The Politics of Education

Challenging Multiculturalism

Christos Kassimeris, Marios Vryonides

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136627309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Education is a thoroughly political enterprise. The process of determining the purpose of education has always been highly controversial. It has resulted in disputes that have not only divided people philosophically, but also on the basis of religion, region, class, race, and ethnicity. As a result, education provides us with a spectacular arena in which to explore the tensions inherent in European and North American societies, as well as an understanding of how current politics shape education policy.

This book focuses on the politics of education, relating to the formation of national identities as affected by globalization and multiculturalism. It assesses the ways in which governance institutions, political ideologies and competing interests, both within and outside of the education community, influence the content, form, and functioning of education. As a collection of studies of the political aspects of education and educational policy-making, this book reaffirms that educational phenomena reflect and inevitably serve specific political agendas. Political scientists, sociologists and education scholars will find this to be an important and valuable text.

1    Introduction

Christos Kassimeris and Marios Vryonides

Among academic circles there is a belief that education and politics are, or at least should be, separate. Yet education is a thoroughly political enterprise. For the most part, formal education is under direct state control. While education is expected, though in a much perverted manner, to cultivate moral individuals, convert immigrants into patriotic citizens and supply competent workers for a growing economy, it has also been expected to promote fundamental democratic ideals such as justice, equality, freedom and prosperity. It is precisely this controversy over the nature and scope of education that has generated disagreement over the definition of highly cherished social values, not to mention conflicts over individual and group interests. As a result, the process of determining the purpose of education has been a highly political one. It has resulted in battles that have not only divided people philosophically, but also on the basis of religion, region, class, race and ethnicity. Hence, education provides us with a spectacular arena in which to explore the tensions inherent in European and North American societies, as well as an understanding of how politics shapes education policy.

This book assesses the ways in which state institutions, political ideologies and competing interests, both within and outside the education community, influence the content, form and functioning of education. Moreover, it has historically been used as an ideological agency to promote national and ethnic identities which have been essential in the notion of ethnocentric states. As a result it has always been heavily financed by nation states. The notion of state, however, has been eroded over the past few decades. Since the 1970s at least three interconnected social phenomena have come about which had direct effects on the functioning and powers of the state; globalization and its overall impact on states, the emergence of post-modern societies and mass migration. While recognizing that the promotion of national and ethnic identities often seems to emanate primarily from the political right, there is a competing tendency from the left which tends to promote transnational allegiances and global perspectives, thus encouraging individuals to think of themselves as ‘world citizens.’ As a collection of studies focusing on the political aspects of education and educational policy-making in a number of western countries, this book reaffirms that educational phenomena reflect and inevitably serve political agendas. On the whole, this book offers a comparative examination of how politics influence education that should appeal to scholars in a variety of academic disciplines. The transatlantic character of this volume is, in particular, very instructive for comprehending how North American educational policy differs from Europe. Thus, we hope that these differences will indeed become quite illuminating for the readers.

As far as the opening chapter is concerned, it suffices to say that its main purpose is to set the tone of the book and to provide the general theoretical framework. Chapter 3 assesses education in the now ethnically diverse Britain. Even though there are certain policies and legislative acts in place designed to improve ‘race’ relations, Britain is not racism-free. Education, in particular, remains a field characterized by racial inequalities given the noticeably poor performance of Black and Minority Ethnic children in schools. This chapter delves into the historical and sociological background of certain education policies that have failed to address this discrepancy. Multiculturalism has been overshadowed by notions pertaining to diversity, citizenship and nation-building. The apparent radicalization of young Muslims in Britain, community cohesion and those educational policies set by the recent Labor governments are central to this chapter, as is the significance of ‘whiteness’ and the role that White and middle-class culture plays in modern Britain.

The following chapter examines education in the Netherlands. Commencing with a historical assessment of policies arguably designed to tackle racial inequalities, Chapter 4 focuses more on issues denoting to citizenship education. While multiculturalism was once the main objective regarding the future of the Dutch society, it is nowadays apparent that assimilation weighs far more heavily. Evidently, policies designed to combat educational disadvantage in the Netherlands are often dictated by the political ideology of whatever political party is in power with the main differences between left-wing and right-wing parties expanding over the field of education. The role of the extreme right, in particular, reveals interesting findings with regard to immigration.

