Democracy, Education and Research

The Struggle for Public Life

John Schostak, Ivor F. Goodson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781136733741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Considering how practices and processes of research and education can create fundamental, radical social change, Democracy, Education and Research assesses the meaning of 'public impact' by rethinking what is meant by 'public' and how it is essential to the methodologies of education and research.

Focusing on empirical illustrations of the use of research and educational processes in contemporary and emergent forms of social organisation, this book:

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• Covers the traditional forms to be found in education, health systems, community, business and public institutions, as well as emergent forms arising from innnovation in technologies.

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• Explores the forms of learning and knowledge creation that take place across the everyday interactions in places of learning, communities or workplaces

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• Discusses how learning and knowledge can be intentionally shaped by individuals and groups to effect social and political change

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• Considers the research strategies required to forge new practices, new ways of working and living for a more socially just world

Including practical examples of research that has created real change, Democracy, Education and Research will be a vital resource to professional researchers in their roles as teachers, educators and activists as well as students of education, sociology, politics, cultural studies.

Chapter 1

What’s wrong with democracy at the moment and why it matters for research and education

What is wrong with democracy is mirrored in the policies, practices and forms of organisation that have reduced education to schooling and research to an instrument of social manipulation, exploitation and control. How were these established? And how can they be undone? We argue here that both research and education have been critically deployed in the taming of democracy. There is a key principle at stake here: the active participation of all voices in the debates and decisions that impact upon people’s lives. Both education and research depend upon the principle of freedom and equality for all voices in determining what is ‘real’, ‘good’, ‘desirable’, do-able’. It is precisely this principle that comes under attack by elites.

Following the extension of franchise after the 1868 Reform Act in the UK, Robert Lowe, realising its threat for the privileges of the wealthy classes, supposedly said: “we must now educate our masters”. What this meant was reinforcing the split between an ‘education’ for the masses as supposed ‘masters’ and the upper classes that has been well documented in historical and sociological research. What Simon (1960) called the ‘two nations’ between 1780 and 1870 had its continuation in the post-1870 education system that was created around elite schools where the wealthy were to be ‘educated’ for leadership, the middle classes for the professions and management and the working classes ‘schooled’ for labour. The pattern was largely reproduced even in the reforms of education following the Second World War designed to increase social mobility and opportunity for working class children. Indeed, as Schostak (1983) argued, schools were largely maladjusted to people, that is, to their needs, interests, hopes and demands and in particular to democratic processes and practices (Roberts and Schostak, 2012). Although there have been democratically organised schools, they have been largely at the margins (see for example Fielding and Moss, 2011). It has been argued that mainstream schools prefigure the model of organisation, social division of labour, class, gender and cultural inequalities necessary to reproduce the status quo throughout society. Countervailing research, curriculum and pedagogical practices emerged during the post-war period, drawing upon democratic and critical legacies. For example there were curriculum innovations such as the Humanities Curriculum Project (Stenhouse, 1975) and Man a Course of Studies (Bruner, 1965). In 1967 the Plowden Report (Plowden (Lady) and Committee, 1967) had seemed to give such innovations its blessing. There were, as it were, a flowering of approaches stimulated by the writings and practices of people like Postman and Weingarten (1969), Kohl (1967), Kozol (1967) and the publication of the Letter to a Teacher (School of Barbiana, 1969). There was a critical zeitgeist revealed by works such as Freire (1972), Shor (1980), Giroux (1989). More than just creating the conditions for child-centred discovery learning and problem-solving methods, critical pedagogy had as its goal social justice (see its range in: Sandlin et al., 2011). Perhaps, for a time, such views seemed to be winning the battle of ideas if not the mainstream practice to such an extent, indeed, that it led to a right-wing backlash stimulated in part by the Black Papers (Cox and Dyson, 1975; Bloom, 1987). The attacks picked up speed with a media campaign following the election of the Thatcher government in 1979 (see for example Schostak, 1986; 1993). There was a clear attempt to manage the engagement of adults in the education of their children through the management of ‘public opinion’. In this sense public opinion replaces actual engagement. How this is done is vital to understanding the contemporary relations between democracy, education and research under ‘austerity’ following the financial crisis of 2008.

