconstitute the school teacher as a public servant under the Public Service Board was quickly translated into legislation by the Public Service Act of 1883. Though this was a key strategy in the recruitment and retention of men in the service, the state had also constituted 2351 women as public servants, where they joined a small number of postmistresses, telegraphists and female warders in gaols and reformatories. The teachers were at first jubilant about their new status, for it was the intention of the Act to create a structure of classification, promotion and transfer based on seniority, literary qualifications and merit. A committee of classifiers was created to oversee the creation of five classes of schools with five corresponding classes of teachers placed in order of precedence for promotion on a classified roll. Literary qualifications were once again tied to promotion: the head teacher of a firstclass school must be certificated and classified in first-class honours or hold a university degree, and so on down to the head of a fifth-class (country) school who need only be licensed to teach. All appointments, promotions and transfers were under the control of the Public Service Board and teachers had the right of appeal. Salaries were to be modelled on the salary scales and yearly increments in the other departments of the public service. The four-fifths male:female salary ratio was preserved. All teachers, male and female, had cause to be disturbed by the first classified roll when it appeared in 1885, but women teachers had special cause to feel betrayed.30 For the first time they were barred from the headships of any but the smallest country schools. They were excluded from the first class of teachers altogether; the most highly qualified women were now clustered in the second class – 25 women of whom 15 were married and many of whom had been heads of girls’ departments until 1875. Their exclusion from the first class lasted until the 1940s. Without explanation there were only six places allotted for women in the third class (there were 132 for men) and this constituted an almost insuperable block to promotion for the 82 women in the fourth class. By far the largest group of women – that is, 780 were classified in fifth class and their chances of promotion were remote. Over the next four decades the absence of any statutory ratio between the five classes allowed the fifth class to expand to the point were the very notion of orderly promotion was farcical. It quickly became apparent to the women that the ‘shape’ of their new career structure created by the roll of 1885 reflected understandings of the woman teacher as ‘not professional’; she would be transient, moving
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out upon marriage, or content to serve for a lifetime on a salary tailored to a beginner who would rise through the system. There was one further act of betrayal in the scheme of 1885. A further 240 women, many of them classified before the 1883 Act, were placed in a newly created division beneath the fifth class and designated ‘junior assistants’, with no rights at all to promotion or yearly increments. This crude attempt to force single women out into bush schools where they could be classified in the fifth class was the subject of a successful legal challenge by Mary Stark, backed by the Victorian Lady Teachers’ Association in the ensuing years.31 The gendered teaching force created by the legislation of 1872 and 1883 required one further refinement, and this was not long in coming. Without any public discussion of the matter, clause 14 of the Public Service Amendment Act of 1889 provided that ‘no married woman shall be eligible for appointment to any office in the public service … [and] … every woman employed in the public service who married after the passing of the Act shall immediately upon her marriage retire’. The clause safeguarded retiring allowances to which the women were entitled, and it specifically exempted sewing mistresses, and women employed in gaols, asylums and reformatory institutions. In a series of bitterly contested manoeuvres during the economic recession of the 1890s, even those married women whose rights to continued employment had been safeguarded by the amendment of 1889 were also dismissed from the service.32 Married women did not regain full access to the state service until the Teaching Service (Married Women) Act of 1956.33 In the intervening years the Department’s dealings with married women were duplicitous in the extreme. They were ruthlessly exploited as temporary teachers where nobody else could be found to fill the position; indeed the words ‘temporary teacher’ may be read as a code for ‘married woman’. Donna Dwyer’s study of Mrs Grace Neven and her ‘lonely and itinerant career … through thirty-seven years and forty-eight schools’, captures the human cost to women desperate for a livelihood but denied the right to tenure.34 For the majority of young women entering the teaching profession in the 70 years that separate the two Acts that took away and restored the rights of married women, the Department had installed a revolving door. Women’s teaching labour rested on a wide base of young and transient women with a vertical core of single women for whom the ultimate professional prize was the infant room. These administratively created certainties shaped the lives and subjectivities of male and female teachers until the 1960s.
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Conclusion: women’s experiences of teaching Politics in the 1990s around the marketplace and educational institutions which are the starting point for this book can mutually inform our understanding of women’s experiences of teaching in the past. As the lives of the women in this study testify, there are gains and losses for teachers in educational institutions underpinned by notions of the free market and entrepreneurship. There are also winners and losers in educational institutions underpinned by ideologies of statism, centralism and bureaucracy, and controlled by the masculine collectivities of the education department, teacher unions and the public service. Though the education ‘market’ in which Mary Jenvey flourished in the 1860s came to an end with the legislation of 1872, after that time the state assembled its own market for teaching labour, imposing the marriage bar upon women and constituting men as a scarce resource. This left women vulnerable to exploitation in ways which I have developed in this chapter. For women then, the market for teaching labour may operate independently of markets for educational services, regulated or deregulated. It is also apparent that the institutions of gender have a life of their own, cutting across the apparent objectivity and rationality of both the market place and more bureaucratic forms of governance. Women teachers’ experience of marriage, family, child-bearing and child-raising varies historically with decisions made by men, whose emotional and material stake in the domestic labour of women is seldom acknowledged. Thus women teachers do not encounter the institutions of education and gender as stand-alone systems free of context, but as networks of relationships (family, community, fellow teachers, administrators). These relationships are differently configured, indeed abruptly reconfigured, along the fault lines of legislation and administrative decisions. This very uncertainty creates the space for teachers to contest agendas imposed from above, though women seldom do so from a position of strength. Historically, women have been undeterred in their determination to colonise the shifting structures of the teaching profession. Despite the best efforts of successive administrations to masculinise the profession, women remain numerically dominant today. Their response to the marketisation of education in the 1990s is not yet on the record.
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Notes 1. Details of the Jenvey case are from Victorian Public Record Series (VPRS) 892, No.37 and Jenvey’s record of service (held by the Directorate of School Education), unless otherwise indicated. 2. The estimation of Jenvey as one of the best teachers in the state is from her record of service; the quotation from Kane is from VPRS 892, No.37, 1866/13336. 3. Victorian Parliamentary Papers (VPP) 1867, (hereafter Higinbotham Commission). 4. VPRS 892, No.37, 26 Oct. 1866, Jenvey to Kane, 26 Oct. 1866. 5. VPRS 892, No.37, 67/336, 8 Jan. 1867, Maria Watts to local committee. 6. Higinbotham Commission, Minutes of Evidence, p.287. 7. See, for example, M. Theobald, ‘Agnes Grant’ in R.J.W. Selleck & M. Sullivan (eds), Not so eminent Victorians, Melbourne University Press, 1984. 8. Higinbotham Commission, Minutes of Evidence, p.285. 9. Ibid, p.284. 10. A.G. Austin, Australian education 1788–1900: Church, state and public education in colonial Australia, Pitman, Melbourne, 1961. 11. I have developed this argument more fully in M. Theobald, Knowing women: Origins of women’s education in nineteenth-century Australia, Cambridge, Melbourne, 1996, ch.5. 12. Higinbotham Commission, Minutes of Evidence, R.H. Budd, pp.110–36. 13. Ibid, Patrick Whyte, pp.254–68. 14. R.J.W. Selleck, ‘A goldfields family’ in M. Theobald & R.J.W. Selleck (eds), Family, school and state in Australian history, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990. 15. Victorian Public Record Series (VPRS) 915, Board of Education, Manuscript Records of Higinbotham Royal Commission, replies to teachers’ questionnaire. 16. Statistics available in VPP, Reports of the Minister of Public Instruction, published annually. 17. Evidence taken from VPRS 892, special case files of the Victorian Education Department and its predecessors. 18. VPP 1874, Report of the Minister of Public Instruction, 1873–74, Appendix 1, pp.1–89. 19. Judith Biddington, ‘The Weekes family’ in R.J.W. Selleck & M. Sullivan (eds), Not so eminent Victorians, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1984. 20. M. Theobald, Knowing women, p.142.
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21. VPP 1867, ‘Report … on Mr G.M. Forster’s Case’; VPRS 892, No.14; teacher record of Maria Forster, Directorate of School Education (DSE) Archives. 22. VPP 1886, Report of the Minister of Public Instruction, 1885, p.x. 23. Higinbotham Commission Minutes of Evidence, pp.112 & 212; teacher record of Tabitha Pike, DSE Archives. 24. This point is developed in M. Theobald, ‘Women’s teaching labour, the family and the state in nineteenth-century Victoria’ in M. Theobald and R.J.W. Selleck (eds), Family, school and state. 25. Denis Grundy, ‘Secular, compulsory and free’: the Education Act of 1872, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1972. 26. Theobald, Knowing women, p.149. 27. VPP 1882–84, Commission Appointed to Enquire into and Report Upon the … System of Public Instruction, 1882–84 (Rogers Templeton Commission). 28. Rogers Templeton Commission, Minutes of Evidence, pp.316–17. 29. For a digest of their views see Ibid, p.xii. 30. Victorian Government Gazette (VGG), No.1, 1 January 1885, pp.1–98. 31. R.J.W. Selleck, ‘Mary Helena Stark: The troubles of a nineteenth-century state school teacher’, in A. Prentice and M. Theobald (eds), Women who taught: Perspectives on the history of women and teaching, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1991. 32. Lesley Scholes, ‘Education and the women’s movement in Victoria, 1875–1914’, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1984. 33. A close reading of this Act reveals that right of re-entry was still qualified. 34. Donna Dwyer, ‘Good and mad women (teachers): The case of Grace Neven’ in Melbourne Studies in Education, Vol.29, No.1, 1995.
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8 The social and organisational renorming of education LAWRENCE ANGUS AND TERRI SEDDON
Australian education is being reshaped. It could be said to being renormed. The institutional ‘rules’ that shape education, its relations, practices and centres of power, are being restructured and re-articulated in complex ways. Of particular importance in the process of renorming has been government intervention in the reshaping of the regulatory mechanisms of educational governance and provision. In this chapter we examine current government policy interventions in two sectors of education. In our analysis we consider government as a designer, or more correctly a redesigner, of education as an institution. We indicate ways in which particular policy interventions represent purposive strategies of educational change. Firstly, we briefly locate current policy in the contemporary rupturing of previous patterns of educational practice. While these had long been contested, both within and without the educational sphere, they had been strongly asserted and mainly accepted as legitimate within mainstream educational thinking, at least until the mid-1980s. By establishing the comparison, we make problematic some key assumptions that underpin current patterns of educational change. Secondly, we draw upon ethnographic research, conducted mainly in a secondary school and an Institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Victoria, in order to illustrate ways in which government policy interventions are experienced and worked through in sites of 151
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educational practice. Seventeen school participants and 27 TAFE participants were interviewed, some on several occasions. Our data indicate that processes of renorming, and of living in and through institutional redesign, are extraordinarily complex. We reveal serious problems and tensions in the design of education that the policies imply. Finally, we reflect on the perspectives and experience of education participants, as we have been able to interpret and make sense of them, in order to tease out the implications, for future redesign, of current reshaping of education as an institution.
Governments as educational redesigners Our focus is specifically on State Government intervention in school education in Victoria through the introduction of the policy of Schools of the Future in 1993, and on Commonwealth Government intervention in the conceptualisation of education generally, and TAFE in particular, through promotion of the National Training Reform Agenda (NTRA) from the late 1980s. Empirically, our emphasis is on the perceptions of organisation participants of the factors that are shaping their working lives and their struggles over visions of education. Such struggle is manifest in discourses and strategic actions in such a way that all institutional participants – not just governments – must to some extent be regarded as institutional designers. Education policy typically incorporates particular educational values and beliefs about the nature and purpose of education, which policy designers either assume to be normative or intend to become normative. For example, the expectation that issues of equity and educational access would be important in the planning of educational provision and distribution became strongly incorporated into policy rhetoric (although not always into practice) in the decades after World War II (Angus, 1986; Bennett, 1982). Although reform of education in the name of social justice was limited (Connell, 1995), the acceptance in principle of such a normative stance was indicative of the assumed will of government, educators and society generally to promote and realise the vision of a more equitable society (Bennett, 1982; Kogan, 1979). The principle of government extending educational opportunities was strongly accepted by the 1970s as part of its social and economic responsibility. Policy convergence on this point between the major
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political parties was such that in Labor Government platforms, federally in the 1970s and in Victoria most strongly in the early 1980s, the incorporation of an emphasis on social justice in education policy was not regarded as exceptional. Apart from their focus on teaching, learning and curriculum, what such policies had in common was an emphasis on policy-makers working collaboratively with teachers, persuading them to change through professional development programs, and regarding them as essential resources in promoting educational and social change that was intended to enhance the social capacities of students. The rhetoric was an educational rhetoric and the discourse was largely dialogical. Increasingly during the decade of the 1980s, however, education policy became much more coercive (Watkins, 1992). A new kind of educational policy convergence, in which issues of social justice became more problematic and peripheral to the main education agenda, emerged between the major political parties. The new agenda has become increasingly characterised by economic rationalism and New Right thinking (Pusey, 1991; Marginson, 1993).
Policy interventions in schools and TAFE As part of recent reforms, teachers, who relatively successfully asserted progressive educational values during the 1970s and early 1980s, have become subject to new demands and controls. The previous policy emphasis on teacher-oriented issues of teaching, learning and curriculum now seems to have been largely replaced by a more indirect reform strategy in which the practices of organising educational work are being manipulated. Funding, outcome measures, policy targets, industrial relations and management have become the new levers for change. These do not impinge immediately on the face-to-face work of teaching and learning, but they shape the institutional context in which such work proceeds (Seddon, 1994). The effect is that changed management requirements, funding arrangements and the like, redefine the relationships, and the practical parameters and constraints, of educators’ work. Such reshaping is played out somewhat differently in different social and historical contexts. We draw on a school site and a TAFE site in order to illustrate ways in which different traditions and institutional inheritances shape the process and politics of educational reshaping.