Education in the US is a rather intriguing topic. A key issue dominating education at national level was Civil Rights and the lack of equality of educational opportunities. The expansion of Civil Rights, the arrival of new immigrant groups, and globalization have revamped the US education system to an extent where what was once considered the domain of state and local authorities nowadays includes the federal government. Still, both schools and states have resisted federal interference in educational policies. In this respect, Chapter 5 assesses the role of the federal government and those structural forces that shaped public education. Central to this chapter are the hypotheses that the increased educational opportunities available to disadvantaged groups and immigrants alike have lessened the career prospects of those pupils coming from the native-born middle class and the growing fears expressed by the business sector concerning a lack of competitiveness of the American labor force in the midst of the worldwide financial crisis and the overall impact of economic globalization.

Chapter 6 examines the relationship between education and the construction of identity in Spain. By way of assessing Catalan, Basque and Galician nationalisms, this chapter makes evident that secessionist nationalism is as manipulative a force as the past unionist, Spanish nationalism was during Franco’s era. The use of different languages in schools and the instruction of the different histories and nationalist symbols of Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country underline the significance of education and its political dimension in Spain.

The chapter on education in Germany focuses on matters pertaining to citizenship, Europeaness and interculturalism. Comparing the citizenship, geography and history curricula of Berlin and Baden-Württemberg, this chapter makes evident that government policy and ideology helped promote a ‘Europeanized national identity’ so as to promote the needs of a multicultural society. Germany continues to struggle with shifting its educational policies from maintaining a Europeanized identity to a novel dimension of multicultural citizenship. Tracing the historical background of educational polices in Germany from the times of the Weimar Republic, through Nazism, to the post-war division of the country, it becomes clear that citizenship education has always been instrumental in shaping society.

As with the chapter on US education, Chapter 8 assesses yet another North American education system. This chapter produces an analysis of multicultural education in Canada at provincial level. Changes in textbook content, educational achievement rates of minority students and the ethnic composition and practices of teachers dominate the discussion, while also indicating that despite whatever education strategies inequalities continue to persist in Canadian education. The case of Canada is unique, however, for its manifold cultural identities engage the First Nations peoples, the British and French communities, as well as the immigrant population. As one might expect, the pertinent cultural differences are often reflected in Canada’s understanding of multiculturalism and education. Interestingly, education in Canada is a provincial matter rather than a federal issue, thus affecting much the federal government’s initiatives to defend multiculturalism.

Chapter 9 demonstrates how highly politicized education is in Greece. This chapter assesses three very interesting cases studies all mirroring the significance of nationalism in Greece. More precisely, it becomes apparent that educational policies intended to facilitate the integration of migrant children are likely to suffer at the hands of extreme right formations, just as the impact of Greek–Turkish affairs may dictate Greek educational policies with reference to the Turkish minority in Thrace. To this end, the heated debate surrounding the proposed new history textbook is, of course, hardly surprising, thus indicating that politics and ethnocentrism complement one another in designing school curricula in Greece.

The final chapter of this book employs ethnographic data from one Flemish school in order to explore the nature of interaction between instructors and students. Taking into account the school’s ethnic composition, senior management policies and national educational policies, all examined against the background of multiculturalism, the teachers’ stereotyping of ethnic minority students of Turkish origins is assessed.

As a collection of studies that reveal the politicized nature of education in contemporary western societies, this book reaffirms that educational phenomena reflect and inevitably serve certain political agendas that do not necessarily coincide with the all-pervading notion of multiculturalism. Yet amidst the rabid social changes brought about by globalization and post-modernity, states and governments try to reaffirm their power to promote policies that reflect the needs and the priorities set out by those in power. Hence, this book aims at situating education in a political setting and should, therefore, appeal to political scientists, sociologists and educationalists with an interest in the political aspects of education.

2 Politics and Education

Christos Kassimeris and Marios Vryonides

Since the time of the emergence of the post-Westphalia ethnocentric states, national governments in their effort to build nation states have used an array of ideological tools in order to cultivate national identities of shared cultures, histories, languages, religion, traditions, etc. Education, especially after it has become a mass social phenomenon post-World War II, has often been used as an ideological tool for implementing such national policies for cultivating and strengthening a uniform cultural and national identity. In this effort they often resorted to the suppression or eradication of competing identities and peripheral nationalisms. The examples are numerous and can be found all around the world.

The process of nation-building and the use of education as a tool towards this end has been particularly true in states that emerged after the postcolonial era from the time of the independence of the US until today; for example, in the case of the newly independent Balkan states or those that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The way with which this has often been promoted was through national curricula that usually prescribe common histories, memories and cultures. However, much of sociological research tended to focus not only on the content of the official national curriculum but at times it was thought that such policies were more efficiently implemented through the workings of the “hidden curriculum” (Meighan and Siraj-Blatchford 1997). Meighan and Siraj-Blatchford offer a working definition of the hidden curriculum which is “all the things that are learnt during schooling in addition to the official curriculum” (1997, 65) and express the idea that schools do more than simply transmit knowledge, as laid down in the official curricula, but also pass on norms, values and beliefs.

