Encountering Education in the Global

The selected works of Fazal Rizvi

Fazal Rizvi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317932741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the World Library of Educationalists, international experts compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands and see how their work contributes to the development of the field. This volume brings together the selected works of Fazal Rizvi.

Born in India, Fazal Rizvi has lived and worked in a number of countries, including Australia, England and the United States. Most of his educational encounters have been 'in the global'. He has developed a keen sense of the multiple and conflicting ways in which transnational ties and interactions are transforming the spaces in which identities and cultures are forged and performed, and in which education takes place. Much of his research has sought to examine how educational systems around the world have interpreted and responded to the challenges and opportunities of globalization.

In this collection of his papers, written over a period of more than two decades, Fazal Rizvi seeks to understand the shifting discourses and practices of globalization and education, critically examining the ways in which these are:

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• reshaping our sense of identity and citizenship, and our communities

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• creating transnational systems of ties, networks and exchange

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• taken into account in the development of policies and programs of educational reform

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• producing uneven social effects that benefit some communities more than others.

Fazal Rizvi's analysis shows how recent global transformations have mostly been interpreted through the conceptual prism of a neo-liberal imaginary that have undermined education's democratic and cosmopolitan possibilities.

Chapter 1

Introduction

I

It is not often that academics get an opportunity to publish in one volume a number of their papers written over a period of more than two decades. I am, of course delighted to have such a rare opportunity, and thank Routledge for this honor. I realize, however, that this opportunity implies the difficult task of selecting the papers I consider worthy of re-publication, and that I cannot do this adequately without reflecting more broadly on my career, positing on it a greater degree of coherence than was perhaps planned. Indeed, the task of selection has encouraged me to consider how the diverse topics on which I have written are linked to my personal and professional biography, shaped in complicated ways by the opportunities I have had, the theoretical influences on my thinking and the scholars with whom I have had the privilege of working. Furthermore, my reflections have led me to consider the more general sociological question of how academic careers are constituted in an era in which systems of higher education are experiencing major transformations, which inevitably affect the nature of the challenges most academics now face, as well as the opportunities they accept.

These transformations can, of course, be described in a number of different ways. However, what can no longer be disputed is that over the past twenty-five years academic work has increasingly been located within a context in which commercial imperatives have become dominant, in which the long-established political settlement about the public role of universities has been destabilized. Driven largely by neo-liberal assumptions, university governance has become increasingly corporatized and curriculum increasingly vocationalized, concerned more with instrumental knowledge than with its cultural and critical dimensions. There has been a dramatic shift in the ways in which the state now conceptualizes its relationship to public universities, placing a greater emphasis on market dynamics, threatening the traditional mission of universities to serve the ‘public good’.

In public universities in particular these changes have been associated with rapid expansion in student numbers, which, in western countries, have more than doubled since the mid-1970s and have increased even more spectacularly in the developing systems of higher education, particularly in Asia. There has been an ever-increasing demand for post-secondary education, which is widely believed to be necessary for social mobility and for enhanced life-chances in societies that require highly educated workers to support information-based industries. Yet few governments are willing to meet this growing demand with additional public resources, even as they believe higher education to be essential for economic development and national prosperity. This tension is further reinforced by a growing ideological commitment to smaller government and ‘user-pays’ principles.

Consequently, higher education appears to have become a ‘private good’. With declining funds from the state, universities now require students to pay more of the cost of their education, altering the nature of the relationship between the university and its students, encouraging students to think of themselves as clients or customers, who participate in an economic exchange for certain specifiable outcomes. Accordingly, knowledge and learning experiences are commodified, broken into chunks and distributed at least partly on the basis of the ability to pay. Market considerations have also led commercially ‘useful’ disciplines, such as applied sciences, information technology and business studies, to acquire greater importance, sidelining humanities and the social sciences, which now have to struggle to survive.

Along with these shifts in the curriculum over the past two decades, universities have experienced major shifts in their governance. The traditional university administration was conceptualized in bureaucratic terms, designed to support academic work. The autonomy of academics to pursue scholarship through teaching and research was respected. A new ideology of governance has, however, undermined this view of academic autonomy. Borrowed from the corporate sector, the new ideology emphasizes notions of value for money, strategic planning, costefficiency, optimum resource allocation and accountability through performance indicators. It is used to make budget cuts to support services for students and faculty, deregulate working conditions, attack the very notion of tenure and increasingly require faculties and departments to prove their worth by demonstrating their contribution to strategic goals that are often couched in terms of national economic productivity. A new regime of performativity has been created to coordinate and control academic work.

To remain solvent and grow, universities increasingly have to rely on private sources of income, including student tuition and contributions from endowments and the corporate sector. This necessarily puts pressure on academics to align their work more closely to commercial interests, to become more entrepreneurial. In organizational terms, universities emulate the practices of the supposedly better managed private sector, with administrative leaders feeling justified in centralizing power and in incorporating senior academics into management functions in an effort to become more flexible, responsive to changing economic conditions, with greater capacity to re-engineer policies and programs. This does not, however, mean that academic priorities are no longer considered important, but are now re-articulated in terms of their capacity to generate revenue and to meet the requirements of the knowledge economy.