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Reshaping schools Current attempts to redesign education need to be considered in relation to the design that is being revised, reshaped and renormed. Grandridge Secondary College is in many respects an exemplar of the institutionalisation of educational reforms of the 1970s and 1980s. It can be seen as a case of the seemingly successful assertion of the norms and practices that were embodied by reformist teachers to challenge the education bureaucracy. Staff at Grandridge became known as advocates of social justice and student-centred curricula and pedagogy. By all accounts, despite conflicts, teachers worked towards the realisation by the end of the 1980s of multiple elements of the ‘progressive’ educational movement that many teachers had been asserting since the 1960s in Victoria and Australia generally. Jack Regan maintains that when he was appointed principal of Grandridge in 1987 the greatest asset he had to work with was the staff, especially a core of innovative teachers who had pushed the development of progressive curriculum over a considerable period of time. Teachers at the school had developed a tradition of educational innovation and a willingness to be at the cutting edge of educational debates. In Victoria, a measure of the contribution of educators like those at Grandridge to the policy process is that, in the early to mid-1980s, teachers were to a large extent regarded as co-participants with government in the work of educational innovation and change. Such involvement was not achieved easily but was an outcome of contestation throughout the 1960s and 1970s in which teachers, teacher unions and educational organisations asserted their professional status (Preston, 1994). Their advocacy of educational issues and agendas encouraged more consultative relationships between teachers and education departments as departmental officials, many of whom came from the teaching force, began to respond to the educational agenda being promoted from the chalkface. The extent of the education profession’s inclusion in educational governance is perhaps most starkly demonstrated by a series of six Victorian Ministerial Papers (Victoria: Minister of Education 1985) published in the early 1980s. These statements of policy were intended to support collaborative practices among managers and teachers, and also parents and students. There was an explicit emphasis on ‘a process of participative, collaborative decision-making’ within a
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‘responsive bureaucracy’ (Victoria: Minister of Education 1985, p.5). Such commitments to democratic and collegial practices began to erode, however, during the second half of the 1980s as government educational policy increasingly incorporated the rhetoric and principles of corporate management (Bessant, 1988; Angus & Rizvi, 1989; Victoria: Ministry of Education, 1987). By the mid- to late 1990s, the fluid educational climate of the previous decade had congealed around particular norms and their proponents. Against an institutional background in which many teachers were involved as activists, Schools of the Future policy introduced by the Kennett Government in 1993 was interpreted and received overwhelmingly negatively by teachers at Grandridge Secondary College. For them, the policy signalled a return to antagonistic dialogue between the main parties concerned with education. The approach to educational governance in Victoria (and elsewhere) no longer accepts that inputs from constituent groups are legitimate. The new approach is decisional – not dialogical or participative. It emphasises management decisions. Within the approach, blueprints for education are largely designed by ‘experts’ according to economic criteria and standards of economic efficiency and effectiveness. Significantly, the teachers who once contested paternalistic bureaucracy and challenged the power of technical and political elites in the name of educational progress and professionalism, are now likely to be excluded from educational decision-making because they are regarded as vested interests. This point was made perfectly clear by the former leader of the Victorian Liberal Party, Alan Brown, when he stated unequivocally prior to the 1992 Election that: Left-wing advocates of progressive education have captured the curriculum with the aim of using it to restructure society according to their socialist ideals ... In contrast, the Coalition acknowledges that education must promote the common beliefs, values and knowledge on which our society is based. (Gaff, 1999)
At Grandridge, education policy during the 1990s was experienced by teachers as the effects of funding cuts, and was seen largely as State Government imposition. The result among teachers is a general perception that spaces for autonomous institutional organisation have narrowed as a new institutional design, to which they do not feel they have contributed, is imposed in a system-changing manner in an attempt to moderate the older, largely teacher-asserted design. In other words, beyond the effects of the cuts on their conditions of work,
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the design of education associated with State Government policy has been largely interpreted by teachers at Grandridge as being of an ideological kind that is anti the kind of design that many of them had previously perceived themselves to be advancing. The progressive educational agenda that had been asserted within education until the mid-1980s by education workers was represented in the 1990s as radical. Its proponents, particularly the teacher unions, from the perspective of the Kennett Government were a blight on education not only because they were allegedly responsible for ‘unacceptable’ levels of educational expenditure through ‘cosy’ industrial deals, but also because they and other educationalists were accused of having pursued a radical, ideological agenda. It was argued by the incoming Victorian Liberal–National Government in October 1992 that education was riddled with inefficiencies and would have to be restructured. The slashing of educational infrastructure, which was justified by a rhetoric of eliminating bureaucratic waste and inefficiency, seems symbolically as well as materially important in the education design that was asserted by successive Kennett Governments during most of the 1990s. Schools of the Future policy emphasised local school management within a centrally imposed framework. The language and terminology of the policy initiatives are quite striking. There is little if any reference to educational processes, pedagogy, teaching or learning styles, or relations between students and teachers. Terms such as ‘marketing’, ‘accountability’, ‘outcomes’, ‘efficiency’, ‘appraisal’ and ‘competitiveness’, however, which teachers concerned with educational values often find quite alien, are used freely in the policy documents and supporting materials. Jack Regan, principal of Grandridge Secondary College, sees himself as a realist who keeps abreast of changes of policy and is willing to change in response. With the overall aim of improving the school’s capacity to compete with its neighbours, he is on the lookout for opportunities that might bring extra students or resources to the school. But Schools of the Future policy is not just about market competition. It also centralises control and extends accountability over teachers and managers. Rather than fostering teamwork, according to our evidence, the policy has extended interpersonal competition within the school and created increased divisions and antagonism. The policy documents make it very clear that principals are expected to manage. One of the first duties given to them after the election of the Kennett Government in 1992 was to nominate their ‘least effective’
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teachers who were then declared ‘in excess’. The workloads of principals have increased dramatically (Cooperative Research Project Steering Committee, 1996). Budget cuts have also meant increased teacher workloads, which, many fear, directly affect the type of learning experiences they are able to provide their students. Many teachers are particularly worried about disadvantaged students, but their capacities to act on their concerns are influenced by fears that some staff might still be declared ‘in excess’ if enrolments do not hold up. Regan has used this general concern as a weapon in controlling union activists within the school. He reported that he told a union delegation: ‘Look, I’ve got a contract. If they go on strike and upset the enrolments and things, who looses? Not me. I might lose emotionally, but you’re going to cost them their jobs, by talking down the school and all that sort of stuff’. So really the union’s looking for a weapon and they’re knocking themselves off.
Many teachers said they perceived a change Regan’s style. They said he had previously established himself as a participative and democratic manager as he worked with the staff as a whole to establish the school’s fine reputation. Some staff, including some new to the school, had in recent years become quite hostile towards him. However, even the most trenchant critics of Regan’s allegedly managerial and autocratic style since Grandridge joined Schools of the Future tend to concede that he had been pushed into this position by the current circumstances. One of his management colleagues put the following view: He’s a very humane person. He’s forgiven for his mistakes [laughs] whereas some other people aren’t. ... He’s built up lots of credits.
Regardless of much staff sympathy for Jack Regan in his difficult position, he was increasingly being seen as – reluctantly or otherwise – accepting a line-management relationship with the Department of Education, which was seen as having been captured by government. In a sense, he was seen as the Government’s person on the spot. Under the policy, Regan and other members of the principal class switched from tenured positions to individually negotiated contracts that allow for salary packages. The contracts set out severe limitations on their freedom to comment on government policy. Such conditions reinforce the point that the principal class is different. One teacher, a supporter of Regan, said:
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One member of the principal class at Grandridge, who had previously been a well-respected teacher unionist, felt keenly the sense of being on a different side to her former colleagues. She felt she had been forced to make a difficult choice, and attempted to explain her position to her former union comrades: I don’t go on strike any more. I went to the branch meeting and explained that it was a painful and difficult decision for me to make, and I felt I owed it to my comrades to tell them why. I mean there’s this feeling that there is a distinction because of the contracts and the differences in pay and all that sort of stuff.
The comrades were not impressed. The response of one underlines the extent to which there are now different ‘sides’, and that ‘choosing’ to change sides can be regarded as a sellout: She just came out and said, ‘Well, I’m not going to support any union. I’m not going to go on strike, etcetera, etcetera. This is a new order’... I got up and said that, you know, your history is quite irrelevant when you’re a unionist. What is relevant is your present actions and they should be a reflection of your history, and that you’re only as good as the last time you supported the industrial action of the union, and that I’d heard a lot of people say that they’d been a unionist for 20 years and that is generally a precursor for saying that they don’t go on strike now and that they can do all sorts of appalling things to undermine people who do.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the increasing sense of emergence of different sides at Grandridge, as we have interpreted the data, is the feeling among teaching staff that what is valued in the work of teachers has changed. A number of teachers perceive that recent, controversial internal promotions indicate the changed priorities: It’s the ‘bean counters’ largely who have been the ones who have been promoted into the middle-management positions. The middle management here is typical I think of the attitudes that have been promoted. That is that they are the most important people around. That they have almost no interest in curriculum at all ... because your curriculum output is not something that measures you as a success [any more]. It’s your sort of ability to be able to do administrative tasks, like for example, working a computer, being able to do rolls or to be able to do a timetable.
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Reshaping TAFE The National Training Reform Agenda (NTRA) emerged in a series of steps from about the mid-1980s. These included responses from Australian politicians and economists to the emerging deregulation of international markets, and various reports which unfavourably compared the productivity of Australian industry with that of Japan and several European and Scandinavian countries. The Deputy Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Employment Education and Training during the period 1988–93, Dr Neil Johnston, defines the NTRA as follows: ‘The Training Reform Agenda is aimed at creating a more diverse and responsive training system while maintaining sufficient regulation to ensure nationally consistent, quality training and skills recognition arrangements’ (Smith 1996, p.5). As Smith points out, ‘industry’ and its ‘needs’ are the key concerns of virtually all NTRA documents (p.59). There has been a clear sense that the reform process should be owned and driven by industry. The effects of the NTRA are felt particularly strongly in TAFE, but its influence on teachers’ practice is in many respects indirect rather than direct. For example, its aim of implementing national standards of competency exposes teachers to external forms of accountability. Likewise, the development of standard sets of materials for use on a national basis would seem to impinge on the traditional core of teacher professionalism: curriculum and pedagogy. It is perhaps for this reason that TAFE teachers have tended to respond to the NTRA largely in terms of its emphasis on competency-based curriculum and testing. The ethos of contractualism that we argued was becoming apparent at Grandridge Secondary College was already well established at Streeton Institute. Indeed, as the previous policy orientation towards devolution through ‘responsive bureaucracy’ and ‘inclusive’ government practice began to be questioned within the Victorian primary and secondary education sectors in the late 1980s, TAFE, after about 1987, began a rapid transition to contractual staff arrangements and fee-for-service course delivery. In a move that strategically advantaged the TAFE education sector, the growing market emphasis shifted attention onto vocational outcomes. And because TAFE had always cultivated close relationships with industry (Rushbrook, 1995), it was generally more willing and able than the school sector to serve perceived industry needs and implement policies and administrative procedures that incorporated the kind of contractualist principles that
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were characteristic of industry throughout the 1980s. Managers at Streeton and many strategically placed staff have generally welcomed the NTRA’s industry focus. The Director, Barry Klein, emphasises that Streeton is an industry player and that ‘the business of TAFE is business’. He has reportedly told his Divisional Directors: ‘If the bottom line is working, I’m very happy with your performance.’ Klein is uncomfortable with the label of educationalist and with educational discourse. He regards all that as ‘too academic’. He is much happier talking about training, which he clearly regards as a different, more practical and more worldly business than education. He refers to Streeton as a ‘firm’ which, like any private company, must first and foremost ‘protect its bottom line’. In departments identified by Klein as successful there was no shortage of people who spoke with passion and excitement about commercial activities. For example, the Director of one of the Institute’s Divisions, who was once a trade teacher in a technical high school, was revelling in the exciting new entrepreneurial era: I’m currently managing two projects [in Southeast Asia] ... One, New South Wales TAFE couldn’t deliver so we delivered within three days and had someone on the ground up there and won the contract ... With the other project that I’m running, it’s a green fields site; there’s no plant there at the moment, just some training rooms and offices ... We prepared and wrote the resource material from scratch for 320 hours of training by four, in three weeks ... Then we delivered for a month. It’s now all been translated and we go up there to deliver for three more months ... Magic projects! The demands on the College were just incredible and we just [snaps his fingers] did it.
TAFE’s tradition of seeking sectoral legitimacy and identity through its claimed ‘unique’ relationship with industry may partly explain the orientation of many TAFE managers and some teachers to both serve and emulate the private sector. The Director quoted above, for example, attributes Streeton’s success to its being ‘ahead in that culture change’ to embrace entrepreneurialism and commercial competition. Competency Based Training (CBT), program budgeting and management by objectives have generally been accepted by managers at Streeton, and by education policy-makers, as the embodiment of business ‘best practice’. The implementation of such measures serves the further purpose of reinforcing TAFE’s principal connection with business and industry and therefore as a refutation of its ‘school-based’ past. Business and industry are appealed to in a generic sense to give
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legitimacy to the direction of educational reshaping. In this, some managers have jumped ahead of the requirements of the Government’s policy intervention in that they see the entrepreneurial agenda as their own. There is no doubt, however, that a number of teaching staff regard the entrepreneurial ethos and what they see as the reduction of complex educational relationships to CBT as anathema to educational principles and their own cherished educational values. Like many teachers at Grandridge Secondary College, they tend to perceive the current business-oriented and outcomes-driven policy environment in TAFE as anti-educational. Progressive educational thinkers at Streeton, however, had never experienced the same institutional success as their colleagues in schools like Grandridge. A crucial difference, we believe, is that at Streeton not only has there been general enthusiasm at management level for changes represented by the NTRA, but also, despite the presence of scepticism towards CBT, there has been greater and more enthusiastic take-up of elements of the policy than at Grandridge by many (but, as we shall emphasise, by no means all) teaching staff who have perceived exciting possibilities in the new order. Actors in the two settings to some extent embody their different institutional and social histories – and professional identities – that influence organisational politics. In TAFE generally, the progressive educational movement, while influential in modifying conceptions of good teaching, never caught on as a key feature in institutional debates (Rushbrook, 1997). Indeed, from our first day of field research at Streeton we heard senior managers and others refer to educational ‘dinosaurs’ – a term that is used derisively in connection with other terms like ‘educationalist’, ‘intellectual’ or ‘academic’. The unmistakable message was that ‘dinosaurs’ were locked into the ‘outdated’ educational agendas of the 1970s and 1980s and unable to make the jump to the new commercial climate that was required in TAFE. Dinosaurs were criticised not just for their antiquated thinking, but also because they were presumed to be wedded to work practices and conditions that their union had previously struggled to win for them. The dinosaurs were therefore painted by their critics as romantic idealists, at best, and ineffectual time-servers, at worst. They were seen to still inhabit the old environments in which progressive educational thinking and union activism had thrived – humanities, arts and VCE. Many teachers in these areas had begun their careers in technical high schools where they were likely to have had exposure to, and possibly
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involvement in, the heady educational politics of recent decades. Criticism of such teachers, therefore, was another way in which some TAFE personnel could distance themselves from the culture of TAFE’s school-based past and, in some respects, celebrate the new era of direct association with the industry (rather than education) sector. Less often stated (except by dinosaurs themselves) was the view that the dinosaurs were defenders of traditions and values which, in the ongoing process of contested educational reshaping, still retain some institutional legitimacy. For this reason, some teachers were pleased to be associated with the dinosaur tag. But even teachers with backgrounds as educational activists had virtually given up on defending the vision of education they had long fought for. Once, they were activist designers of TAFE, and education generally, and were regarded as progressives. Now they are cast as conservatives. They might resist policy interventions and refuse to comply in their own classrooms, but they were often resigned to marginalisation: People like me are relics of a different era. We’re not market oriented. We don’t give a fuck about the dollar basically. We’ve got a commitment to broadening minds, opening inquiry, getting people to think and to develop themselves through that and, along the way, giving them other skills that will help them fit into society but with the intellectual apparatus hopefully sharpened a bit. There’s no future for people like us in TAFE ... It’s a sad thing but we’re an embarrassment to them. They just want the yes-people who’ll come in and if you give them a copy of Mein Kampf and told them that’s what you’re going to teach, that’s what they would teach. No questions. It’s a job.
While we are somewhat sympathetic towards the dinosaurs, the problem with the above view is that it is extremely limited strategically. The dinosaur language stereotypically defines the once partially institutionalised ‘old’ educational culture of TAFE teaching in terms of the new industry-focused one which is envisaged and willed by its proponents. Managers, including the Director, repeatedly emphasise that Streeton is one of the most successful TAFE institutes at raising fee-forservice revenue. Many staff at various levels see Streeton as a leader in developing ‘commercial activities’ in much the same way that Grandridge was once seen as a leader in curriculum reform and in developing progressive educational practice. There is excitement and even glamour, as well as institutional recognition and support, for entrepreneurial individuals and Departments. People who have taken off in an extension of TAFE’s entrepreneurial and business-oriented traditions do not experience current pres-
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sures for institutional change as impositions in the same way that teachers at Grandridge Secondary College seem to do. In fact, many staff believe that the implementation of the NTRA, and its effect of stimulating entrepreneurial commercial activity, has resulted in the opening up (not closing off) of opportunities for everyone. People have started running with the agenda. They seem to have developed a sense of ownership and personal investment in it. There is talk of empowerment and new freedom to achieve: The sad thing I think for a lot of TAFE teachers is they don’t see the opportunities that are there for them. They don’t open their eyes. They wear blinkers. I’m a hairdresser for God’s sake! I mean! And I’ve had a sister who’s an academic who has huge problems with me being a hairdresser and doing the things I’m doing now. Now, if a hairdresser can open their eyes and look above ... there’s opportunities there for everybody!
This teacher is puzzled that more teachers do not think like she does: When can we get the academics to understand that it doesn’t mean that they lose their jobs, and it doesn’t mean that they lose power or control, or whatever it is, that in fact it gives them more and it’s not a threat, that it will be one of the best things that’s ever happened to education?
