The Council and the European Parliament

Teaching in the knowledge society: education in the age of insecurity

This paper argues that Foucault’s conception of governmentality provides a powerful tool for understanding learning and education and links the organisation of learning to both politics and economics in developed Western societies. What is offered by Foucault’s conception, I will argue, is a new version of superstructural sociology, which provides a means of understanding how educational and economic practices mutually condition and adapt to each other while avoiding the excesses that plagued Marxist analyses in the later 20th century, which represented such processes as the outcome of a necessary determination. Lifelong learning will be identified as a specifically neoliberal form of state reason in terms of its conception, emergence and development. Although it has manifested a uniformly consistent – albeit not exclusive – concern of serving dominant economic interests, the prospects for moving beyond it depend, I argue, on whether the structures of learning created can be harnessed for other ends; that...

http://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/9050879.pdf

Understanding the mechanisms of neoliberal control: lifelong learning, flexibility and knowledge capitalism

Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the Child

The ancient idea of cosmopolitanism is a topic of renewed interest today. Scholars and practitioners in many fields are examining what it means to conceive all human beings as linked by their membership in a shared cosmos. Some people focus on political cosmopolitanism, others on moral, cultural, or economic cosmopolitanism. This paper examines educational cosmopolitanism by elucidating the idea of curriculum as a cosmopolitan inheritance. It argues that curriculum can generate a cosmopolitan sensibility, by which one means an outlook that regards life experience as universally educational. It suggests that a cosmopolitan sensibility can assist people in working through some of the tensions that accompany global and local change in our time. It can position them to reconstruct creatively cultural and individual values rather than abandon them in the face of the ceaseless pressure of globalization. A cosmopolitan sensibility edifies human beings by helping them perceive why all persons, in principle, can b...

Curriculum and the Idea of a Cosmopolitan Inheritance.

The ‘learning society’ expresses principles of a universal humanity and a promise of progress that seem to transcend the nation. The paper indicates how this society is governed in the name of a cosmopolitan ideal that despite its universal pretensions embodies particular inclusions and exclusions. These occur through inscribing distinctions and differentiations between the characteristics of those who embody a cosmopolitan reason that brings social progress and personal fulfilment and those who do not embody the cosmopolitan principles of civility and normalcy. Mapping the circulation of the notion of the ‘learning society’ in arenas of Swedish health and criminal justice, and Swedish and US school reforms is to examine the mode of life of the citizen of this society, the learner, as an ‘unfinished cosmopolitanism’ and also directs attention to its ‘other(s)’—those that are outside.

The Learning Society, the Unfinished Cosmopolitan, and Governing Education, Public Health and Crime Prevention at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century.

Boken presenterar det man idag utvunnit och fornyat fran den foucaultska traditionen, inom olika human- och socialvetenskapliga kunskapsomraden. Bokens bidragsgivare exemplifierar och urskiljer i e ...

Foucault. Namnet på en modern vetenskaplig och filosofisk problematik. Texter om maktens mentaliteter, pedagogik, psykologi, medicinsk sociologi, feminism och bio-politik

This article reveals how templates that emerge from opaque albeit often inclusive policy processes in transnational forums (EU, OECD & the Bologna Process) affect education reform policy in Scandinavian countries, such as Denmark and Sweden. The open method of coordination is the mother template of the political technologies (standards, performance indicators, scorecards, best practices) that are instrumental in fashioning reforms. This template commits countries in consensus-making ways to comparison, and normalizes the competitive incentive of mutual peer pressure. The authors draw on post-Foucauldian governmentality-studies to scrutinize policy documents and literature on policy reform to display the forces make up reforms, which to date have not figured prominently in national debates.

The transnational grip on Scandinavian education reforms - The open method of coordination challenging national policy-making

This article provides a genealogical perspective on narratives about the past and the future as governmental discourses in teacher education, public health, and criminal justice in Sweden. Contempo ...

Nostalgia, the future, and the past as pedagogical technologies

The Bologna Process and the creation of a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) signify that European nations commit to making different education systems comparable and advancing quality by competition. Employing a governmentality lens, this article scrutinizes the Bologna Process as a set of transnational political technologies at work. The Open Method of Coordination appears as the key political technology to advance the Bologna Process. In a voluntarily based political process the OMC brings about a transnational forum by simultaneously catching national players between the lures of peer pressure and self-interest. This complex of advancing national educational policies by means of on-going and gradual transnational consensus-building is exemplified in analyses of the crucial 2009 Bologna Stocktaking Report and its context.

Kenneth Petersson

Papers

The Learning Society, the Unfinished Cosmopolitan, and Governing Education, Public Health and Crime Prevention at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century.

Foucault. Namnet på en modern vetenskaplig och filosofisk problematik. Texter om maktens mentaliteter, pedagogik, psykologi, medicinsk sociologi, feminism och bio-politik

The transnational grip on Scandinavian education reforms - The open method of coordination challenging national policy-making

Nostalgia, the future, and the past as pedagogical technologies

Governing Europe by comparison, peer pressure & self-interest : On the Bologna Stocktaking Process as operator of national education policy