The management of opinion

The management of opinion is key to the production of pseudo-democracies for the government of people in the interests of elites. The subversive use of ‘education’ and ‘research’ are critical to that management. This line of thinking was well developed by the early pioneers of the public relations industry. It was Lippmann (1927) who coined the phrase the ‘manufacture of consent’ that was later picked up by Herman and Chomsky (1988) in their study of the influence of the media on the formation of opinions and the shaping of behaviour in the interests of the powerful. In Lippmann’s view the fundamental means to manage opinions was to paint pictures in the mind. The role of the picture was to simplify the complexity of modern life into a believable whole. As a journalist, Lippmann saw controlling the story as the role of the media. Working at the same time, Bernays (1928) drew upon the power of the media to generate the kinds of stories he wanted in the interests of his clients, whether these were Roosevelt in ‘selling’ the New Deal, or American Tobacco in ‘selling’ the cigarette as a symbol of women’s emancipation (Tye, 1998). For both Lippmann and Bernays:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

(Bernays, 1928: 27)

The significance of public relations was not lost on President Hoover who in his speech to an audience of public relations men in 1928, said: “You have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines, machines which have become the key to economic progress.” (Curtis, 2002)

It was the recognition both of the potential power of people and of the significance of the market in the management of people that led to strategies for managing, or taming, democracy. Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers, who worked with Bernays, commented, “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want things, even before the old have been entirely consumed.” (Gore, 2007: 94). Desire, of course, has to be translated into effective demand, that is, a willingness to purchase in the market place that is backed by money. Hence, the role of the new public relations professionals was to free action from the determination of particular needs by replacing them with the fluidity of desire and also to fix those desires with the firmness of demand for a particular object marked as ‘desirable’. But of course, not too firm, the desire must soon evaporate from the recently purchased object and coalesce around another, motivating further opportunities for purchase. In short, two kinds of ‘demand’ were being managed through effectively the same system, the market place. There was the political demand of an effective democratic public and the economic demand of a consumer public. By reducing the first to the second, the public as ‘constantly moving happiness machines’, it was believed, could be managed through public relations strategies directing the public’s desire and constructing their picture of ‘happiness’. In doing this Bernays drew upon the psychological and sociological theories along with evidence drawn from the research of the day, in particular, those of his uncle, Sigmund Freud (Tye, 1998). Propaganda, in his view, was critical to the management of opinion in complex societies which he saw as a form of educational process:

But education, in the academic sense of the word, is not sufficient. It must be enlightened expert propaganda through the creation of circumstances, through the high-spotting of significant events, and the dramatisation of important issues. The statesman of the future will thus be enabled to focus the public mind on crucial points of policy, and regiment a vast, heterogeneous mass of voters to clear understanding and intelligent action.

(Bernays, 1928: 114)

It may be called a public relations pedagogical practice where: “Social progress is simply the progressive education and enlightenment of the public mind in regard to its immediate and distant social problems.” Essentially, modern society is the propaganda society dependent upon a largely acquiescent public who are to be ‘educated’ to the current social problems and the elite’s desired solution to them. Research provided the theoretical and evidential underpinnings to that process of ‘education’ or engineering (Bernays, 1947), which may also be called the pedagogy of public relations. Combining this with the traditional social functions of schools to reproduce society creates the conditions for a life-long management of the minds and behaviours of people by those whose policies direct schools and whose business interests fund public relations. It was, essentially, a way of managing the radical freedom implicit in the concept of democracy. In this view, democracy was, then, to be increasingly aligned with business culture rather than business being subjected to democratic culture and practice. This latter view was implicit in Dewey’s (1938) own more optimistic views as to the capacities of individuals to engage democratically and the role of education in developing those capacities. Essentially, in so far as possible, business was to be seen as part of a private domain of decision-making and action rather than public. The public was deemed to be the realm of government and government was to be as minimal as possible so as not to interrupt the free play of private interests. Nevertheless, such private interests are dependent upon political freedoms and democracy opens the way for all people to make demands in their own interests. Democracy implies both freedom and equality for all.