Such puzzlement is interesting. Like many managers, this teacher attributes the lack of enthusiasm of teachers in general for the contractualist, managerial and entrepreneurial agenda as being a product of ingrained ‘public service’ attitudes and a simple inability to see the benefits of the new order. Critics like the dinosaur mentioned earlier, however, claim that such a simplistic view of their position entirely misses the point. The point, as he sees it, is that ‘there’s not even the slightest educational pretence in this place any more’. Education considerations, in this point of view, have been squeezed out by opportunistic market considerations. It’s a question of values and normative orientations. The upshot, it is claimed – and this is the critical issue for many – is that teachers are required to demonstrate corporate loyalty to the Institute which cuts across the concept of loyalty ‘to the education profession’. This critic claims: ‘Some of those people have no concept of profession. It’s whatever the company wants.’ Despite the variety of educational positionings, all participants seemed to accept that market competition in education has become a reality. The emphasis at Streeton on competition, commercialisation and budgets, and the sense that savvy organisational players are making things happen for the Institute, indicates the nature of the changed
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conditions. The Director typifies this sense of localised entrepreneurialism. He refuses to identify with the TAFE ‘system’ and insists instead that his loyalty and commitment are specifically to Streeton. In this respect he is very much like Jack Regan at Grandridge who is equally passionate about his school. Both Regan and Klein expect staff to share their single-minded loyalty. Klein, like Regan, is a networker, but his networking is external to TAFE and is used as a way of building market credibility. He wants to mix directly with the relevant players in industry – locally, nationally or internationally. He wants people at various levels of the organisation to act in this way and says he will back those who take the initiative. According to the Director, the teachers who are likely to do this come from trades rather than ‘academic’ backgrounds. Klein regards such teachers as being ‘more worldly’ than Humanities and Arts teachers who ‘never left school’. These trade teachers, the backbone of TAFE, generally took pride in delivering the kind of service which emphasised the development of relevant skills that they believed industry and the trades needed. Such teachers were likely to be seen, and to see themselves, as relatively task-oriented in delivering and measuring practical training. NTRA priorities are more or less compatible with this view of teaching, especially in their endorsement of competency-based curriculum and evaluation. One thing that was new about the implementation of the NTRA, however, was the emphasis on expansion of ‘commercial activity’. In order to meet the challenges of both the competency emphasis and the emphasis on commercial activity, much work has been done in various Departments on the development of curriculum materials that lend themselves to flexible modification and individual pacing, and to computer testing. Some Departments in particular have become externallyoriented and entrepreneurial in this respect. These are the Departments that the Director sees as successful – the ones that have ‘taken off’ in the new era. The easy distinction made by Barry Klein and others between ‘academics’ and ‘tradies’ has the effect of reinforcing existing stereotypes. We need to be careful, however, as the apparent dichotomy between enthusiastic, practical, entrepreneurial advocates and despondent, academic, high-minded critics of educational redesign may be somewhat misleading. In fact, in some ‘practical’ curriculum areas that were involved in direct training of industry-employed students, and in which CBT and an emphasis on commercial activities had generally been embraced, we found some of the most profound thinking
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about issues of pedagogy, curriculum and evaluation. These data are especially important, not just because they give some indication of the complexity of educational practice at Streeton as a whole, and of the complexity of responses to the current educational redesign, but also because they indicate that the professional educational discourses of the 1970s and 1980s, so readily dismissed now by some organisational players, may have penetrated quite deeply into general educational thinking in TAFE. For example, a teacher in the Applied Health Science Department maintains that: [TAFE] has become a business. I mean, I think to survive you have to see yourself as a business that is providing education to the client who, from a policy point of view, is industry, but, from the educator’s point of view, is the people that come in here on a daily basis. I think it’s wrestling with that – trying to keep industry happy but making sure that we treat our customers not as customers or as clients, but ... in a broader sort of educational perspective. I mean, we really do see them as people and, sure, we have to justify our existence under policy, but they are still people with problems, people with issues, and from an educational perspective that’s just as important as meeting the demands of industry.
The point being made here is that education cannot simply be commodified as a product to be delivered but must be negotiated as part of the teacher–student relationship which is a joint process that calls forth forms of engagement and interaction. A similar consideration led this teacher and his colleagues to modify the assessment regime that was specified under CBT and which teachers felt was ‘pushing them from teaching to assessing’ to the point where they were ‘bogged under with assessment’. But their strategic adaptation of the assessment regime has as much to do with pragmatic imperatives as educational ones: We do use computer managed learning assessment [but] we see it as a superficial form of assessment that simply looks at whether a student has read the material ... We’ve tended to go to a more holistic form of assessment in terms of a project or an assignment or case study or that sort of thing. Not arduous, but nevertheless can be justified and figured back to the learning outcomes. And partly it’s survival. Not all of this is driven by good educational principles. You know, we’re saying, ‘Shit, we just can’t cope.’
The pressure on Departments to develop and use computer-based instructional materials in order to allow for individual student progression (as well as the marketing of courses and materials to other
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providers) has been resisted by many teachers as foreign to their professional culture. The core group of teachers in the Applied Health Science Department, however, seems to have applied here also a combination of pragmatic adaptation and protection of educational principles. Moreover, they have found that their pragmatic critique of CBT has resulted, to some extent at least, in critique of formerly accepted practice. As the teacher quoted above explains: The big change of that technology is not so much technology [as such], but all of a sudden the teaching that was going on was no longer a private affair in the classroom between the teacher and the student. It then became a very public affair because the documentation was public. And so all of a sudden the students knew exactly what was in the subject from start to finish. It was available to the employers. To other Departments. That was quite threatening for a while for all of us I think. All of a sudden, if we were documenting stuff it had to be right and that required some review of the material ... and also it made our assessment methods and so on very public. That actually, for us, had a fairly positive effect because it demystified the process if you like. All of a sudden these were documents that people could comment on and processes that people could comment on, and that could be changed.
The move to computer-based teaching materials and the public production and ownership of curriculum documents, for this informant, signals the evaporation of the teacher’s paternalistic mystique. While he says this has ‘created a sense of disempowerment for some people’, it has also necessitated more collaborative working relations and the development of good curriculum. Most importantly, teachers were able to ensure group ownership of the materials and that ‘there’s still that relationship with the students and between teachers’ that is the essence of educational practice. We have spent some time on this teacher’s account because it seems to us to offer a good illustration of organisational actors struggling to deal with imposed institutional design. Although many TAFE teachers we encountered were struggling to balance commercial viability against their commitment to educational and social values, few seemed prepared to critique formerly entrenched educational ideals. That this is going on in one quarter at least, where teachers are also trying to protect the flame of professional educational practice as they bring revamped educational values to bear in reshaping the design that is reshaping their institution. This suggests multiple possibilities for the ongoing politics of educational reshaping.
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Implications for future design In our account of the current playing out of particular policy interventions in education, we have presented something of a contemporary social history of specific sites of the social and organisational renorming of education. The different social contexts embody distinctive traditions and educational norms and networks that influence educational reshaping in particular ways. Schools of the Future policy and the National Training Reform Agenda have been major State and Commonwealth policy interventions in education. Their effects have been felt in educational organisations not just as imperatives that are mandated, but also as normative orientations which shape the agenda of possibilities for ongoing institutional design and change. For example, many managers and some teachers, especially at Streeton, but also at Grandridge, saw themselves as running ahead of the reform agendas, and even independently of them. The Divisional Director at Streeton quoted earlier is a good example of this, as is the Institute Director who feels that in the new era of TAFE he has been liberated from restrictions of the past to the point where he can now regard himself as ‘not actually working within the TAFE system’ but as an independent entrepreneurial operator within the training market. He is normatively located beyond the policy interventions but within the broad design agenda that he finds so empowering. His counterpart at Grandridge, although clearly being pulled in the same direction and endeavouring to run ‘his’ school like a private enterprise outfit, does not exude the same cultural and normative identification with business and industry – or at least not to the same extent. Moreover, at Grandridge, much more so than at Streeton, teacher input at various school forums is still a force to be reckoned with and must be carefully negotiated. Relatively long-standing educational norms still largely inform teachers’ discourse about their work and their understandings of good practice. So despite his nominal authority, Jack Regan rarely insists on making unilateral decisions. The institutional design that is manifest in government policy interventions, however, legitimates particular kinds of change and frames direction for continuing change. In the embodiment of design in practices of management, teaching and learning, we can detect trends which suggest that, for example, while income generation is enhanced at Grandridge and Streeton, there is also a renorming of teaching and
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learning processes going on. As researchers and educators, we, like many of our informants, can see complex costs and benefits of the asserted education design and alternative designs that are being displaced or that might be worked towards within the limits of change agendas. Perhaps most significantly, the current design reduces the agency of teachers by asserting alternative ways of transmitting curriculum content and minimising the teacher’s role in contextualising and shaping the learning encounter. This point was picked up by the teacher from the Applied Health Science Department at Streeton quoted above, who, with colleagues, was working both within and against the design agenda in a way that suggests possibilities for embracing affirmative practical politics of shaping educational possibilities and purposes. We would argue that the assertion and defence of normative possibilities is the essence of organisational politics, in which feasible designs need to be evaluated to ensure that ongoing processes of institutional shaping do not lead in dysfunctional directions. At the most practical level, the implication of the above is that ‘what might be’ in education must grow in some ways out of ‘what is’. And although we have not attempted to present a definitive account of what is at Grandridge and Streeton, our data do enable us to say that it is clearly not the same as what the policy agenda and policy documents say it should be. There are many examples of active and passive resistance, adaptation and accommodation to policy. On at least one point, however, all participants we spoke to seemed to be in agreement: that education does particular work on behalf of society. It contributes to the social polity, the economy and social fabric of society in ways that most educational designers – be they educators, governments or industry players – would presumably hope would enhance both individual and social capacities for institutional visioning and for realising willed visions through their embodiment in institutional practices. It is such capacity that Connell (1995) refers to as ‘the capacity for social practice’. Because such capacity is interactive and reflective, Connell argues, the extent to which it can be enhanced ‘depends to a considerable degree on teachers’ capacities for reflection and strategic thinking about their work’ (1995, p.110). From this point of view, considerations of desirable educational futures amount to considerations about social and individual investment in individual and collective capacities for reconstructive practice that might realise socially optimistic visions. Education workers, as institutional players and designers, would need to accept responsibility for contributing to new ways of social organising and living, and
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for developing creative capacities linked to traditional educational touchstones of democracy and equity. If this is the case, then the aping in education of the economically rational fixation of modern business practice, with its links to positivism and fundamentally modernist, behaviourist and mono-motivational assumptions, will need to be problematised in order to accommodate the complexity and multiplicity of ways in which meaning and understanding are constructed. For example, the aspect of organisational reality that presses most heavily on Jack Regan, and especially on Barry Klein, is ‘the bottom line’. Accountability tends to be reduced to economic viability more than to educational responsibility. Klein is out in the market place doing deals in this respect, as also is Regan to a lesser extent. They are networking and setting up ‘strategic alliances’ that will advantage their organisations. But in terms of building a sense of institution, such networking promotes the individualistic advantage of individual players and individual, competitive educational units rather than sustaining integrated grids of mutual professional cooperation and solidarity. Such an individualistic orientation, as well as marginalising general education thinking, challenges the ‘historic consensus’ (Anderson, 1997) that education should serve the public good and promote long-term social, economic and cultural development of the society. In other words, forms of rationality, and what counts as rational, are social constructions that are capable of being deconstructed and reconstructed from various perspectives including critical policy analysis (Bowe et al., 1992; Lingard et al., 1992) and postmodernism (Yeatman, 1998), strands of both of which embrace affirmative practical politics of contributing to the shaping of preferred educational and social possibilities. Such a view of institutional design assumes that the assertion and defence of normative possibilities in institutional spheres is the essence of practical politics which may largely be conducted in organisations but which have broader institutional and social implications. A politics of possibility, in these perspectives, is not seen as the work of solitary, autonomous, calculating and objective individuals, but of collections of diverse, interconnected social beings who engage in intersubjective striving to shape their practice within social and institutional spaces and discourses.
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9 The politics of postpatrimonial governance ANNA YEATMAN
One could suppose that before a certain era, say a thousand years ago, only a very few people lived creatively ... To explain this, one would have to say that before a certain date it is possible that there was only very exceptionally a man or woman who achieved unit status in personal development. Before a certain date the vast millions of the world of human beings quite possibly never found or certainly soon lost at the end of infancy or childhood their sense of being individuals. (Winnicott, 1971, p.70)
The argument of this chapter centres on the proposition that ours is an era of postpatrimonial governance. By postpatrimonial governance, I mean that government can no longer ethically model its policy, administrative and regulative work along the lines of a patrimonial household owing care and protection to those who are viewed as both the subjects and dependents of this household. Instead, government has to structure its policy, administrative and regulative work in relation to what I will call individualised personhood. Individualised personhood is a type of political and social personhood which requires relationships of governance and social connectedness to be mediated by individual consent. This means that these relationships have to respond to individuality. Or, to put it differently, that the individuality of persons has to be addressed and harnessed in how these relationships function. For the individuality of all persons to be taken up and 170
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responded to in relationships of governance and social connection, a profound transformation of the structures of what we can call patrimonial individualism has to have occurred. Instead of only heads of households being accorded the status of individuality, all who are counted into human communicative interaction, including types of interaction which are non-verbal and tied to the embodied co-presence of individuals, are counted as ‘individuals’. This is a non-discriminatory and universalistic ethos of individuality which fundamentally challenges the paternalism and maternalism of patrimonial types of governance. People who a patrimionial liberal-democratic discourse took for granted as unable to participate as citizens in democratic government because they were not capable of governing themselves let alone others – children, lunatics, idiots and prisoners – are admitted to the status of individuality. This extension of the status of individuality requires a fundamental recasting of the patrimonial conception of citizenship (see Yeatman, forthcoming). Governance has to be refigured on behalf of an individualised social life. Relationships of authority or legitimate domination have to be reshaped so that they are responsive to individuality and deploy it. These are new challenges to what it is we think we mean by democratic governance. Instead of authority working in terms of the hierarchical relationships of a patrimonial household, authority has to be reconceived in ways which make it possible for those with unequal power and capacity to respect, respond to and interact with each other as individuals whose agency must be taken up within the conduct of this authority. This is the ethical direction of individualised democratic governance. It is difficult to find any contemporary political position which in some fundamental way does not affirm this direction. It is arguable that the ethical reassertion of a libertarian neo-classical economics as interpreted by Hayek is precisely such an affirmation. This is a neoclassical economics that elaborates a radical possessive individualism which appears to be ethically free of its old patrimonial encumbrances. This is a universalised possessive individualism that deals in the nondiscriminatory and individualised metaphors of choice, rational action, firms and markets. Since the 1960s, New Left and other participatory social movements have been developing a political culture of individualised personhood and they have been experimenting with organisational forms, models of governance and political process which can respond to individualised personhood. These are two different kinds of political affirma-
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tion of individualised democratic governance. Where a postpatrimonial neo-classical economics reasserts a universalistic individualism – the sovereign individuality of individuals as private property owners in the marketplace–postpatrimonial forms of social democracy are exploring how continuing relationships of governance and social connection can be individualised in ways which make social life responsive to individuality, and individuality responsive to the claims of social life. Where the former tends to be anti-government, the latter affirms the centrality of government to the conditions of democratic participation. Where the former uses metaphors that are centred on market-based forms of individualised action, the latter uses metaphors that are tied to political and social participation by means of government-supported structures of citizenship. When we examine these two different political affirmations of postpatrimonial democratic governance more closely, it becomes clear that neo-liberal individualism turns into a reassertion of hierarchical command relationships that may respond to a particular version of individualised action, consumer choice, but which do not and cannot respond to individualised political action (what I will call citizen choice and citizen voice). Neo-liberal individualism authorises the expansion of market-oriented action at the expense of democratic government, and to the extent that this expansion occurs, the force and scope of democratic governance is diminished. Postpatrimonial liberalism accepts individuality but this is the severely non-egalitarian albeit non-discriminatory individuality of a competitive ‘survival of the fittest’. This is not an individuality capable of respecting, responding to and interacting with the individuality of others except in a highly instrumentalised, utilitarian and privately oriented fashion. Postpatrimonial liberalism is an elaborated conception of governance and techniques of rule which deploys market-based individualism in order to correct what it takes to be inevitable paternalistic-bureaucratic features of government. In this way it evades the task of working on what it may mean to develop an individualised form of democratic governance. There is however considerable effort in the direction of meeting this task which can be used to think about what it may mean. The politics of postpatrimonial governance, then, is currently structured in terms of contestation between a neo-liberal and postpatrimonial reassertion of utilitarian individualism, on the one hand, and positive efforts in the direction of individualised democratic governance, on the other. While the former term of this contest deploys the
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market at the expense of government, the latter term relies on an affirmation of government and things public.
