Rightward education policy advanced by reframing schooling as industrial productivity
Evidence
These connections and couplings are the key mechanisms of the process by which education as a field of struggle has been articulated to the Right. There are long, deep-seated resistances within the philosophy of state education to any attempt to measure schooling directly in terms of the needs and requirements of industry. That these were resistances often shot through with ambiguity is not so important for our purposes. However it arose, the reluctance to cash schooling in terms of its immediate value to capital was one on which campaigns could be mounted with some hope of professional administrative support. These defenses have now been dismantled. Clear evidence is supposed to exist that standards are falling: the principal witnesses to this alarming trend are employers who complain about the quality of job applicants: this, in turn, must be having an effect on the efficiency and productivity of the nation—at a time when recession puts a premium on improving both. Once the often ill-founded elements were stitched together into this chain of reasoning, policies could begin to be changed by leading educationists of the political Right, indirectly, even before they took charge at the Department of Education. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1123
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- SEED: An essay on how policy change can be accomplished discursively before institutional power shifts — ‘the logic precedes the office’ as a general phenomenon beyond Thatcher-era education.
Related
- Ill-founded reasoning chains let the Right alter education policy before gaining office (similarity 0.82)
- British education discourse was reoriented toward Right themes within a decade (similarity 0.80)
- Recession conditions let education groups convert schooling into a tool for industrial needs (similarity 0.79)