Equality, greed and the exceptional

The only legitimate equality, for Hayek, is equality before the law. All other sorts are “bound to produce inequality” because “if the result of individual liberty did not demonstrate that some manners of living are more successful than others, much of the case for it would vanish” (Hayek, 1944). In short, in his influential book – The Road to Serfdom – he opposed socialism and capitalism and equated equality with serfdom and capitalism with freedom. Along with Milton Friedman, this liberal economic credo has come to equate freedom, democracy and market capitalism. It has merged with and become the ‘American Dream’, a dream that universalises its values globally so that America is promoted as the leading democracy (Roberts and Schostak, 2012). In effect, to be against American interests is to be against freedom and democracy (Friedman, 1962; Fukuyama, 1992). It is what might be called, in Billig’s (1995) terms, a flagging of democracy, essentially a public pedagogy where nationalism, capitalism and politics become written together (Schostak and Schostak, 2013; Roberts and Schostak, 2012) in the symbol of a flag. This was symbolised perfectly by Trump, following an anti-immigrant speech, hugging an American flag (Pleasance, 2018).

It is in such a context, for example, that the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange can be accused of engaging in Anti-American activities with demands that he – an Australian – be extradited via Sweden where he was accused of sexual offences and brought to trial in America for the publishing of leaked material (or, in the words of Senator Huckabee, executed (Wing, 2010). Crudely, therefore, if there is a global ‘law’ then it is pedagogically flagged as American in so far as American interests are market interests and in populist terms by definition these are ‘free’ and ‘democratic’. It is the political rationale of what has been called American exceptionalism, a view that there is something special about American history and destiny (Tyrrell, 1991: Walt, 2011), that gives it the right to intervene on the world stage and undertake regime change. This something is its insistence on individual freedom, the right to pursue self-interested happiness and the equation of these with ‘free’ market democracy. Furthermore, the notion of exceptionalism can be merged with a concept of ‘the exception’ employed by Schmitt (1996) as the foundation of ‘the political’ and with his notion of sovereignty (1985), both further developed by Agamben (1998; 2005). In short, their combination authorises, as it were, the sovereign decision of the state to suspend laws as in extraordinary rendition and the setting up of Abu Ghraib as a prison camp that is outside the law for prisoners deemed to be of exceptional danger (Comaroff, 2007).

Generalising, these terms can now be applied to any form of organisation that has the power to suspend the law in its own ‘sovereign’ interests. In particular, they may be applied to the ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions that were able to operate in de-regulated markets where the borderlines between criminal and lawful were pushed to and beyond the limits, creating the conditions for the financial crisis to explode in 2008. Expanding Eisenhower’s (1961) phrase, the financial banks became an underpinning dimension of the military industrial complex he feared, where “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” More than this, with revelations of money laundering, interest rate manipulation (Treanor, 2012), hiding trillions of pounds/dollars in off-shore tax havens (Stewart, 2012) and media corruption (Levenson inquiry – undated), there are the grounds to argue that the hidden/criminal economy and the official economy are co-dependent.

In Bernays’ terms a complex of economic, military, media and political power is essentially the dispositif for an ‘invisible government’ that pulls the strings of States and manipulates the consent of the ‘public’. As a key feature of the invisible government there is what has been called a ‘revolving doors’ strategy. In an empirical study Etzion and Davis (2008) concluded there was “evidence that government service can serve as a conduit for joining the ranks of the corporate elite.” However, the financial crisis made clear the extent to which key directors, executives and consultants of such institutions as Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan constitute a revolving door with government positions internationally (Reid, 2010; Foley, 2011). Add to this the scale of party political funding by corporations and wealthy individuals where the top financial 1% of the 1% according to Drutman (2011) provided 24.3% of all political donations to American political campaigns with ‘super PACs’ (Political Action Parties) being formed that can finance political parties without limit (Berman, 2012). Indeed, it was all too well illustrated in accusations of vote influence and interference arising from the web of connections between the Billionaire Mercer family, Aaron Banks, Cambridge Analytics, Russian individuals and groups and the Trump and Brexit campaigns (Cadwalladr, 2017; 2017b). Whether this, as Scott (1996) and Ahmed (2012) argue, is deep politics constituting a kind of ‘state-crime symbiosis’, it can at least be argued the transnational elite prefigures an emergent global invisible government that has considerable influence on what constitutes democracy and the ‘law’ of given nations through its influence on political parties and the manufacture of public consent through funded campaigns.