Postpatrimonial challenges to patrimonial models of democratic governance This is a protracted and complex crisis which, broadly speaking, is associated with the post-Second World War era for established and aspirant liberal democracies. Up until this point the classical conception of democratic government had prevailed. It is this conception that I am calling a patrimonial one because democratic government on this account is tied to its foundations in private patrimonial household governance. On this conception which goes back to the Aristotelian account of politics, and to use Lockeian rather than Aristotelian language, government as a public authority is constituted by the association of free householders. They are free because they are independent householders, or, differently, they are heads of households that are economically independent. These male heads of households are the governors of what is a private household economy (the oikos). Until industrialisation brought about the separation of households and productive economic activity, economic production was embedded in the kin-based and master–servant relationships which defined the structure of household as a unit of governance. With the disembedding of the economy to become an autonomous sphere of capitalist marketbased production and exchange, households lost their economic character and function. However, their ethos was imported into the functioning of capitalist firms where the relationships between employers and employees continued to be structured in terms of the originally household-based master–servant relationship. The distinctively patrimonial element in this conception is associated with the idea of independence as the essential condition of citizenship or participation in democratic governance. Independence refers to a capacity to govern oneself – a capacity, incidentally, which cannot be present without its corollary; namely, the capacity to govern others. Independence, then, is tied to a hierarchical relationship between those who are so constituted that they can govern themselves and those who either temporarily or permanently lack this capacity. Thus, until this century when the accession of especially wives to the
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suffrage began to fundamentally complicate this picture, the headship or private governorship of a household was not only associated with the basis of the democratic suffrage but was also understood to be the basis of private property, in both senses of the term property/propriety: property as the ownership of land, things and people, and as the capacity to be one’s own man. The patrimonial bases of democratic government are also extended to how the state apparatus which follows upon the establishment of a public authority is understood. While the free association of independent householders maintains an association of the public authority with contractarian principles of freedom and consent, when this public authority assumes the aspect of state administration of domestic welfare it takes on patrimonial features. Such state administration was associated with political economy; that is, policy which is oriented to the increase of national wealth on behalf of the welfare of the national populace. There were two models of political economy available: either the historically novel principle of universalistic capitalist market exchange, or the management of the household economy or oikos. When state administration was oriented to the welfare of those who could not otherwise meet their needs, it was conceived as a patrimonial administration of the needs of those who were positioned as dependents of the state. It is for this reason that a political theorist like Hannah Arendt fundamentally objected to the obtrusion of the rise of the social or welfare state into the domain of the political. For Arendt (in The Human Condition) the political is the sphere of freedom, of ‘action’, as distinct from the principle which rules the oikos, the principle of necessity. Patrimonialism, then, I am arguing characterised the formation of modern democratic governance and state administration in three fundamental and interlinked respects. Firstly, the capacity to be a citizen was associated with the capacity to be one’s own man, and this in turn was contingent on status as a free and independent householder or head of a household. Thus the capacity to be self-governing was contingent upon and associated with one’s responsibility for the government of others within one’s household. Secondly, patrimonial assumptions coloured all conceptions of economic management: these ranged from the slave plantations of the southern United States in the 19th Century to the structuring of the modern employer–employee relationship internal to the firm. Thirdly, patrimonial assumptions informed the conception of state administration of needs, where needs were associated with the status of economic dependency and as thus
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requiring patrimonial protection and support. The welfare state, as well as the colonial state, were both structured by this conception of state administration as the protection of the weak and needy by a state conceived as though it is a large and independent household. The independence of the state is expressed in interstate relationships where international law is modelled on the contractarian assumptions of natural law; namely, the right of independent private property owners to defend their own property and their obligation to respect that of others. Modern patrimonial democratic governance and state administration, then, produce a set of asymmetric relationships between those who are constituted as capable of self-governing and those who, being not so capable, are to be governed by those who are: men and women; parents and children; colonial administrations and the colonised; welfare administrations and the needy; employers and employees; those who are counted as normal self-governing adults, and those who by some reason of moral, physical or mental impairment are deemed unable to be self-governing. The first line of challenge to modern democratic patrimonialism is on behalf of those who are so positioned that they can claim the capacity of self-government: wives, employees, colonials and the colonised. They use the tradition of natural right which identifies the capacity for self-government with an educated and mature capacity to reason. In the case of labouring men, they also use patrimonial masculinism: as heads of their own families they should have the right of citizenship. Masculinism of this kind also informs anti-colonial struggles on behalf of national independence. In many ways this line of challenge to modern democratic patrimonialism sustains it by making it more inclusive. An individuality which is identified with the independence and selfsufficiency of a self-governing unit is the model for individualised citizenship on this account. The second line of challenge to patrimonial democratic government is made on behalf of those for whom metaphors of self-government will always be inappropriate because they lack the capacities to be selfgoverning: children and infants, many people with relatively severe intellectual and/or psychiatric disability, older people with dementia, for instance. While the first line of challenge was nourished as it were within the terms of patrimonial liberal democracy, this line of challenge was without previous harbingers and represented a genuine challenge to the patrimonial model itself. It involved a very new idea: just because an individual cannot be independent in the sense of self-
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governing does not mean that they cannot be respected and responded to as an individual in how others connect with and relate to them. Here individuality or the integrity of an individual does not preclude dependency on others. Rather, the issue turns on how this dependency operates. Does the person whose assistance, education, nurturing, care and so on, is needed give these in ways which respect or which deny respect to the individuality of the person who has this need? As I have argued elsewhere (Yeatman, forthcoming), and will further detail below, this is a profoundly postpatrimonial turn of events. There are asymmetries of capacity and power between the parties to this relationship of dependency of the one on the other, of this there can be no doubt. However, these asymmetries are to be structured by what Seyla Benhabib (1992, p.31) terms an ethic of universal moral respect and egalitarian reciprocity. Among other things, this ethic cannot be practised except as this practice is oriented to respect for the unique individuality of those who participate in the relationships concerned. What this means, for example, is that a parent or teacher cannot discipline a child without orienting the nature and mode of discipline to respect for and responsiveness to the individuality of this child. It is this line of argument which in a profoundly novel way recasts the whole problem of democratic governance. If ‘participation’ in government does not have to be tied to a capacity for self-government in the sense of an independent individuality, then we are in a position to think about ‘participation’ in ways which admit different kinds of subject positioning and the different kinds of inequality, capacity and power they may entail regardless of whichever politico-redistributive regime is in place. For example, it is impossible for a client to compete with the expertise of a professional, but does this mean that the professional has to exercise this expertise as a paternalistic ‘speaking for’ the client? It must mean this if all we have is a model of participation tied to independent self-governing selfhood. On this model, those who participate have to be equal in their capacities for independent selfgovernment, a metaphor impossible to sustain in situations of tutelage or dependency where those who lack knowledge are dependent on the judgement, knowledge and expertise of others. However, if this model is no longer the only one going, and it is possible to think of responding to those who are less able, knowledgeable or expert as individuals who can participate with their own distinct and unique wisdom or sense of self in the relationship, the distinctive inequality of the professional–client relationship can be reconciled with individualised
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democratic governance. It is not that professional and client become equal in terms of expertise, or even that they are equal in their respective capacities to be individuals, but that the relationship can be governed in such a way as to invite reciprocal respect from each for their own unique individuality and that of the other. With hindsight, the New Left movement’s formulation of the value of ‘participation’ as the right to participate in the decisions which govern one’s life can be seen as a conception of individualised voice. This is a conception of democratic governance that requires the work of government to be mediated by the voice, or as I have put it elsewhere (Yeatman, 1995), individualised consent of those subject to government.1 This conception is possible only to the extent that government is accepted as a normal feature of social life. New Leftists had a generalised conception of the decisions which govern one’s life. The logical thrust of this formulation was to demand individualised participation in all forms of government, domestic and public, private and public, thus, for example, in the government of the family or domestic relationships, in the government of classrooms and of whole schools, as well as in the government of the locality, province and nation. New Leftists surely did not realise that they were generalising government as a feature of social life in this way, but that was the logical force of how they formulated democracy. The significance of this conception is that it makes individualised voice central to the workings of governmental relationships, and, in this way, goes beyond the liberal democratic tradition’s tendency to reserve voice for the establishment, and disestablishment of relationships. On the more orthodox liberal democratic model, voice tends to be assimilated to choice, to the rights of voting in and voting out a government, or, on the older social contract model, to the choice of contracting into a political association or of contracting out. The New Left conception, on the other hand, is oriented to the individualisation not of moments of establishment and dis-establishment of governmental and other relationships, but to the individualisation of ongoing relationships. On this conception, choice tends to be in service of voice, or, of individualised participation; whereas, in the liberal-democratic conception, voice tends to be in service of choice. As we shall see in a moment, this difference underwrites very different conceptions of government. When participation or voice is identified with the individualisation of ongoing relationships, the two lines of challenge to patrimonial democratic governance, instead of working in different directions can come together to work in the same direction. When hitherto excluded
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groups such as women claim access to democratic self-government, both at the level of the individual and at the level of the polity, their claims work to re-instate the difference between those capable of governing themselves and those who lack this capacity. Moreover, in making the claim for self-government, women buy into a conception of individuality which is associated with a self-sufficient and private propertied individualism. On this account, one is an individual only to the extent that one has an integrity or singularity which not only marks off who one is with regard to other individuals, but establishes individuality as separation from other individuals. For this to occur, one has not only to own one’s will but also to own all that is required for this to be possible: thus, to own one’s body and all those things that enable a private individual propriety of this kind. This individual can interact with others only in one of two ways: either, by reciprocal choice or contract; or, by the former commanding the latter on the model of patrimonial household governance. This is an individuality in fact which is modelled after the individualisation of dominium or lordship. It is not an individuality capable of coming into an ongoing relationship with other individuals where the dynamics of their reciprocal recognition as individuals is taken up into how this relationship is conducted. Patrimonial individuality can recognise the presence of other individuals only as separate lords of their own dominium. Thus, reciprocal recognition here is structured in terms of recognition of such separateness: a recognition of each as lord of his own castle, his own private property. Patrimonial individuality can enter into positively acknowledged relationships of interdependency with others only as these others are positioned as the dependents of the patrimonial lord or master. When the patrimonial individual recognises other patrimonial individuals not as partners in a common venture (for this would inappropriately place them inside his private household economy), but as separate lords of their own dominium, this establishes a particular dynamic between patrimonial individuals. Their relationship of mutual recognition is a defensive relationship: ‘I will recognise you as the best prudential defence of my own property, but I have to recognise that if you manage to increase your property, you will have more power than me, and, potentially, more leverage in terms of what it is you may wish to get me to do. Therefore, I will work hard to increase my own property so to deny, or at least to minimise, this leverage you may gain.’ A defensive relationship, then, which becomes a competitive relationship oriented to the accumulation of private property, or, in its modern sense, capital.
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This is a solipsistic type of individuality, one that requires individuality to be expressed as a privately oriented individualism. As many have remarked before now, it is a curious feature of modern democratic dynamics that women have to claim access to this privately oriented individualism in order to be counted as individuals. For women, of course, are located in social life as relational creatures – as mothers who are bound in an intimate relationship of dependent co-existence with infants and young children. For this reason, women never make entirely convincing patrimonial types of individual. The contradiction in women’s claims to be individuals too is not reconcilable until a different and genuinely postpatrimonial conception of individuality is in view. This opens up when the idea of individualising ongoing relationships makes it possible to think of reconciling individuality with relationships of interdependency with others. Somehow these relationships have to be structured not only to invite individualised participation, but also to afford the private space or property which enables an individual to enjoy integrity as an individual. Self-government is not so much the issue here as opportunities to grow and develop as an individual and to be an individual – in ongoing relationships of reciprocal recognition with other individuals. Such growth and development includes the care, teaching and nurturing which many individuals give those individuals who need such care, teaching and nurture. The postpatrimonial conception of individuality, then, does not work in terms of a heavily marked difference between those who get to be individuals because they can govern themselves and those who do not get to be individuals because they lack this capacity. It requires private property in all senses of the term; namely, recognition of a distinctly embodied individual as a unit of agency; recognition of the acts of this individual as his or her ‘own’, if they are indeed so – that is, both uncoerced and facilitated to be his or her own in this way; freedom to pursue choices and opportunities which enable an individual to explore their individuality or to become more of their own individual.2 However, this right of private property is limited by its functioning on behalf of a postpatrimonial individuality; namely, an individuality which does not need to assert itself as an individualised form of lordship engaged in a competitive relationship of reciprocal recognition with other individualised lords. A postpatrimonial individual needs only so much private property as enables him or her to function as an individual in different kinds of relationship with other individuals – that is, to be able to achieve, as Winnicott puts it, unit status in these relationships. If reversion to patrimonial individuality
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where others inside an ongoing relationship of interdependence are accommodated only as the lord’s or master’s dependents is not to occur, unit status of this kind has to be able to accommodate the positive existence of other individuals; that is, to welcome and work with others as individuals.
The politics of postpatrimonial democratic government Postpatrimonial conceptions of individuality and democratic governance represent a much more serious threat to patrimonial democratic individuality than communism, socialism or other kinds of communitarianism have ever represented. The socialistic or communistic traditions of resistance to patrimonial possessive and competitive individualism were made in the name of equality but they could not show how they could accommodate individuality in a politico-ethical sense. Historically, indeed, the structures of social democratic welfarism or of the communist state form were bound into patrimonial household models of governance which were antagonistic to a universalistic and inclusive conception of individuality. From the mid-1950s onwards a number of social movements combined to present a postpatrimonial set of challenges to the established liberal-democratic welfare state form. These included the civil rights movement on behalf of Afro-Americans within the United States and its affiliations with the pan-African postcolonial movement; the second wave of feminism and its later offshoots such as the women’s health movement; the participatory democratic student movements and their ripple-out effect into various kinds of bottom-up movements to reform the delivery of health, public housing and legal assistance; the Vietnam Vets movement seeking rights on behalf of returning American soldiers with disabilities, and the wider disability rights movement which was spurred by this; indigenous people’s movements for self-determination; and the new public administration and public administrative law which combined to develop a more publicly accountable and participative conception of state administration. This was in fact an epoch of postpatrimonial developments in democracy. Looking back, it is possible to see the various movements of the latter half of the 1950s and 1960s as laying the groundwork for what became a sustained set of policy, procedural and institutional
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reforms over the two decades of the 1970s and 1980s. In Australia where reforming Labor Governments began this process in 1972 and were able to sustain it until about 1989, there was an accumulation of policy reform initiative and learning which constitutes a rich repository of experimental practice. It is not too much to see this epoch as a quiet participatory revolution which worked in the direction of extending the Keynesian welfare state into a participatory state form. It was a revolution which elaborated the idea of ‘voice’ as central to a democratised state administration. Governments and administrators became increasingly practised in various kinds of consultative relationships to citizen users of state administrative services. Much of this consultative work involved highly innovative experimental practice, and much functioned on behalf of a real input to the governmental policy process, until roughly the end of the 1980s. By this time a counterrevolution was in play and it had led to the rationing of public resources to such an extent that citizen claims on state administration and public services had to be both curtailed and pushed off the policy agenda. The Keynesian welfare state did not just evolve into a participatory form. For the participatory revolution to be possible, a sustained critique had to come in the name of participatory democracy from those who rejected the patrimonial features of the welfare state. These included feminists who rejected how the welfare state positioned women on public income support as ‘dependents’ under state protection, as they included multicultural activists who rejected the assimilationist assumptions of the welfare state, and indigenous activists who rejected the racism built into state protection of an inferior race. This critique is still ongoing as the recent report on the ‘stolen generations’ Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (1997) exemplifies. Transmutation of the Keynesian welfare state into a more participatory form occurred by fits and starts and in uneven ways depending on the effectiveness, vision, consistency and organisation of change agents on behalf of the participatory revolution in the period of the 1970s until the present. However, by and large it succeeded in establishing the new terms of legitimacy for governmental practice and state administration. The critical point, however, is that the Keynesian welfare state could be extended in a participatory direction because it represented government of the economy on behalf of a citizen community. In short, it represented the fundamental principle of democratic political
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economy: the economy should be in service to the needs of society, and part of government’s role is to ensure that the market works in this way. The other part of government’s role is to specify and respond to common or public goods (for this conception of democratic political economy, see Levine, 1996). Keynesian thus represents the primacy of democratic government with regard to capitalism. Resistance to this regime on the part of champions of the freedom of the market in relation to government has been growing since the 1960s. This resistance has taken two forms: firstly, the increasing organisation of transnational corporations from the 1970s onwards to change public policy agendas in the direction of freeing the market from governmental intervention and Keynesian types of regulation; secondly, the reassertion of a libertarian neoclassical economics which champions market-oriented freedom as the only principle congruent with individuality and views the inequalities which follow upon unrestrained market-oriented competitive individualism as natural rather than as artifacts of social arrangements. The combined practical and ideational force of these two agencies has succeeded in bringing about a counter-revolution: the disestablishment of the legitimacy of the Keynesian welfare state and of its extended participatory form. The public policy agenda has been reshaped to become one of restructuring state administrative action so that it works on behalf of market-oriented capital, the proposition being that the welfare of individuals will be best served by wealth generation than by a citizenresponsive state. This is a counter-revolution on behalf of the reassertion of a non-relational individualism, an individualism for whom freedom resides in individualised dominium and separation from other individuals. This is an individuality for whom choice of contracting in and out of relationships is critical but for whom voice is redundant except as it is expressed in contractual agreement.
