Policy Futures in Education
ISSN 1478-2103

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

An Analysis of the Relationship between the Quantity and Quality of Education: focusing on Korea and OECD countries

JOO, HYUN-JUN Department of Education, Daegu National University of Education, South Korea
OH, BEOM-HO Department of Education, College of Education, Kyungnam University, South Korea
YUN, CHUNG-IL Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, Gangwon,South Korea

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.607

Quantity and quality have long been recognized as primary factors to explain educational development. However, our understanding of the relationship between quantity and quality of education is quite limited and unclear. In this context, the purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between quantity and quality of education. To achieve the objective, it draws on the longitudinal empirical analysis of statistical reports officially issued by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Korean government. As a result, a positive correlation is clearly found between quantity and quality of education. Based on the synthesis of findings, the authors conclude that investment for education plays an important role in determining the quantity and quality of education and each nation has different policies depending on their level of development. Implications and suggestions of this study are as follows: 1. establishment of plans for expanding educational opportunities by stages, 2. inducing national motivation for education, 3. institutionalization of teacher evaluation and school evaluation.

Neoliberal Policy in the Higher Education Sector in Bangladesh: autonomy of public universities and the role of the state

ARIFUL HAQ KABIR University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and Institute of Education and Research, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.619

Since the 1990s, enormous changes have been made in the higher education sector in Bangladesh. The government promulgated the Private University Act in 1992, and formulated a 20-year Strategic Plan for Higher Education: 2006‑2026 (SPHE). A critical review shows that the objective of the plan is to connect education with market-driven economic forces. This article argues that such a neoliberal policy in the higher education sector will have far-reaching socio-economic consequences in Bangladesh. With a critical investigation of the SPHE, this article explores how the autonomy of public universities is threatened, and how the role of the state is redefined through withdrawing government grants in the higher education sector. By providing three case studies, this article exposes the marketising nature of higher education in contemporary Bangladesh. This article also argues that the resistance against neoliberalism in higher education is another aspect which is organised by different socio-political groups in the higher education institutions.

Transmorphosis: negotiating discontinuities in academic work

ZANE MA RHEA Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.632

The idea of ‘transmorphosis’ will be used in this article to discuss the impact of new teaching and learning environments on the highly mobile global academic pedagogue. ‘Trans-’ implies ‘movement across’, whether it be space, time, place, culture, or institution. ‘-morphosis’ evokes the possibility/requirement to shapeshift one’s pedagogical presence and performance in new and previously unimaginable ways. This article begins by positing that the traditional pedagogue, the one charged with the responsibility of leading the child to learn, no matter what the community, was able to prepare the future generation to maintain and develop the society in which they were to live. The pedagogue was recognised as having an understanding of what needed to be taught, how to teach it, and what a ‘good’ future would be. One of the noted impacts of globalisation is that we are educating for an uncertain future where local certainty has been replaced by clashes of a global magnitude about what are legitimate lifeways. Increasingly, the learners are adults coming into higher education. Drawing on a range of scholars who have examined the global diffusion of new knowledge, through imitation, innovation, using complex exchange logic, the ‘transmorphing’ pedagogue will be foregrounded in a discussion of everyday discontinuities that the academic travelling pedagogue is challenged to solve.

Franchising Education: challenges and opportunities for coping with the economic recession and the provision of higher education in the United Kingdom

PAUL MILLER & GERTRUDE SHOTTE Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.644

When the global economic recession hit the world some 18 months ago, very few could predict the impact this would have on government spending on higher education. Higher education institutions in the United Kingdom face spending cuts. Notwithstanding, they are expected to deliver quality education with fewer resources. This article discusses challenges associated with the proposed funding cuts but also explores opportunities open to higher education institutions such as franchising and various forms of integration.

Present Nightmares and Realizable Futures

DOUG MORRIS Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Eastern New Mexico University, Portales, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.653

The article reflects on the work of Henry Giroux, focusing on his latest book Youth in a Suspect Society. It attempts to capture the experience of reading Giroux and what Giroux’s critical engagements across a wide array of cultural and pedagogical formations provide in terms of assisting us in articulating substantive criticisms of and insights into current crises, burdens and challenges. Additionally, it examines the force of Giroux’s insistence on pedagogies of hope and possibility that offer tools for meaningfully intervening in the world in order to awaken and develop our critical individual and social agency directed toward modes of transformation necessary in this time of creeping neoliberal cynicism and pessimism, a prowling global fatalism, and a growing contentment with the malaise. In reading Giroux we will be disturbed; it is this creative disturbance, roiling indignation and enlivened action of an awakened public that will provide us grounds for hope that new modes of resistance emergent with humanizing forms of pedagogy, struggles for internationalist solidarity and global justice, and announcements of a dignified world meriting human habitation will open up the pathways to transformation we so urgently require if we are going to save rather than lose the future.

The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage

MATTEO PASQUINELLI

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.671

Bringing post-Operaismo into network culture, this text tries to introduce the notion of surplus in a contemporary media debate dominated by a simple symmetry between immaterial and material domain, between digital economy and bioeconomy. Therefore a new asymmetry is first shaped through Serres’ conceptual figure of the parasite and Bataille’s concepts of excess and biochemical energy. Second, the crisis of the copyright system and the contradictions of the so-called Free Culture movement are taken as a starting point to design the notion of autonomous commons against the creative commons. Third, a new political arena is outlined around Rullani’s cognitive capitalism and the new theory of rent developed by Negri and Vercellone. Finally, the sabotage is shown as the specular gesture of the multitudes to defend the commons against the parasitic dimension of rent.

Education Policymaking for Social Change: a post-humanist intervention

HELENA PEDERSEN School of Education, Malmö University, Sweden

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.683

The humanist tradition in Western education systems is increasingly coming under critical scrutiny by posthumanist scholars, arguing that Enlightenment humanism accommodates a number of serious shortcomings such as being essentialist, exclusive, and unable to meet its own criteria of value pluralism, tolerance, and equity for all. This article formulates some challenges posed to formal education by posthumanist theory, addressing international education policymaking for social change. Based on an analysis of a number of education policy documents produced by UNESCO, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank, the European Commission, and the Nordic Council of Ministers, it elicits five pervasive ideas about the relationship between education and social change that are frequently appearing in contemporary rhetoric of education policymaking: ‘the knowledge society’; ‘the democratic society’; ‘the multicultural society’; ‘the globalized society’ and ‘the sustainable society’. Inspired by critical discourse analysis, the article identifies a number of research questions focused on each of these five ideas and explores possible responses, inflected by a range of recent cross-disciplinary posthumanist scholarship, that deconstruct conventional assumptions about the idea of education in general and of education policymaking in particular. It concludes with a discussion of what subject positions and repertoires are, or are not, allowed to emerge in education policymaking for social change.

Building ‘Special Capital’ for Entrepreneurial Development: special populations as human capital in the context of global development

GABRIELA WALKER University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.697

Ten to twelve percent of the world population is identified as having one or more types of disability. This ecodeme has been historically known to be discriminated, marginalized, and disempowered by the lack of access to resources and to education. This article discusses the importance of adding special capital to the global human capital in the context of today’s demanding contexts. Nevertheless, people with disabilities have the potential to be entrepreneurs in different ways: firstly, as entrepreneurs of the self, and, secondly, as economic and social growth agents, and thus directly or indirectly contributing to various innovations and discoveries. The need for inclusive development, ecological education, ecoducation, entrepreneurship, and sustainable development calls for changes in the make-up and education of global biopower.

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