Policy Futures in Education
ISSN 1478-2103

CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text]

Neoliberalism, Education and the Crisis of Western Capitalism

MICHAEL A. PETERS Policy, Cultural and Social Studies in Education, University of Waikato, New Zealand

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.134

This article introduces the Policy Futures in Education special issue on neoliberalism, reviewing its origins in the founding of the Mt Perelin Society at the beginning of the Cold War and its political phase with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s policies in the 1980s. It sets the scene for the rest of the issue and investigates the financial collapse and its consequences in terms of the decline of a US-centric world.

Democratic Shortfalls in Privatized Curriculum Policy Production: silencing the ‘potted plants’ and politicizing ‘quick fixes’

LAURA ELIZABETH PINTO College of Education, Niagara University, Toronto, Canada

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.142

Democratic policy production requires the input of citizen voices, ideally through a process that actively engages a broad range of stakeholders in decision-making. This article describes Ontario’s curriculum policy formulation process during the 1990s, based on archival documents and interviews with 16 policy actors. The privatization of curriculum policy production resulted in a politicized environment that silenced citizens’ voices. Though contracting writers through a bidding process allowed the government to produce a vast amount of policy in a relatively short period of time, findings reveal how policy actors’ roles were reduced to ‘potted plants’ charged with carrying out a predetermined agenda rather than active participants in a robust democratic process.

What of the Future for Academic Freedom in Higher Education in Aotearoa New Zealand?

NICK ZEPKE Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.155

A major challenge facing higher education is balancing two competing discourses. One sees higher education as a place of learning and teaching in academic freedom, a place to enable staff and students to research and learn without restrictions, a place in which to be able to critique the status quo. The other discourse is rooted in neo-liberalism. This has imposed on institutions a regime of economic efficiency in a global marketplace, a regime that advocates cognitive capitalism and is kept in place by an accountability culture. This article first traces the influences of these discourses in Aotearoa New Zealand; second, it uses data from document analyses and fieldwork to make a judgement about which influence is dominant; and third, it uses this to preview the future of the two discourses using causal layered analysis (CLA), a method for analysing futures.

Education for Y’all: global neoliberalism and the case for a politics of scale in sustainability education policy

MARCIA McKENZIE Department of Educational Foundations, University of Saskatchewan, Canada

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.165

This article addresses the effects of neoliberalism as it operates through global and local educational policy, and in particular in relation to the United Nations’ Education for Sustainable Development initiatives. It examines how a politics of scale is necessary in enabling critique and in rearticulating forms of education policy-making and practice that prioritize interscaler local ‘good sense’ over neoliberal global ‘common sense’. The article closes with examples of interscaler data from a participatory research project on youth orientations to place and sustainability that aims to use practice to generatively examine sustainability education policy.

UK Higher Education Institutions and the Third Stream Agenda

STEPHEN CLOUGH & CARL A. BAGLEY School of Education, Durham University, United Kingdom

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.178

This article focuses upon the adoption and implementation of United Kingdom government support for third stream business-facing activities in UK higher education institutions (HEIs). The article, concerned with income generation and the creation and application of knowledge beyond the confines of the academy, draws on policy literature and qualitative data from research conducted in three contrasting HEIs. It reflects critically on the policy embrace of the third stream agenda in the UK, to suggest that despite increased UK government funding and policy pronouncements in support of such activities, the take-up and operationalisation at institutional level remains variable and piecemeal.

The World Bank’s Shift away from Neoliberal Ideology: real or rhetoric?

RINO WISEMAN ADHIKARY Institute of Educational Development, BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.191

Some literature on World Bank education policies after 1999 tries to project a shift away of the Bank from its 1980s neoliberal mandate. This article argues that the shift is only in the form of rhetoric, which facilitates a hidden agenda of creating a worldwide higher education market, leaving the poor with primary education only. At the rhetorical level there is a greater concern for poverty and equity, showing the importance of primary education for the poor, but at an operational level the policies still are conducive to a market-driven approach to higher education.

Traveling Policies: mobility, transformation and continuities in higher education public policy

RODRIGO G. BRITEZ Universidad Católica ‘Nuestra Señora de la Asunción’, Instituto de Ciencias Sociales de Paraguay

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.201

This article presents an assessment of the impact and implications of the international mobilities operating in the national public policy environment. In fact, patterns of transformations that take place in national higher education systems are generating diverse and complex outcomes in different countries, in ways that may preclude a simple relation between international policy prescriptions and communication and policy change in higher education. In this way, the different processes that constitute globalisation within local spaces demand recognition of the importance of specificities in their constitution. In short, the starting point to understanding these processes seems to require detecting the specificity of complex dimensions in which the dynamic interaction between global and local takes place. In order to illustrate this point, the author presents the case of policy developments related to the dramatic private expansion of Paraguay’s higher education sector since the 1990s.

Neoliberal Education and Student Movements in Chile: inequalities and malaise

CRISTIAN CABALIN Instituto de la Comunicación e Imagen, University of Chile

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.219

This article examines the major consequences of the neoliberal education system implemented in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and how two important student movements contested this structure. In 2006 and 2011, thousands of students filled the streets to demand better public education, more social justice and equal opportunities. They rejected the free-market fundamentalism in education that has generated segregation, stratification and inequalities. Students have become important political actors who re-evaluated the discussion on education in Chile. By doing so, they are rejecting the competitive and privatized nature of the current system, which is lacking in quality and equity, and they are demonstrating that new ‘social imaginary’ in Chilean education is possible.

The Parable of the Physicist and the Postmodernists

DAVID WILSON, BILL COPE & MICHAEL A. PETERS University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.229

This reproduces, for fun, a conversation between three professors at the University of Illinois, that originated at a dinner party over a couple of bottles of good red wine.

Logarithmic Time: its role in current culture and education

ALAN COTTEY University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.234

The timescales relevant for human culture cover a very wide range. A better appreciation of these timescales would facilitate an adequate response to humanity’s ecological ‘slow reckoning’. This article discusses the use and presentation of simple logarithmic timescales and advocates their widespread use in education.

WikiLeaks and the Authority of Knowledge

ANDY VALERI Interdisciplinary Joint Studies Graduate Program, Media, Communications and Human Rights, University of Dayton, Ohio, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2012.10.2.237

This article outlines how providing accessible transparency to information controlled by institutions of power and suppressed from public view is both similar in purpose to, as well as an essential component of, the pedagogical processes promoted by Paulo Freire, which are necessary for the establishment of a truly just and non-oppressive society. It asserts fundamental philosophical, instrumental, and ethical connections between organizations such as WikiLeaks and Freire’s program of dialogic education towards undermining the foundations of societal-based ignorance, upon which the maintenance of structures of oppression are dependent.

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