Conclusion: new contractualism and relational individualism The non-relational kind of individuality that I described above cannot participate in relationships of interdependency without losing its freedom, unless it can become the directive voice of command in these relationships. Are we back then to a patrimonial individualism? Not
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quite. This is a postpatrimonial market-oriented individualism to the degree that, firstly, a non-discriminatory conception of individual freedom to participate in market-oriented action is operative, and, secondly, command relationships are themselves contractualised. This is the point of the principal-agency model, borrowed from the new institutional economics, and which is driving the new contractualist models of entrepreneurial management in the public sector. As Jonathan Boston (1995, p.78) puts it: ‘control by administrative hierarchy is being replaced by control by contract.’ To briefly explain, a non-discriminatory economic or market-oriented individualism generalises the principle that each individual is bent on maximising his or her own private happiness, or utility. It is this principle which is used to call all conceptions of public values and service into question, for, on this reasoning, all actors regardless of where they are placed are in the pursuit of private, not public, goods. Since it is conceded that there needs to be some kind of state apparatus in attendance of residual welfare needs, law and order, and the facilitative regulation of the free market, those who staff this state apparatus have to be controlled in ways which minimise both their tendency to convert state power and resources to their own benefit and the possibility of them being captured by ‘interest groups’ seeking to gain special advantage from the state. The favoured instrument of control is the performance contract; namely, a contractual agreement between those who work on behalf of the state and whoever is commissioning/funding the work to produce against specified outputs and standards. Boston’s (1995, p.79) representation of the new contractualist model of public management for New Zealand is now generalisable to Australian public sector management: ... the new model of public management has placed a heavy emphasis on the separation of funders/purchasers and providers, and the separation of policy advice from policy implementation. It has also led to an extensive use of ‘contracts’ of various kinds to govern relationships, not merely between public- and private-sector organizations, but also between (and within) public-sector organizations ... some government departments now employ a significant proportion of their ‘permanent’ staff on fixed-term contracts and regularly draw on the services of consultants to undertake short-term assignments.
This is a contractualism which is driven by a universalistic nonrelational individualism, an individualism which is extended to all adults so as to draw them into a market-based performativity, regardless of whether these adults are engaged in non–market-oriented
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kinds of social contribution such as the care and parenting of young children. Its general direction is one of substituting the market for government, choice for voice, and economic standing for citizen standing. Elsewhere (Yeatman, 1997), I have argued for a new contractualism that fits and contributes to the development of a post-Keynesian participatory state form which works on behalf of democratic governance. This is a contractualism which privileges voice by developing different kinds of protocol and procedure which facilitate the individualisation of ongoing relationships. Contractualism here is used on behalf of participation and a relational individualism. For this kind of citizenoriented contractualism to develop, it will need to be joined with a participative conception of the policy process where citizens are drawn into public learning and social problem-solving in ways which make them more responsible as policy claimants. In short, the politics of our time is structured by a contest between two kinds of contractualism. One kind re-asserts the sovereign individuality of individualised dominium and extends market freedom as the most appropriate expression of sovereign individuality at the expense of government. While this contractualism is not patrimonial, it has neo-patrimonial features because it enables power to be expressed as contractualised command relationships. However, the universalisation of contractual individualism ensures that there are no longer any ethical obligations of patrimonial authority: those who are powerful enough to structure contract relationships in their favour have no obligation to those with whom they contract beyond what the contact specifies. The older patrimonial economy where the household head owes protection to his dependents has gone. The other kind of contractualism is specified in terms of the individualisation of ongoing relationships of all kinds of governance. In particular, it is tied to the specification of the rights of individuals to participate in administrative state decisions that govern their lives. It is a contractualism which is defined in terms of a relational individualism where to get to be an individual, a person does not have to be self-governing or independent but, simply, to be effectively invited to participate as he or she can in the relationships that govern his or her life. On this model, power differences exist but they have to be worked in ways which facilitate the participation of the less powerful in the relationship, whether it be a professional–client, employer–employee, or parent–child relationship. This kind of contractualism depends on primacy being given to democratic government as the guarantor of citizen standing and rights in relation to the economy or market.
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Notes 1. The Port Huron Statement, written by Tom Hayden as a manifesto for Students for a Democratic Society founded in June 1960, and for the 1962 SDS Convention at Port Huron, Michigan, mixes older masculinist patrimonial metaphors of ‘independence’ with a newer participatory language: ‘As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organised to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.’ 2. From the Port Huron Statement again: ‘This kind of independence does not mean egotistic individualism – the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own.’
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10 Beyond nostalgia: institutional design and alternative futures TERRI SEDDON AND LAWRENCE ANGUS
This collection began with a vignette: a 1993 seminar in Melbourne during the early days of the implementation of the Liberal–National Coalition Government’s school reform agenda. At this seminar a woman – a parent involved in her child’s schools council – and a man – an economist, exchanged views about the direction of the then recently elected Kennett Government education reform. For the woman what was at issue was care; how she and other parents worked with teachers and the school principal to ensure the best schooling for their kids. For the man what was at issue was cost; education is like any other area of government expenditure and must be constrained within the fiscal limits required to ensure a balanced state budget. Looking back from 2000, this vignette, with its polarisation of care and cost, can be seen in some respects as having been a motif for the 1990s. While policies and practices of the past decade have varied in their emphases, there has been a tendency for care and cost to be seen as irreconcilable in education. In the main, governments and some community interests have emphasised the need to manage the costs of education. The problems of spreading scarce resources across proliferating demands for educational support and development, and of ensuring that these resources are used efficiently and effectively, 186
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became the priorities. Many educators and other community members countered by asserting the priority of care in education: the view that productive learning depends upon an interpersonal chemistry between teacher and student. From this perspective, cost is only significant in so far as this chemistry is enabled or disabled by resource allocations. The upshot of these trends, as stated in the introduction to this collection, led to a situation in which stakeholders in education polarised. They tended to speak past each other, neither hearing the other party’s concerns or criticisms. Market rhetoric became de rigeur. Affirmation of the social purposes of education, public interest and public provision was marginalised, seen as old-fashioned criticism, an appeal to the past, or an expression of self-interest. But such disengagement between stakeholders in education is unproductive. It implies that some interests have a monopoly on wisdom. It undercuts consultation about the intentions and impacts of policy and this limits public and professional acceptance of reform. Such reluctance to engage in the issues of reform undermines fidelity in implementation and, in some cases, fuels stoic resistance or overt conflict. Ultimately, disengagement reduces the capacity of governments, education systems and institutions to respond to rapid social change in ways which both return benefits to the Australian community and ensure innovation and feedback mechanisms that generate feasible education reform into the next millennium.
The reform trajectory: 1994–99 In the years since 1994, there have been complex trends in education reform. Worldwide, neo-liberal corporate politics and governance have been strongly allied to globalising tendencies, and have mobilised these tendencies selectively so as to achieve various domestic agendas such as cut backs in the welfare state. The weakening of the welfare state, income redistribution and tax reform, means that the tendency of global market forces (like all markets) to increase disparities of wealth and power is not offset by contrary trends that are either national or supra-national in character. There is a growing disparity between rich and poor countries, and between the rich and poor within each country. These trends are evident in Australia as a result of a policy agenda pursued during the 1990s, in somewhat different ways, by Labor and Liberal–National Coalition Governments both within States and the
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Commonwealth. The agenda has been further diffracted by the local political dynamics within states and in the traditional state–federal politics that are a long established feature of Australian federalism. These complex political trajectories have given rise to different patterns of neo-liberal reform. The Commonwealth has moved from residual social democratic principles that were maintained under the Hawke–Keating Labor Government (1983–96) to more deregulatory neo-liberalism under the current Howard Government (since 1996). Among the states, Victoria provided the most extreme example of neoliberal reform in the 1990s. Under Jeff Kennett’s Liberal–National Coalition Government that was in power from late 1992 until late 1999, there was far-reaching marketisation, privatisation and public sector reform – not least in education (Costar & Economou, 1999; Spaull, 1999). In education, the neo-liberal politics of globalisation are very apparent. Education has been both a means of adjusting culturally to the growth of globalised relations and the focus of neo-liberal reforms in public administration. Education has been expected to pioneer globalera Australian innovations and augment national economic competitiveness and adopt the neo-liberal institutional blueprint of corporate institutions and quasi-market forms of production and exchange, while making do with lower public subsidies. The upshot of these neo-liberal policy trajectories has been the erosion of the old statist arrangements in which education was for the nation, of the citizen, by the professional teacher and through normative content and controls. In place of these previously established arrangements there is now a three-way crisis of public educational provision: (Marginson, 1998, p.3) • a resource crisis brought on by declines in government funding, linked to a declining commitment to the nation-building role of public education and training; • an identity crisis brought on by the corporatisation of internal education and training systems and cultures; and • a crisis of global strategy: how do the Australian education and training institutions make their way in a globalising learning environment? In this changing context, education and training are being reengineered as quasi-markets oriented to national competitive advantage and to serving the consumer/client. The principles governing
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access and success in education and training are increasingly individualised through consumer choice policies, privatised user-pays arrangements and learners’ acceptance of individual responsibility for learning. The acceptance of consumer choice is paralleled by the acceptance of market failure. The work of teaching has become more technical in orientation, partly as a consequence of information technology applications and work intensification, and more constrained within corporate rather than professional frames. Governance has tended towards an executive style. It has become more transparent to clients but more controlling in relation to employees as decisionmakers assert managerial prerogative in the organisation and control of teaching. These policy agendas and implementation processes have been shaped by economic rationalist discourses which broadly represent social processes as the outcome of individual choices within changing contexts. Individuals are assumed to be rational actors, disembedded economic units, divorced from social attachments and contexts, and motivated by self-interest to maximise utility and benefits. It is therefore presumed possible to model aggregate individual behaviour in the light of both prevailing and changing incentives and disincentives. And if the incentive structure is changed it becomes possible to reengineer individual behaviour and ‘collective action’, the aggregate of rational individual actions, towards preferred ends. The promise of economic rationalism is the capacity to redesign and re-invent social institutions. Governments have been quick to grasp this promise, pursuing varied policy processes that have reworked patterns of institutional rules, regulatory frameworks and incentive structures that shape education and training. Economic rationalist discourses, however, downplay the fact that education is a peopled social landscape rather than a neutral site in which self-interested rational actors interact independently of society, culture and governance. While the broad neo-liberal policy trajectory has had an impact on educational provision and practice in Australia, institutional re-engineering is never as straightforward as the policymakers, neo-classical economists and management gurus suggest. There are unintended as well as intended outcomes. Individuals and groups contest as well as comply with change imperatives. And, despite all the reforms, the old problems of education and training must still be dealt with: how to prepare students for adult life and responsibilities; what to teach them; how to ensure reasonably equitable access and articulations between family, school and work; how to
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prepare and regulate teachers; how to pay for a learning society in a knowledge economy. That this point is well recognised among the general public, as well as by critics of neo-liberal marketised education, is illustrated by the outcome of the 1999 State Election. Victoria was the state at the forefront of redesign of the public sector and, although the Kennett Government seemed invincible, polling consistently indicated massive public unease about the state of education, particularly the erosion of the caring and supporting role that citizens still apparently expect schools to play on behalf of young people.
Impacts and effects of neo-liberal institutional redesign In 1997, when the chapters that made up this collection were first presented at a two-day conference at the Australian National University, there was relatively little research documenting the impact and effects of neo-liberal institutional redesign in Australian education. Authors were asked to draw on their own research and turn their various conceptual frameworks to analysing the impact and effects of neo-liberal reform. In early 1997, many of the chapter authors who were located in Victoria had already lived through four years of Kennett Government reform. They had first-hand personal and professional experience of the impact of neo-liberal decentralisation and re-centralisation in education, as well as insights arising from their academic research. Drawing on this diverse knowledge base, they prepared chapters that presented preliminary evidence and analysis of the complex and contradictory effects of current education reform agendas. A variety of themes began to emerge in the papers and in subsequent conference discussion that have been developed and reworked for this volume as further research has been conducted. The impact of institutional redesign processes are seen by the contributors to this volume to have been far more equivocal than the rhetoric of government suggested. As Burke explains in Chapter 2, funding patterns were complex and did not lead to clear-cut educational benefits. Meredyth and Hunter suggested that contemporary education reform was simply an ongoing task of pragmatically adjusting processes of governance and educational provision in order to attend to the prevailing problems of the time. In their view, pragmatic
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problem-solving by governments seeking to manage society, rather than experiments in ideological educational redesign, can be seen as the reason for changes being made in education and training. But, they stress, problem-solving depends upon a continuing role for government in both collecting and monitoring data about educational provision and performance, and also responding to it in ways which make clear to citizens that governments are managing to deal with emerging problems. The scenario they describe of continuing government tinkering with the institutionalisation of education and training was confirmed by Angus and Seddon in Chapter 8. Drawing on ethnographic data from schools and technical and further education in Victoria, they indicate that top-down institutional design has been countered and contested as staff within education and training attempt to impose bottom-up institutional designs as they pursue preferred educational futures. These educational developments in advance of policy and management, arising from the pressure to innovate in order to survive in marketised contexts, ultimately outrun intended institutional designs. These processes create continuing debates and politics over change which are costly to manage and also pose constant problems of control within education. The effects of marketisation in the past decade or more have been farreaching. Simon Marginson, in Chapter 3, analysed the effects of competition within education, drawing attention to the way market competition during the 1990s was overlain on existing educational competition for positional goods. He stressed that market competition would play out differently according to the stratification of positional goods on offer in different schools and universities. The effect would be to increase the segmentation of education markets and, as Mark Western confirms in Chapter 5, encourage social closure at both the top and bottom of education-jobs markets. Jane Kenway and Lindsay Fitzclarence reported on interview data with school students, showing that in a marketised context, students became discerning consumers. They know which are good and bad schools and where they are positioned in the market. There was disturbing evidence in Chapter 6 that some students were resigned to their place in the low end of the schooling market and understood this as their place in society. The implications for teachers of stratification among education providers was foreshadowed by Marjorie Theobald. Her historical study of teachers in a marketised context in the 19th Century shows that there was stratification then of star and sink teachers according to the mar-
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ket position of the school they were associated with. Again, the historical analysis indicates that the effect of marketised education is to confirm social closure on class lines. Marketising institutional redesign intensifies social inequality and promotes social closure into rigid stratified class groupings. This recent trend contrasts with the long-standing Australian commitments to a fair go. As Gronn indicates in Chapter 4, education has long been a means of elite formation and its corollary, non-elite formation. The clear distinction between public and elite private schooling has historically been an important means of reproducing social inequality and for creating relatively secure pathways for students of elite schools to elite occupations. As Western emphasises, such reproduction is less a function of the schools than of their clientele and the way schools have been shaped in response to client demands. But in the context of marketisation and labour market reform, protected pathways to elite formation are taken up by middle-class families wishing to secure cultural advantage for their children. Middle-class flight from public schools further compounds the problem of inequality in education which has already been exacerbated by market segmentation as a result of competition. As Kenway suggests, middle-class flight is an indicator that families are taking up the identity of consumer rather than citizen, and expressing concern for their own children’s educational advantage rather than for all Australian children’s benefits through educational provision. Such trends suggest an increase in tribalism in Australian society rather than traditional commitments to the commonweal. Neo-liberal reform entails complex shifts in patterns of governance and control. As Anna Yeatman argues in Chapter 9, the character of neo-liberalism, particularly its assumptions about individuals as economic units who are disconnected from communities and cultures, has driven governance towards an executive, decisional model. This model presumes that the decision-maker, like the old-styled ‘head of the household’, exercises sovereign power within his dominium and that this executive figure or agency – a premier, government, chief executive, TAFE director or school principal – makes decisions which are binding on those within that dominium – the citizens, workers or teachers. Yeatman argues that, in the context of 1990s neo-liberalism, this patrimonial model of governance has been stripped of traditional ethical responsibilities of leaders to protect those within the dominium. It represents a backlash against an emergent postpatrimonial model of governance that had been developing particularly since the 1960s.