A popular fictional metaphor of the world managed by global elites was Atlas Shrugged written by Ayn Rand (1957). As a form of curricular material, intended to be a way of introducing readers to her philosophy, it described and justified a world dependent upon the decisions of Atlas-like figures symbolised on the book jacket as shouldering the world. However, it is not that such Atlas figures care about others; their decisions are entirely governed by an honest self-interest. Such a ‘utopia of greed’ inspired Alan Greenspan, one of Rand’s inner circle, who was chair of the American Federal Reserve from1987 to 2006. The fictional world portrayed an extreme version of the economic philosophies of Hayek, Friedman and what has come to be known as the Austrian School of Economics. In each case the view is that the complexity of economic processes is beyond anyone’s ability to grasp them. However, through the unfettered market there is a spontaneous organisation that will bring order and the optimal allocation of resources to demand. The resulting ideology draws upon Adam Smith’s (1776) proposition of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market through which prices that bring supply and demand into equilibrium will be ‘discovered’. For this to happen, there must be no, or at least minimal, government interference. Although for many years Hayek’s and Friedman’s views made little mainstream headway against the prevailing post-Great Depression Keynesianism of the Western market democracies, their plan was to create the philosophical direction and theory and wait for their time. The right time, for them, was a time of crisis as in an economic depression or a natural disaster. In such a period, populations would be frightened, vulnerable and thus more submissive. There was, in Friedman’s view, in a crisis, a brief period of six to nine months when change can be implemented without effective opposition:

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

(Friedman, 1962: xiv)

Of course, ideas that are taken up in periods of crisis are not just ‘lying around’; they have been carefully set into place, as key elements in a curriculum – both informal via the media, and formal via university law, politics and economics courses – available for action when the time allows. Norton (2004) provides an account of students of Strauss joining positions of power in the US State Department and the Whitehouse; similarly, Klein (2007) describes students steeped in the monetarist economics of Friedman taking up critical positions of power in government and key financial institutions around the world. Neo-liberal principles embedded by these changes include the equation of competitive individualism with freedom, the valorisation of the self over the other, the privileging of the private over the public sectors, the belief that the market works best when left alone (hence a demand for no, or at least minimal, State), the rejection of equality, and the equation of politics with the focus on naming friends and enemies. Certainly, monetarist or neoliberal forms of economics came to dominate university teaching (Earl et al., 2017). Only when such theoretical and philosophical principles are articulated with the legal, governmental, business, educational and social organisations through which material and symbolic resources are allocated and people managed is there the real power to make change.

Given that equality is repressed in contemporary individualist views of representative market democracies, it is only to be expected that wealth and power should accumulate in the hands of the few. Indeed, there is a strong historical heritage arguing that the good society depends upon the expertise of the most talented making the key decisions. These are to be found in Plato’s ‘philosopher kings’ ruling over the baser elements of society. The good Republic, according to Plato, is to be founded upon a ‘noble lie’, which, in people’s best interests, creates specialist classes ranged hierarchically with the best at the top. What people must believe is that this order is natural if, in Bernays’ terms, there is to be rule by the propaganda of an ‘invisible government’. More formally, it is a matter of schooling.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. What’s wrong with democracy at the moment and why it matters for research and education
• PART I: What Went Wrong?
• PART II: What Can Be Done?
• Conclusion: No end
• References
• Index