The idea of the knowledge economy suggests new ways of thinking about knowledge creation and application. Recent innovations in information and communication technologies, it is asserted, have fundamentally reshaped the nature of economic activity, placing knowledge at the center of the changing modes of ownership, production, distribution and consumption. Knowledge has become a more important ingredient of economic growth, needed to improve production techniques and generate profits. Universities are accordingly asked to embrace new ways of conceptualizing the conduct and significance of research, with greater priority attached to commercially useful research, especially if it is conducted in cooperation with the corporate sector and results in commercially useful products.

This thinking is in line with a growing acceptance of the claim that knowledge is produced in a socially distributed manner, and that its production depends fundamentally on collaborations and networks. Universities are therefore encouraged to simultaneously compete and cooperate with other centers of knowledge production.

II

Much of my academic career has been located within this shifting landscape of higher education. Over the past three decades, I have worked at a number of universities in three continents and have witnessed a growing drift towards ‘neo-liberalism’. The ways in which different systems of higher education, with diverse historical and political traditions, have interpreted and responded to the changing economic, political and cultural conditions have been remarkably similar, suggesting unmistakable signs of a global convergence. So, for example, the drive towards marketization, privatization, corporatization and vocationalization in higher education appears to have a become a shared feature of reform across the world, not only in countries committed to the principles of market economy and liberal democracy but also in socialist states, such as Vietnam and China. Academic work is increasingly conducted under similar organizational conditions, serving common ideological priorities.

Most of my recent writing has tried to make sense of these transformations. My work has been located within the vast literature that has grown over the past two decades around the notion of globalization. The idea of globalization has thus become central in my attempts to theorize recent shifts in educational policy and practice that I have described above. I have tried to understand how our educational encounters are now shaped by the global. I have tried to problematize a hegemonic discourse that assumes neo-liberal reforms in education to be an inevitable response to the so-called imperatives of globalization.

Globalization is, of course, a much debated and highly contested notion. It is widely used to describe not only the shifts in patterns of transnational economic activities, especially with respect to the movement of capital and finance, but also the ways in which contemporary political and cultural configurations have been re-shaped by major advances in information technologies. My contention, however, has been that the concept of globalization does not only describe a set of empirical changes, but also prescribes certain normative interpretations of, and responses to, these changes. Within this mix, globalization refers to the various ways in which we both interpret and imagine the possibilities of our lives.

The idea of globalization also suggests that the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent. It is argued that globalization refers to a set of social processes that, according to Friedman (1999: 7), imply the ‘inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before – in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach round the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before’. Globalization, it is maintained, enables people in disparate locations to experience events simultaneously. Increasing instantaneity has ‘created a complex range of social interactions governed by the speed of communication, thereby creating a partial collapse of boundaries within national, cultural and political spaces’ (Ray 2007: 1). This suggests that global processes are dynamic, constantly changing in light of new economic, political and technological developments.

Much of my research has sought to understand the emerging forms of global interconnectivity and interdependence – how they are embodied in everyday practices; how they shape our sense of identity and citizenship, and our cultural practices; how they are taken into account in the processes of policy development and implementation; how they affect educational discourses, practices and governance; how, in various attempts to pursue educational reform, they have been interpreted through the prism of neo-liberalism; how their uneven social effects have clearly benefited some communities and people more than others; how their asymmetrical effects might be mitigated; and how their democratic and cosmopolitan possibilities might be imagined and realized.

III

In putting this volume together, I have had to think seriously about the origins of my interest in these questions. It has become increasingly clear to me that it is my transnational mobility – my own experiences of the global – that has contributed greatly to my research passions and interests. My family immigrated to Australia from India while I was still a teenager, and my Australian education was deeply shaped by an awareness of a politics of cultural difference. I was the only nonwhite student in a school of nearly 800 students, in a country that still practised the White Australia Policy. My educational encounters were therefore invariably couched in difference, as I had to constantly consider the ways in which the requirements of Australian curriculum and pedagogy, and of Australian society, differed from those that I had experienced in India.

After my undergraduate studies in Australia, I moved to the United Kingdom, where I studied Philosophy and Education, partly I suspect to make sense of issues of language, identity and cultural difference to which my migration experiences had given rise. It was in England where I first thought about, in a more explicit fashion, the politics of race and racism, especially as these were linked to the history of colonialism. My experiences in Manchester and London led me also to appreciate the complex ways in which each of Indian, Australian and British societies were forged out of colonial legacies, but in ways that were different. If colonialism was an early form of globalization then, like colonialism, its practices too were diverse and uneven.