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Such postpatrimonial governance had begun to extend decisional authority and individual status beyond traditional heads of households, and to recognise difference and develop new practices of democratic citizenship based on active participation. Other authors provide further evidence of a long and continuing struggle over modes of governance. Theobald shows that marketised education in the 19th Century confirmed decisional and independent status of school principals in star schools while locking teachers in those schools into poor pay and working conditions. Marketisation benefited the executive figure rather than those within the dominium. As Selleck (1990, p.62) has noted, teachers welcomed bureaucratic rules in education which systematised decision-making processes: … teachers did not have to be dragged under the control of a centralised authority – they went willingly, glad to be rid of the turbulent priests and local communities which bedevilled their existence. To them the 1872 Education Act, which abolished local boards and installed a powerful state bureaucracy, was not a contested act of state formation. At the time it seemed a liberation.
Angus and Seddon’s chapter suggests that the struggle between patrimonial and postpatrimonial governance is playing out within schools and TAFE institutes as managers attempt to assert and extend executive authority, while teachers (and some managers) work around and beyond executive decision-making in collegial and participative ways. These emergent trends – increased social stratification in education, middle-class flight, exacerbated social inequality and division, struggles over modes of governance and decisional status, and ongoing cycles of institutional tinkering to try to fix up the limits of previous reforms – foreshadow a future of ongoing destabilisation in education. But they also raise questions about the limits of neo-liberal reform in Australia. How far can education and training be marketised? What are the costs of neo-liberal reform? And what might be necessary to bring about some kind of re-assessment of neo-liberal institutional redesign?
Evidence of impact and effects By the end of the 1990s considerable evidence about the effects of a decade or more of neo-liberal reforms was becoming available, and increasing debate about the social implications and costs of the
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reforms was occurring. The evidence that is available is an eclectic mix of independent research, theses, surveys, government-sponsored research and evaluation, reviews and reports of committees of inquiry. A comprehensive review of these evaluations and debates is important, but is well beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it is possible to give a flavour of this growing body of material. A landmark study of post-World War II education in England (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1981) used four themes to structure its analysis: context (that is, the institutional and funding arrangements of education and training), access, content, and control. We have used these themes to organise a brief overview of this emerging body of research and evaluation literature.
Context There is a substantial critique developing of the institutional context created as a consequence of neo-liberal reform (for example,. Anderson, 1997; Marginson, 1997; Fooks, Schofield & Ryan, 1997). While the general policy trend has been to marketise education and training, there is widespread recognition that what has developed is not a ‘true market’ as modelled by economists but a quasi-market. For example, a recent review of TAFE in Queensland (Bannikof, 1998), conducted for the Queensland Government, stresses that, despite reforms since 1990 that were intended to create a national training market, the formal vocational education and training sector (including public – mainly TAFE – and private training providers delivering nationally recognised training programs and services) does not operate like a true market. The report asserts: You can distinguish products, buyers and providers. But there is limited choice of products and providers in the formal sector, demand signals to providers are diluted through complex processes and information for consumers is scarce. Government is the dominant buyer and the dominant provider in the sector of the market that it regulates. (Bannikoff, 1998, p.7)
Given this prevalence of government in both the demand and supply sides, Bannikoff (1998, p.9) asserts: Government has a clear role to play in funding vocational education and training because the operation of the training market does not lead to optimal levels of skills in the community. Nor does it lead to appropriate standards, efficiency or fairness. It is a clear case of market failure the market does not, of itself, invest in socially or economically optimal levels of funding.
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Bannikof argues that contestable funding is a blunt instrument for reform and that, used by itself, it ‘leaves a trail of instability and creates a reservoir of resistance to a wider range of changes’ (Bannikoff, 1998, p.11). As Gerald Burke makes clear in Chapter 2, the Commonwealth Government’s own figures indicate that contestability of funding has accompanied reduced budget allocations to support education. Indeed, the National Commission of Audit, established after the Howard Government came to office, indicated that funding for school education declined from 3.6 per cent of GDP in 1983–84 to 2.8 per cent in 1993–94. Reduced funding has been accompanied by an explicit agenda oriented to increasing the privatisation of education and training. In vocational education and training this is evident in the development of the training market which permits private as well as public providers to compete for government funds. In school education the strategy has been more direct. The Howard Commonwealth Government legislated to permit the establishment of private schools on the basis of very small enrolments. They also legislated for an Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment such that every enrolment in a private school will draw $1712 from the following year’s Commonwealth outlay to government schools. Senator Lyn Allison of the Australian Democrats has estimated that these adjustments will consume the whole Commonwealth allocation to government schools if private school enrolment approaches 50 per cent (Anglican Diocese of Melbourne, 1998, p.29). Despite the trend to reduce government involvement and funding responsibilities in education and training, there is increasing evidence that a substantial role for government in education and training is being reaffirmed. In Victoria, for instance, there have been growing protests about the increasing dependence of public schools on ‘voluntary’ levies on parents as a financial base for providing core education services. This protest led, finally, to a statement by the Department of Education concerning the items for which government was responsible. This statement clearly commits government to specific funding responsibilities while leaving open questions about how much funding will be available and how the broad resource base for education will be regulated so as to adequately service citizens in the emerging knowledge economy. There has also been a growing emphasis on government responsibility for orchestrating relations between market, state and community that can sustain effective lifelong learning. The expansion of work-for-the-dole schemes and affirmation of ‘mutual obligation’ are expressions of this emerging commitment by govern-
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ment to organising learning relations beyond the traditional parameters of institutionalised schooling.
Access Ultimately, the viability of the redesign of education and training has to be assessed against students’ opportunities for learning, that is to say their access to education and their learning outcomes. Trend studies indicate that there has been a long-term growth in participation in education and training. A recent report on the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth, based on cohorts of 19-year-olds in the early 1980s, mid-1980s, late 1980s and mid-1990s, found that: • year 12 completion more than doubled – up from 35% in 1980 to 78% in 1994; • young entrants to further education and training became more likely to have completed year 12 – up from 43% in 1980 to 75% in 1994, but the post-school participation of early school leavers has also improved; • participation in higher education almost doubled – up from 20% in 1980 to 38% in 1994; • participation in non-apprenticeship TAFE courses showed a consistent increase – up from 13% in 1980 to 20% in 1994; • participation in apprenticeships declined substantially in the early 1990s – down from 18% in each of 1980 and 1984, to 16% in 1989, and then to 12% in 1994, but this decline has been offset somewhat by an increase in traineeships – up from 2% in 1989 to 3% in 1994. (Long et al., 1999, p.vi) Although these data predate the most recent neo-liberal reforms in education, they indicate that, despite all the neo-liberal criticism of Australian education, bureaucratically organised education and training do enable access and learning outcomes. However, since the early 1990s, school retention rates have fallen. Lamb (1998) maps the dimensions of this trend by gender and school type in the light of various social trends. The analysis shows that retention rates have fallen most for boys, government school students, rural youth and children who are not from professional and managerial backgrounds. Lamb canvasses a number of possible explanations for these trends but, noting an association between school failure and decline in school completion (Teese, 1996), suggests that:
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… it is important to consider the impact on the quality of school experiences of changes in the levels of school funding. It may be no coincidence that the decline in school completion, which has largely involved government schools, has occurred during a period in which various State governments have reduced funds to these schools. Larger class sizes, general staff cuts, fewer resources, reduction in support services, and the loss of specialist teachers may well have had an impact on the range and quality of school programs and, ultimately, on the quality of teaching and learning experiences of students. (Lamb, 1998, p.28)
Long et al. (1999) confirm the re-emergence of family factors as significant determinants of educational access and success. Among the student cohort which was 19 in the mid-1990s, parental occupation and family wealth had re-emerged as factors influencing entry to higher education from year 12, irrespective of other family background characteristics. As Spierings (1999, p.8) notes, other OECD countries are overtaking Australian school retention rates and ‘Australia seems to be the only OECD country in which school participation has actually fallen during the 1990s’. More recent data and more detailed analyses indicate that within these aggregate trends there are increasingly complex movements in access and outcomes (for example, Lamb, 1998; Golding & Volkoff, 1998; Teese, 1996). The Dussledorp Skills Forum (1998; 1999) has drawn much of this work together in two significant collections, one on 15–19-year-olds and the other on 20–24-year-olds. The general conclusion that emerges from this detailed work is that young people, teenagers and young adults, have been seriously disadvantaged by changes in the labour market over the past two decades. They are more exposed to casual work, to employment that is part-time or temporary in nature, and, in general, they are increasingly being offered work that is low skilled and provides static or declining earnings (Speirings, 1999, p.5). These labour market trends make education and training increasingly important in the competition for jobs and adult status. Yet, the reports indicate that almost 15 per cent of 15–19-yearolds are marginalised in that they are unemployed or working parttime and are not involved in education and training, or they have dropped out of the labour market (McLelland & Macdonald, 1998). Twenty-six per cent of 20–24-year-olds are similarly marginalised (McLelland & Macdonald, 1999). Young women (32 per cent) are more affected than young men (20 per cent). There is some evidence that young people’s patterns of participation in education and training are shifting towards a combination of
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work and study, and that they are developing a range of capacities rather than focusing on specialist programs (for example, Dwyer, 1998; Golding & Volkoff, 1998). These trends suggest that there may be sharp generational differences between students and their teachers. However, there is also evidence that young people’s values and aspirations have not changed significantly from those of their parents and that they continue to seek an effective transition to independent adulthood, autonomy to consume and establish a lifelong career, and to form life and parenting relationships of their own (Spierings, 1999, p.5). But among the growing percentage of marginalised young people, these aspirations will be difficult to realise. The implications for social education in terms of social learning, care and support, and general skills development are obvious.
Content The impact of neo-liberal reform on the content of education and training is difficult to pin down because the effects of different reforms associated with different sources of content in education and training are complex and interactive. Reforms have shaped formal curriculum and assessment, the hidden curriculum related to the implicit norms and values structured into organisational arrangements and practices, and the embodied expertise that teachers bring to their pedagogy. Curriculum and assessment have become more centrally regulated and, in many respects, the reforms have reaffirmed the traditional dualistic patterns of academic and vocational learning. For example, during the 1990s the Victorian Certificate of Education gradually became more like the traditional Higher School Certificate, which it replaced in 1989, than its innovators would have predicted (Collins, 1992). In vocational education and training, curriculum reform has encouraged a behaviourist skills-based competency-based model which confirms older patterns of vocational education (Stevenson, 1994). The ‘hidden curriculum’ – the organisation of education provision and the norms, values and priorities that are evident as institutionalised practices of teaching, assessing and administering education and training – has also shifted. Marketisation, commercialisation, the growth of regulatory practices that encourage preoccupation with visible performativity, and consequent normative conflicts around
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teachers’ and managers’ work, all create learning contexts. The upshot of this learning is not just evident in student’s ability to perform in assessment tasks or to demonstrate particular behaviours. More importantly, such learning results in the formation of particular kinds of people. Students not only learn knowledge, skills and attitudes, but also how to be one kind of person rather than another kind. As Kenway and Fitzclarence show in Chapter 6, students and parents are being shaped as consumers who look out for their own advantage rather than maintaining older commitments as citizens with interests in the public good. The capacities of teachers to make their embodied expertise available to students in their care have also been redefined as a result of neo-liberal reforms which have changed teachers’ employment conditions, intensified teaching work, and increased teacher regulation through performance appraisal and professional recognition schemes. With increased class sizes and increased work demands, teachers now have less time and emotional resources for building productive learning relations with pupils (Blackmore, 1998). Technology has been promoted as a means of facilitating more efficient learning, although there is evidence that resource demands in developing and maintaining powerful educational computer applications are very substantial (Cashion, 1998). Increased independent learning has also been encouraged, although whether this leads to increased learning or simply more ‘hunting and gathering’ of information is hard to say (Bates, 1998). Moreover, independent learning also serves to further problematise the role and responsibilities of teachers. With curriculum and assessment decisions shifted to central agencies, and learning decisions shifted to students, there is a vacuum around the teacher, who is reduced to a deliverer of knowledge and expertise objectified in modules and materials, and a facilitator who can manage learning processes. This erosion of the teacher as a significant source of curriculum content is intensified by reductions in professional development for teachers (although not managers) and, in the VET sector, the removal of requirements for teachers to possess teaching qualifications. In Victoria, for example, teachers need only have undertaken workplace trainer and assessor qualifications in order to teach in TAFE institutes. Victoria also commits a low proportion of gross wages and salaries to professional development (0.7 per cent) compared with other TAFE systems and industry more generally, and casual teachers, who make
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up 20 per cent of the workforce, received only 3 per cent of staff development expenditure (Villiers et al., 1997). Yet, increasingly sophisticated knowledge and skills are required to support effective learning in vocational education and training (Seddon & Malley, 1998). School-teacher education provision has also been reduced as a consequence of neo-liberal reform in higher education. A number of faculties of education, particularly in Victoria, have been subject to reductions in student load in initial teacher education programs. This has coincided with an ageing of the teaching workforce and increased alternative labour market opportunities that have led some commentators to predict a shortfall in teacher supply. The Australian Council of Deans of Education (Preston, 1998), for instance, has projected a shortage of primary and secondary teachers by 2004. It is in relation to content that some of the most active contestation of neo-liberal reforms has occurred. There are active debates around, for example, literacy and civics curriculum (Yates, 1995). Narrow behaviourist competency-based training has been contested through policy processes (Lilly 1998), curriculum and assessment (Sefton et al., 1993) and in day-to-day teaching in classrooms (Rushbrook, 1997; Billett et al., 1999). The growth of VET in Schools has problematised the nature of vocational education and reopened the question of how general and vocational education can come together in ways that benefit learners. A recent set of case studies of school-industry programs (Malley et al., 1999) indicates that many schools, teachers and communities are developing innovative programs that extend beyond the frameworks established by central education and training agencies. In some cases, central agencies have changed their guidelines as a result of this work. What is emerging is a model of general education that encompasses workplace learning and which also provides more ‘client service’ than is usually available in TAFE institutes or other training organisations. In many cases, this support is attributed to teachers’ traditional professional responsibility and their duty of care to students. As Malley et al. (1999, p.24) indicate: This level of servicing is probably the major factor contributing to ongoing concerns about the adequacy of many traditional school-based resource allocation models to structured workplace learning programs. It might be too simplistic to suggest that this resourcing issue occurs because schools are over-servicing, as the feedback from students, parents and employers identifies these services as a major reason for their participation.
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Control Neo-liberal education reform has refigured relations of control in education in two ways: by privileging the voice of industry and undercutting the voice of educators and other community stakeholders; and by reducing citizen voice to consumer voice and undercutting opportunities for broad participation in educational decision-making. The upshot of these two trends has been the decentralisation of provision of education between provider and consumer, while also centralising control by government as a consequence of government being the key funder, provider and regulator of education and training. This reregulation of control in education has been particularly evident in intergovernmental alignments and conflicts (Lingard, 1993) and also in the development of decision-making processes which exclude key stakeholders (Seddon, 1996). What has emerged in education and training is a quasi-market and an evaluative state (Whitty, Power & Halpin, 1998) which has become increasingly hollowed-out by the strong emphasis on performativity and performance measures under Liberal–National Coalition Governments. Residual equity programs that had been supported by predecessor Labor Governments have been weakened (Lingard, 1999). In a sense, the textual reality produced as a result of proliferating assessment, reporting and accountability measures has become more important in educational decision-making than the social reality of educational provision and practice (Jackson, 1993). School enrolment figures, for example, have been used to determine school provision. In Victoria, primary schools with less than 150 students and secondary schools with less than 200 were targeted for closure in 1993 in the cynically named ‘Quality Provision’ process. Yet the Commonwealth has encouraged the formation of private schools by legislating that nongovernment schools can open and receive Commonwealth funding with far fewer enrolments (primary = 20; secondary = 60). The centralised evaluative state asserts executive authority over its dominium, encourages consumer exit rather than citizen voice, and is increasingly secretive in its practices of governance. In Victoria, for instance, the Kennett Government was criticised by the state auditorgeneral for failing to make its budget allocations in education transparent. During this Government’s term of office there was a wealth of promotional material available but little statistical and financial data to provide a clear picture of developments in Victorian education. The Government refused to release some research findings, such as a
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report by Professor Caldwell of the University of Melbourne on the effect of class sizes on literacy development. This report was later released under Freedom of Information. Teachers were subject to increased restrictions in relation to speaking in public on education issues. Teaching Service Order 140, for example, limited Department of Education employees from speaking freely to school councils or gatherings of parents on policy matters. The Kennett Government simply broke off consultative relations with unions on coming to office (Spaull, 1999; Humphries, 1999) and, as well as regulating information, seemed impervious to public criticism. Yet, reports by concerned citizens apparently has a cumulative effect on public opinion, if not on the Government. For example, the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne (1998) established a Synod Schools Task Group to argue its concern about the direction and trajectory of school reform. The report presented a carefully documented case outlining the impact of neo-liberal reform on funding (based on official Commonwealth and State documentation), school management, teachers, students and equity, and the public interest. In establishing this investigation, a preamble was approved which captured the Synod’s disquiet: This Synod views with dismay the increasing polarisation between rich and poor in the facilities and infrastructure provided within the State education system, which expose the more vulnerable sections of the community to serious disadvantage. (p.1)
The Victorian Coalition Government (Department of Education, 1998) responded to the Report by indicating that the Synod got its facts wrong and by countering specific claims in the Report. The response noted that all the information (except some current budget data) it was using was publicly available although, apart from one reference to Education Victoria’s Corporate and Business Plan, 1998, none of this documentation was sourced in the response. It concluded by emphasising the Department of Education’s ‘willingness to debate the merits of its policies and operations, so long as the debate is based on fact not misrepresentation’ (p.15). Yet what counts as a ‘fact’ is clearly contentious. Statements about the purposes of education outlined in the Synod Report, and the Government’s response to this outline (see Figure 10.1), illustrate the point. The response claimed that the Synod and Government statements were similar in their ‘essential aims’ and that only the wording differed. Yet the rest of the response picked up endless ‘inaccuracies’ in terminology in the Synod’s Report.
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Figure 10.1 Statements of the purposes of education in the Synod Report and the Victorian Department of Education’s response. The of purposes of education (Synod Report)
The vision of education (Government response)
… the vision of a quality education system which is open to all irrespective of social, economic, ethnic or religious background, which offers equal access to that knowledge and those values which are widely shared in our society, which enables society to draw on the widest possible range of abilities in the population, which prepares people for effective participation in a democratic society and which helps unify that society. (p. 3)
The Department of Education’s vision is for a world-class education and training, founded on consumer choice and accountability, and achieved in partnership with business and the community, which provides literate and numerate citizens with enhanced__NOTE: COPY MISSING HERE???
Despite recent emphasis on a performance-focused evaluative and increasingly secretive state, there are plenty of indications that parents and other stakeholders do not prefer contractualised accountability but seek to participate in a kind of local decision-making that values cooperation and collegiality (Macpherson, 1998). There are also signs of increasing pressure for less secretive and less unresponsive government. In the 1999 Victorian Election, for example, the level of secrecy in government was a major issue and considerable emphasis was given to the danger of secrecy breeding corruption. State–federal relations provide another set of forums in which patrimonial and unresponsive government is being contested. In vocational education and training, for example, national policy has demanded the use of ungraded competency-based assessment, but this is widely criticised by teachers who condemn the practice because they say it reduces student motivation (Kavanagh, 1999). Parents, students, universities and many employers criticise such assessment because it reduces opportunities for access to further education and because it reduces the information available to employers on which they can make job selections (Rumsey, 1997). States began to take the matter into their own hands and, despite national training policy, initiate graded competency assessment. Alongside these assessments of the impacts of neo-liberal reforms in relation to the four specified dimensions of education and training,
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global assessments are also beginning to emerge. These evaluations begin to address the way the redesign of education has affected education as a social institution. For example, a recent five-country comparative evaluation (Whitty, Power & Halpin, 1998) concluded as follows: The dismantling of bureaucratic control of education provision currently taking place to varying degrees in our five countries represents a significant and far-reaching strategy to reformulate the relationship between government, schools and parents. … The evidence we have put forward suggests that recent education policies are doing little to alleviate inequalities in access and participation and, in many cases, may be exacerbating them. (p.126)
The evaluators added that … there was insufficient evidence to claim that self-managing schools enhance student attainment. So, while it is clear that self-management results in changes to certain school processes, there is considerable ambiguity about how or whether these have positive consequences for student outcomes. (p.111)
While acknowledging that school reform has engendered organisational changes, the evaluators also noted evidence of continuity in education. They note that there has been little change in the balance of power between lay and professional stakeholders, and that there is little evidence of enhanced teacher autonomy and professionalism. Yet there have been significant changes in the role of principals and a widening gap between managers and the managed. Performance indicators emphasise product over process of learning, and narrow the scope of education and its purposes. Whitty Power and Halpin and the other evaluators add: Perhaps most worrying of all is the welter of evidence on the systemwide effects of articulating self-management with choice-driven funding mechanisms and the marketisation of education generally. There seems to be little doubt that such a combination of policies is enhancing the advantages of the already advantaged at the expense of the least well off. (p.126)
Conclusion: beyond nostalgia This collection claims to move ‘beyond nostalgia’ in the consideration of contemporary education and training. It has tackled this task
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through critique and also by beginning to flag issues and themes that help us think about preferred educational futures rather than simply reiterating the probable futures that neo-liberalism has laid out for us. There are key lessons to be drawn from these analyses. Firstly, it is clear that rational actor theories of institutional redesign can provide only a very schematic picture of possible institutional redesigns. Individuals are not only rational actors but are embedded in relationships and social landscapes. These landscapes are not thin contexts in which individual decisions are the only significant factor. Rather they are thick environments which have histories and cultures, patterns of affiliation and difference, and relations of advantage– disadvantage and possession-dispossession. It is the thickness of social environments, and the embeddedness in them of social actors that people them, that render rational actor institutional redesigns a caricature of social life. It is the thickness of social life that is real and which must be dealt with in promoting either change or continuity in education. The analyses collected here begin to provide a basis for grasping and understanding what we are calling here the ‘thickness of social life’. Each chapter is informed by knowledge traditions within the social sciences and humanities that have accumulated and tested resources and ways of understanding social institutions that offer partial insights into the complexities of social life. These insights shed light on the social processes that constitute history in the making, the obdurate social relationships and structures that persist irrespective of voluntarist institutional redesigns, the continuing patterns of inequality which demand government attention, and the way long-standing relations of class, gender, race and culture inflect institutional processes. While institutional design can begin with rational models which identify potentially effective strategies for change, things cannot end there. It is these complexities that must be taken into account in any institutional redesign process because they will overrule change strategies and overwhelm those individuals who seek to enact change. Effective policy and practice depend upon this kind of broad knowledge base, oriented to understanding the thickness of social life, as much as the data collection and opinionaires that are currently favoured and sponsored by government. Global and local historical, social and cultural processes disrupt and undercut the design intentions of governments and managers despite their authority in decisional processes. As a result, it seems likely that neo-liberal reform will bring ongoing instability in education because
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embedded cultures, traditions and routines have been destabilised through the 1990s. These social and historical dynamics appear to be bringing increased inequality and social closure which are taking us towards a social order in which there is more social division and dispossession. These developments are not simple effects but are accompanied by both attendant consequences and increased costs. The privileging of consumer voice in public affairs seems to encourage a consumption-oriented ‘me society’ that puts individual advantage before the commonweal and to undercut the individual’s role and faith in democratic politics. As Don Aitken (1999) comments, the combination of a loss of a national project, a lack of confidence about the future, pronounced individualism, preoccupations with the ‘economy’ and lack of interest in ‘society’, a sluggish economy with high unemployment, and increased welfare demands on a declining tax base, creates ‘an unusual philosophical and political context’ in Australia. He suggests that this context seems unlikely to sustain present quality of life or a high level of civil law and order in the longer term. He calls for active efforts to rebuild social and economic infrastructure within the national domain. Finally, as this collection, together with a range of more recent research, has suggested, there are indications that the tide of neoliberal reform is turning. The 1999 Election outcome in Victoria is probably the most obvious indicator of such change in Australia. The social and economic costs of marketisation are becoming increasingly apparent and public opinion is beginning to mobilise against the evaluative and secret state, and against the subordination of quality of life issues to privatised profitability. There is growing concern that the gulf between rich and poor is ultimately destructive of society and there is a sense that, despite the rhetoric of globalisation, neo-liberal reform does not position Australia well in the New World order. The emergence of arguments about social capacity, the responsibilities of government to Australian citizens, and the importance of national culture and identity in a globalising world, point towards a much needed reworking of the relations between state, market and community in the provision of social infrastructure such as education and training. These developments foreshadow a renewed process of nation- and institution-building but, this time, oriented to global as well as local frames, processes of community development and problem-solving. As these chapters have indicated there is already a live academic debate about new modes of governance and patterns of democratic
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citizenship (Davis, Sullivan & Yeatman, 1997; Yeatman, 1998). There is advocacy of the importance of civil society (Cox, 1995) and the contribution of social capital to social and economic life (Fukuyama, 1994; Sen, 1992). These themes are being taken up in public debate and being used to challenge political parties to revise policy agendas (Latham, 1998; Tanner, 1999). There is also an extensive re-assessment of the impact of reform and the need to attend to the documentation of ugly increases in inequality, social marginalisation and alienation. But perhaps more importantly, there is also evidence of bottom-up innovation and community-building that is problematising the traditional processes of administrative problem management and running ahead of governments. Some of our chapters flagged such developments. They are also evident in the development of community banks, community employment schemes, small-business developments and the proliferation of community activism on single-issue campaigns, such as urban and regional development, environment, school closures, and the protection of legitimate community interests in work and collective action. The drive for more civic responsibility is already becoming evident. What is now required is a process of institutional redesign oriented to facilitating these developments, not stymieing them through work intensification, mis-allocation of public resources and the lack of institutional frameworks and agencies for effective collective action. The challenge in education is to move beyond both neo-liberal nostalgia for the unfettered free-market capitalism of the 19th Century and social democratic nostalgia for a nationally oriented education provision and governance focused on characteristics of the postSecond World War period. It also means moving beyond the policy framework of the 1990s that has set cost and care as opposites and then privileged the former over the latter. The care-less effects of neoliberal reform reveals the unsustainability of this policy regime and its implementation in the practical world of education and training. In reshaping Australian education for the 21st Century, it will be necessary to address Australia and its diverse communities within a global context and tackle this policy agenda by building on synergies between cost and care that contribute to productive community building. Already, alternatives to neo-liberal policy and practice are emerging which are beginning to rework the polarisation of cost and care. These alternatives discern that while cost is important, care is what sustains societies. They recognise that economic development and profitability is not an end in itself, but only a means to a good life for
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all. They also see that critical decisions relate to the way costs are incurred and the way they are met in institutional designs that benefit communities in equitable ways. These policy and practice alternatives allow us to begin to shape a schematic outline of a broad reform agenda that pursues community development and the reworking of state, market and community relations with a view to nation-building for the global era. It recognises that nation-building consolidates the social and cultural resources that make Australia distinctive in world affairs and global markets, and creates a basis for reaching out into the globalising world. It seeks institutional frameworks that accommodate difference, and the rebuilding and re-legitimation of participative forms of governance. Government has a necessary role and responsibilities in these processes, not least in defining and guaranteeing a financial basis for social development. But these tasks will need to be addressed in the context of shared governance, with authority exercised in partnership with citizens and their communities. In all this, education and training will be crucial because through education and training learners become knowledgeable, develop relevant capacities for social practice and take on the responsibilities of citizenship in a shared national community. These kinds of outcomes mean that educational effectiveness beyond the neo-liberal 1990s will need to address three core challenges: Firstly, there is a need for educational redesign that promotes personformation oriented to citizenship and responsible adulthood as well as skill formation within and beyond the frames of formal schooling. As Yeatman suggests in Chapter 9, such processes of person-formation within education and training which support responsible citizenship will need to be joined ‘with a participative conception of policy process where citizens are drawn into public learning and social problemsolving in ways which responsibilise them as policy claimants’. The trajectory is towards lifelong learning in which community development in a variety of contexts goes hand in hand with person-formation to advance the learner, both as an individual and as a member of diverse communities (for example, global, national, local, occupational, political). Secondly, there will need to be a far greater recognition than there has been through the 1990s that the peopled landscape of education is not only a learning place but also a workplace. Between the system of education and training provision and individual learners, there are educational workers who realise the educational enterprise. These
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workers are a crucial element in both the systematic provision of education and training, and in effective learning, because they orchestrate and give content and purpose to learning. The conditions of learning/work will determine the effectiveness of the educational enterprise. Finally, the central role of educational workers in realising educational outcomes demands that careful attention be given to both their formation and organisation. Traditionally, these educational workers have been termed ‘teachers’, although through the 1990s it has been managers that have been privileged. The critical question for the future is how practitioners’ teacherly capacities that sustain effective learning (that is, caring, competence, inquiry, social learning and community building) might be integrated with the organisational capacities of managers and the emerging agendas around lifelong learning and community development. The challenge is to remake processes of teacher formation and to reconsider the current division of educational labour so that Australia can develop an effective teaching workforce for the learning society.