My PhD thesis, completed at King’s College, University of London, addressed the fact-value distinction, the positivist view that statements of facts and judgments of value were logically distinct. This distinction was widely assumed at that time, and formed the basis of leading theories of education and approaches to research. I used Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (1974) to show how the fact-value distinction presupposed a mistaken view of language as concerned largely with description, and not also with a whole range of other functions. With words we do things, argued Wittgenstein. I did not deny the importance of fact-value distinction but argued that this distinction was not dichotomous, but plural, and that the differences across various kinds of facts and values were as interesting as any absolute binary. An appreciation of Wittgenstein’s performative view of meaning, I argued, enabled us to see how a theory of education involved practical deliberations designed to generate, develop and assess a set of rationally defensible principles that could guide practice.

During my research, my dissertation advisers, Professors David Aspin and Peter Winch, impressed upon me the notion that there were no absolute unchallengeable standards in practical knowledge and that no number of empirical generalizations can guarantee practical standards, free of culturally specific conventions. I learned from them to moderate what Wittgenstein had called ‘our contemptuous attitude towards the particular case’. To understand something as complex as educational practice, we needed to be open to the possibilities of conceptual plurality and creativity, in order to be able to imagine the world differently. I regarded Wittgenstein as a troubled soul who was deeply suspicious of the claims of detached objective knowledge, especially when they were made to increase technological power to manipulate the social world.

My understanding of Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the problems of the contemporary human condition was further enhanced by a series of seminars that Peter Winch offered on his translation of some of Wittgenstein’s notes, which were later published in a book with the title Culture and Values (1983). The book had a profound intellectual impact on me. Its arguments, and Wittgenstein’s later philosophical works more generally, enabled me to clarify my own position with respect to the then dominant analytical school in Philosophy of Education. My own reading of Wittgenstein took me in a direction different from those philosophers of education, such as Paul Hirst and Richard Peters (1974), who had assumed Wittgenstein’s remarks to be laying the foundations of an ordinary language philosophy, teaching us how to establish the essential meanings of words that we commonly used in education. The analytical approach viewed philosophy to be fundamentally anti-speculative: its aim was the logical clarification of thought, and its method involved the elucidation of the logical grammar of an expression.

Philosophy, according to analytical philosophers of education, was an activity concerned not with producing a body of propositions or doctrines but with the clarification of concepts. Philosophy was assumed to be a second-order activity that sought to elucidate the meaning of words and the logical rules that lay behind the use of those words. In an essay I wrote for Educational Philosophy and Theory (Chapter 2), I re-examined the Wittgensteinian concept of grammar to reject this view of philosophy, denying any clear distinction between first-order and second-order analysis. I suggested that philosophy cannot get outside the range of social relations of which analysis itself is a part. Furthermore, freed from the assumptions of essentialism, I argued, philosophy is like any other human activity, conducted within the organic grouping of persons, directed towards particular objectives, including prescription, speculation and imagination.

IV

Towards the end of my PhD studies, I had become somewhat disillusioned with philosophy of education as it was practiced at that time. I found its abstractions unhelpful in thinking about education. I regarded its failure to locate linguistic practices – speech acts – in their particular cultural contexts as misleading. I became increasingly convinced that ideas in education could not be adequately analyzed without examining their social and political functions as well as their historical origins. A short visit in 1984 to India where I had an opportunity to discuss these issues with a number of Indian philosophers led me to realize how ethnocentric the analytical method in the Anglo-American tradition in Philosophy really was. My perceptions of its parochialism were further reinforced by the arguments presented by Edward Said (1979) in his highly influential book, Orientalism, especially its contention that issues of power were never too far away from the claims of knowledge.

In 1984, I took up an appointment at Deakin University in Australia, where I had the good fortune of working with a group of wonderful scholars led by Richard Bates and Stephen Kemmis. The appointment itself was in the area of social and administrative studies. I knew little of the literature in educational administration, policy and leadership, and therefore engaged with the questions it raised in a way that was new and distinctive, greatly informed by my training in the analytical skills I had acquired in philosophy, even as I had become critical of some of the assumptions that underpinned them. I used analytical tools, for example, to reflect on the then dominant traditions of thinking about policy studies in education. In a paper published in the first volume of Journal of Education Policy (Chapter 3), I argued that Wittgenstein’s account of language as a purposive human activity should enable us to interpret policy discourses in education as part of a system of communicative exchange which served simultaneously to maintain, disguise and legitimate various social orders, and that such discourses cannot therefore be analyzed apart from attempts to assess the various political interests they serve.

I insisted that a view of educational policy analysis that did not attend to moral and political questions could never be entirely adequate. I suggested furthermore that, in view of Wittgenstein’s insistence on the performative character of language, it was possible to conceptualize educational policy analysis as practical reason, in the Aristotelian sense of the term. Such a view implied that we as human beings needed to describe the educational world in moral terms, and had moreover the capacity to imagine ways of acting upon it differently. Self-reflection of this kind, I insisted, could indeed be empowering, for it enabled us to become ethically aware of the forms and consequences of our linguistic practices. With this empowerment, I suggested, it was possible to re-think those aspects of our institutions that offended the moral spirit of our community.

V

At Deakin University, I was able to develop this thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Beyond Analytical Philosophy of Education
• Part II: Theorizing race and multicultural education
• Part III: Education in the era of globalization
• Part IV: Emerging policy challenges in education
• Index