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Index Notes 1. Entries in bold indicate major entry. 2. Abbreviations used in this index: ACE (Adult and Continuing Education); ALP (Australian Labor Party); ANU (Australian National University); CAEs (colleges of advanced education); CofE (Church of England); CEGGS (Church of England Girls Grammar School); HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme); NTRA (National Training Reform Agenda); RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology); TAFE (technical and further education); UTS (University of Technology, Sydney); VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education); VET (vocational education and training) Australian Catholic University 61, 63 Ballarat, University of 61, 63 Benhabib, Seyla 176 Board, Peter 17, 18, 19, 85 Brown, Alan 155 Bruce–Page government 85 Budd, R.H. 135 business competition in education and 49, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 106, 159–69, 202, 203, 207 elites and 75, 78, 79, 80, 82, 84–8, 94 universities and 64, 65 VET and 37, 61, 64, 65, 159–69 bureaucracy and public service economic rationalism and viii, 16, 91, 156
Aborigines xii, 42, 180, 181 access see recruitment ACE ix, 43–4 Adelaide, University of 60–2 Aitken, Don 206 Alberta, University of 86 Allison, Lyn 195 ALP viii, x, 1, 2, 20, 55, 56, 57, 60, 100, 153, 181, 187, 188, 201 Anglican Diocese of Melbourne 202–3 apprenticeships 26, 39, 40–1, 46, 196 ANU xv, 57, 60–2, 63, 64, 190 Arendt, Hannah 174 assessment see attainment attainment 19, 23, 38, 40, 74, 93, 115, 198, 200, 203, 204 see also examinations
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education control x, 2, 6, 7, 11, 12, 15–23, 154–6, 159, 172, 193, 196, 204 elites and 77–84, 94, 101 expertise 6, 16, 19, 77, 78 teaching service and 15–23, 101, 146–8, 154–6, 159, 193, 196, 204 Public Service Act (Vic. 1883) 133, 146–8 CAEs 56, 60, 61, 66 Calder, William 85 Caldwell (Professor) 202 Canberra Australian University 61, 63 capital costs 45–6, 47 Central Queensland, University of 61, 63 Charles Sturt University 61, 63 civics education 1–23, 200 Coalition governments see Liberal Party; National Party co-education 133, 140 competition class formation and xix, 91–104 economics and 1, 2, 16, 20, 22, 25, 49, 50–2, 76, 172, 178, 179, 180, 182, 188, 191, 192, 197 education and xix, 24–47, 48–69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 79, 83, 87, 90, 91–104, 105–29, 154–69, 191 elites and 71, 72, 74, 76, 79, 83, 87, 90 higher education and 26, 48–69, 159–69 schools and 2, 5, 71, 72, 74, 76, 79, 83, 87, 90, 91–104, 105–29, 154–8, 167–9 Copland, Douglas Berry 85, 86 councils see schools – councils Cox, Ross 145 curriculum 5, 16, 21, 36, 38, 45, 82, 83, 87, 136, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 162, 164, 165, 166, 168, 198–200 Curtin University of Technology 60–1, 63 Darling, James 82, 83, 94
Davitt, Arthur & Ellen 135 Dawkins, John 2, 55, 56, 59 Deakin University viii, 60–1, 63, 67 deregulation 1, 2, 4, 20, 22, 106, 148, 159, 188 disabilities 42, 175, 180 Drake, John & Anne 140 economics competition see competition economic rationalism 2–6, 20, 72, 91–2, 148, 153, 169, 171, 189 economics of VET 24–47 economists ix, 6, 77, 159, 186, 189, 194 elites and 18, 71–2, 75, 76, 91–2, 101–3, 192 globalisation see globalisation Keynesian 72, 77, 85, 181–2, 184 markets see markets planning & statistics 7, 8, 11, 13, 19, 20, 22 postpatrimonial governance and xxii, 170–85 Edith Cowan University 61, 63 elites 70–90, 92–104, 192 employers 1, 24, 26, 29, 36, 37, 39, 41, 45, 46, 49, 85, 92, 97, 166, 173, 174, 175, 184, 200, 203 ethnicity xix, 2, 21, 42, 43, 94, 203 examinations 10, 16, 132 see also attainment families Aboriginal 181 consumers 1, 65–6, 90, 107, 109, 119, 123, 143, 192, 197 domestic arrangements 118, 119, 148, 175, 177 elites 54, 70, 78–9, 81, 82, 83, 84, 89, 90, 96, 97 equity 41, 96, 97, 99, 189–90, 192, 197 funding 26, 54, 65–6, 90, 96, 97, 99 history of education 18, 19, 20, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143
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moral influence 16 see also parents Flinders University 60–2, 66 Forster, Maria & George 139–40 Fort Street Boys High School 80 funding fundraising 2, 106, 115 government ix, xiii, 1, 24–47, 49, 50–1, 55–7, 65, 66, 67, 133, 136, 141, 195, 197, 201, 202 private 24, 25, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 38, 48, 56, 57, 65, 66, 115, 162 student fees 24, 27, 35, 36, 50, 56, 57, 65, 66, 98–9 see also Victorian Education Act 1872
Haig, Robert 120 Hawke, Bob 76, 188 Hawthorn Grammar School 136 HECS 35, 36, 56, 57, 65, 69, 98–9 higher education see tertiary education Higinbotham Royal Commission 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 140, 141, 144, 145 Horne, Donald 74–6, 84, 86, 89 Howard, John 38, 188, 195
Geelong College 137 Geelong Grammar School 78, 79, 80, 81–3, 94, 125 Geelong National Grammar School 136, 137 gender xix, 42, 94, 107, 118, 119, 129–50, 170–85, 196, 205 globalisation 1, 2–3, 16, 25, 49, 58–9, 70, 76, 90, 188, 206, 207 Goold (Archbishop) 136 government role competition in higher education 48–69 development of schools 1–23 economics of VET 24–47 education–government nexus xx, 170–209 elites and 72, 89–90, 192 funding ix, xiii, 1, 24–47, 49, 50–1, 55–7, 65, 66, 67, 133, 136, 141, 195, 197, 201, 202–3 reinventing government xviii–xx, 1–47 Schools of the Future viii, 152, 155–8, 167–9 Grandridge Secondary College 154–8, 159, 161–4, 167–9 Griffith University 60–2, 66, 67
James Cook University 60–1, 63, 67 Jenvey, Mary 129–33, 136, 137, 144, 145 Johnston, Neil 159
independent schools see private schools inequality 91–104 Irving, Martin Howy 136
Kane, Benjamin 129, 130, 135, 136 Keating, Paul 2, 188 Kennett Jeffrey viii, ix, 155, 156, 186, 188, 190, 201, 202 Keynes, John Maynard 72, 77, 85, 181–2, 184 King’s School 82 Klein, Barry 160, 164, 167, 169 La Trobe University 60–2, 67 Labor Party see ALP Liberal Party viii, x, 1, 20, 64, 98–9, 155, 156, 186, 187, 188, 201 literacy 25, 43, 44, 54, 200, 202 Macartney (Dean) 140 Macquarie University 57, 60–2, 66 Manly Boys High School 81 markets education market viii–xi, xiv, xv, xix–xxi elites and 72, 76, 91–104, 192 globalisation 1, 2–3, 25 higher education and 36, 48–69
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labour 43 political philosophy 20, 22, 23, 24, 25 postpatrimonial governance and xxiii, 170–85 quasi-markets xix, 48, 51, 55, 56, 58, 64, 69, 133, 134, 141, 188, 194, 201 schools and 2–7, 16, 36, 105–28, 155–8, 187–93, 198 TAFE (NTRA) ix, 36–8, 159–66, 167–9 see also competition; economic rationalism media xi, 78, 108, 109–12, 113, 119, 126 Melbourne Boys High School 80 Melbourne Grammar School 78, 79, 80, 81 Melbourne Technical College 85 Melbourne, University of 60–2, 64, 66, 85, 86, 136, 139, 202 Menzies, Robert 74 meritocracy xix–xx, 67, 70–90, 93–5, 103 Monash, John 85 Monash University 60–2 Morrison, George 136 multiculturalism x, 109, 181 Murdoch University 60–2, 67 National Party viii, 1, 20, 64, 98–9, 156, 186, 187, 188, 201 Nell, F.A. 145 Neven, Grace 147 New England, University of 60–2, 86 New South Wales 17, 70, 77, 79–80, 81, 144, 160 New South Wales, University of 60–2, 64, 66 Newcastle University 60–2 North Sydney Boys High School 78, 80 Northern Territory, University of 61, 63 NTRA 152, 159–66, 167–9
parents viii, x, xx, 2, 4, 15, 21, 22, 106, 107, 112, 113, 117–20, 187, 197 see also families pastoral care 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 23, 85 Pike, Tabitha 140 postpatrimonial governance xxiii, 170–85, 192–3 Presbyterian Geelong College 137 Presbyterian Ladies College 81 privatisation ix, 2, 4, 7, 22, 30, 188, 189, 195, 206 private schools elites and 55, 67, 70–1, 77–84, 90, 93, 94, 95 funding and government policy 2, 4, 7, 24, 32, 33, 36, 38, 46, 55, 195, 201 history 13 recruitment 2, 7 see also named schools progressive education 154–6, 161–2 public (state) schools elites and x, 78–81, 90, 93 expenditure on 30–4 history of schools 9–20, 23 management ix, 24 Schools of the Future viii, 152, 155–8, 167–9 social theory and x, 1–23 see also schools see also named schools public service see bureaucracy Pusey, Michael 2, 91, 94, 153 qualifications elites and 84, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 103 lack of 25 teachers 130, 134, 135, 136, 139, 145, 146, 199 VET 26, 36, 39, 40, 44, 199 quality and attainment 19, 23, 38, 45, 49, 53, 54 see also attainment; examinations Queensland 17, 39, 194
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INDEX Queensland, University of 60–2, 64 Queensland University of Technology 60–1, 63 Rae, John 142 Rae, John & Emily, and family 139 Rae, William 139 recruitment 2, 7, 94–104, 196–8 Regan, Jack 154, 156–8, 164, 167, 169 religion/religious schools Anglican/CofE 14, 15, 195, 202–3 general 2, 8, 9–18, 21, 22, 77, 78, 80, 81, 94, 136, 140, 143, 193, 202 Protestant 13, 14, 77, 78, 80, Roman Catholic 13, 14, 15, 34, 61, 63, 77, 80, 81, 136, 143 see also named church schools research educational and social xi, xvii, 46, 53, 68, 71, 81, 86, 88, 95, 96, 101, 103, 105–28, 151–69, 190, 194, 201, 206 funding 45, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 64 universities 38, 45, 50, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 92, 93 retention 40, 44–5, 96, 146, 196, 197 retrenchment viii Ricketson, Staniforth 85 RMIT University 60–1, 63, 66 Rogers Templeton Royal Commission 144, 145 Rosenblum, Edward & Harriet 140 rural issues 38, 42, 43, 137, 139, 156 schools advertising 109–12, 113, 117, 118, 123 closures viii, 133, 201, 207 councils ix, x, 115, 119–20, 129–33, 135–6, 202 discipline 114–15, 116, 119–20, 121, 145 history of 9–20, 23 markets and ix, 105–28
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principals viii, ix, 81, 106, 115, 125, 129–33, 136, 137, 143, 145, 154, 156–8, 164, 167, 169, 204 private see private schools public see public schools retention 40, 44–5, 96, 146, 196, 197 Schools of the Future viii, 152, 155–8, 167–9 teachers see teachers see also named schools Scotch College 78, 79, 80, 81 Sergeant, John 145 Service, James 145 Shore (school) 78, 80 Smith, Adam 55 Smyth, John viii sociologists 6 South Australia 35 South Australia, University of 60–1, 63 Southern Cross University 61, 63 Southern Queensland, University of 61, 63 St James’ Girls School 140 St Mark’s CofE Girls School 129–33, 140, 144 St Peter’s College 79, 80 Stark, Mary 147 state education see public (state) schools Stow, David 135 Streeton Institute 159–69 Stretton, Hugh 75, 76, 82 students attainment & assessment 165, 166, 189, 199, 203, 204 competition between 52, 53 consumers 1, 2, 4, 7, 105–128, 191 disadvantaged 157, 191, 192, 196–7, 202 fees 24, 27, 35, 36, 50, 56, 57, 65, 66, 98–9 gender 132–3, 136, 138, 141 numbers & resources 2, 26, 27–9, 32, 33, 34, 53, 67, 156, 157, 164
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student:teacher ratios 34, 200 teacher–student relationship 5, 8, 10, 13, 14, 18, 23, 114–15, 116, 145, 153, 154, 156, 165, 166, 187, 189, 198, 199, 200 Sunshine Coast University College 61 Swinburne University of Techology 61, 63 Sydney Boys High School 78, 80 Sydney CEGGS 81 Sydney Grammar School 80 Sydney, University of 60–2, 64 TAFE apprenticeships 41 funding 33, 38, 45, 67 NTRA 151–3, 159–66, 167–9 participation 27, 41, 42, 43, 100, 196 Queensland 194 teachers 159–66, 167–9, 199–200 see also VET Tasmania, University of 60–2, 85 Tate, Frank 17, 85 Taylor F.W. 85 teachers activism and 20–21, 23 bureaucracy and 5, 6, 23 casual 45 discipline 5, 114–15, 116, 145 see also (below) teacher–student relationship gender xix, xxi, 129–50 history of profession xxi, 129, 134–47, 191–2, 193, 209 marketing and 113–23, 159–66 principals viii, ix, 81, 106, 115, 125, 129–33, 136, 137, 143, 145, 154, 156–8, 164, 167, 169, 193, 204 retrenchment viii salaries and conditions 32, 33, 65, 132, 143–5, 157–8, 199–200, 208–9 student:teacher ratios 34 TAFE (NTRA) 159–66, 167–9,
199–200 teacher–student relationship x, 5, 8, 10, 13, 14, 18, 23, 114–15, 116, 119, 121, 122, 123, 145, 153, 154, 156, 165, 166, 187, 189, 198, 199, 200 training 47, 61 university 65 VET 45, 47 technical and further education see TAFE tertiary education x, 48–69 see also TAFE, universities, VET testing see attainment; examinations Tisdall, Henry & Lucy 139 Tufnell, E.C. 135 unemployment xii, 20, 23, 25, 30, 109, 112, 197, 206 unions x, xii, 37, 78, 148, 154, 156, 157, 158, 161, 202 universities competition xix, 48–69, 91–104 funding ix, 26, 27, 29, 33, 38, 44, 45, 48, 50–1, 64–7, 98 hierarchy 48–9, 51, 53–68, 92–3, 98, 100 recruitment 95–104 research 38, 45, 50, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 92, 93 retention and completion 45 see also named universities UTS 60–2, 66 VCE 111, 161, 198 VET 19, 20, 23–47, 194–5, 198, 203 Victoria viii–x, xxi, 2, 17, 35, 70, 77, 79, 80, 81, 86, 134–7 Education Department 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 148, 154, 157, 195, 202, 203 funding 195 Schools of the Future viii, 152, 155–8, 167–9 Victorian Education Act (1872)
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INDEX 141–4 Victorian Public Service Act (1883) 146–7 Victoria University 61, 63 Watts, Maria 130–1 Weekes, Alice & Clara 139 Wesley College 79, 80, 136 Western Australia, University of 60–2 Western Sydney, University of 61, 63 Whyte, Jane 140, 144 Whyte, Patrick 136, 140, 142 Wollongong University 60–1, 63, 66 Xavier College 81
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AER Beyond Nostalgia
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Page 1
Lawrence Angus & Terri Seddon
Beyond nostalgia: reshaping australian education distils this ongoing debate into a concise account of developments in education, and provides a positive framework for finding a way forward. It examines the: • shifting relationship between government and education; • implications of commercialising education; • broader social factors, such as globalisation, which impact on education; and
With contributions from 12 highly-regarded education professionals, this insightful and accessible book is important for policy makers, undergraduate students, academics and educators, as well as anyone concerned with education reform.
Australian Education Review No 44
t. seddon and l. angus (eds)
• prospects, challenges and opportunities for Australian education in the new millennium.
reshaping australian education terri seddon and lawrence angus (eds)
Enormous change to Australian education over the past decade has created a maelstrom of debate among politicians, teachers and academics about the direction of education.
beyond nostalgia: reshaping australian education
"The polarised and exclusionary debate about education (has created) unproductive walls of silence… reconstructing a sensible debate about educational reform is imperative for the long-term future of Australian education and the people, young and old, who pass through it."
beyond nostalgia:
PRESS
THIS FOLD REMAINS CONSTANT. ADJUST SPINE WIDTH TOWARDS LEFT HAND EDGE
PRESS PRESS