Education as one of the primary institutions of an individual’s socialization transmits those cultural values that are regarded by many as necessary for the preservation of social solidarity and order. The institution of education, however, has not operated without criticism stemming from ideological, political and philosophical debates. In terms of political debates, education has always been regarded as a thoroughly political enterprise and powerful stakeholders, particularly those with political influence, have always aspired and worked towards creating and maintaining control over the contents, the goals and the way it is implemented. This has often resulted in social divisions and an ongoing debate about the winners and losers of this enterprise in a number of areas; social class, gender and ethnicity to name a few. Social class tensions in education have attracted quite a lot of interest, so much so that, as we will examine later on, Marxist sociologists, for example, have characterized education as an arena where the capitalist ideology is been promoted at the expense of the working classes (Bowles and Gintis 1976). Others, too, following the eminent work of French sociologist P. Bourdieu, have seen education as a mechanism of cultural reproduction which leads to the reproduction of social advantages of those middle classes that are better positioned within the educational market.

In our analysis, while recognizing these discourses concerning education, we will not go into them but rather focus on the ways national policies in education become politics of national continuity amidst an environment which operates in an eroding fashion for the nation-state. This has been the outcome of what has come to be known as the Globalization phenomenon which has created unparallel social conditions for individuals and societies in a way that the pace with which they occur (because of advances in Information and Communication Technologies) is often very difficult to track and examined in all of their dimensions. One of the consequences of the Globalized era is the creation of the notion of multicultural societies and the need of education to respond to this new reality. Recently, however, the political goal of cultivating multicultural policies has suffered significant blows by an emerging changing attitude towards multiculturalism exemplified by the realization of many European leaders mostly from the political right, such as German Chancellor Merkell, French president Sarkozy and Italian premier Berlusconi, that the multiculturalism project has in fact been unsuccessful in Europe. This realization would likely point to shifts in national policies and specifically in changes in the direction of educational policies that for so long promoted the goal of multicultural societies. Many interpret these political leaders’ stand as a response to the new realities posed by the so called “international terrorism” (especially post-9/11) and by national discourses about the consequences of the global economic crisis. There are also voices that connect the latter with migration and its consequences in domestic social, cultural, economic and political agendas.

Our chapter will start with an examination of the goal of education in societies and the relationship of education and the state. We will then go on to examine the development of education in a globalized world and the changing discourse that emerges in Europe about the promotion of multiculturalism as a political objective. What we would like to argue in this chapter is that even though up until now education was seen as a vehicle for promoting multiculturalism and that such a rhetoric is still present and visible in many countries it is also evident that national countries still treat education as an ideological tool for promoting nationalist specific goals of national unity, identity and cohesion.

The Goal of Education in Society

In any approach one adopts to examine the role of education in society regardless of the outcomes and its consequences it is probably an undisputed fact that education is expected to perform some functions. These include cultivating individuals in the norms and social values of the time, integrating migrants into the host society and supplying competent workers for the economy. As most national curricula would have it, education is also expected to promote fundamental democratic ideals such as justice, equality, freedom and prosperity. It is precisely this controversy over the nature and scope of education that has generated disagreement over the definition of highly cherished social values, not to mention conflicts over individual and group interests. As a result, the process of determining the purpose of education has been a highly political one. It has resulted in battles that have not only divided people philosophically, but also on the basis of religion, region, class, race and ethnicity. Hence, education provides us with a spectacular arena in which to explore the tensions inherent in European and North American societies, as well as an understanding of how politics shapes education policy.

There are at least two ways of examining the role education in societies. From a structuralist perspective, education functions in such a way so as to promote society’s need to achieve equilibrium and social order. Structural functionalists believe that the primary aim of key institutions, such as education, is to socialize the new generations in such a way (directly through the formal curriculum, but also indirectly through “the hidden curriculum”) so as to internalize the knowledge, attitudes, norms and values that they will need as future citizens. Apart from socialization education performs another function, that of sorting individuals in the labor market. Those who achieve higher are given better opportunities for training and get the most important jobs and by extension the highest social rewards. Those who do not achieve as high are directed to the least demanding jobs, which entail fewer social rewards. This, in many ways unproblematic, view of education does not take into account power relations and the unequal distribution of material and symbolic resources in society, part of which are regulated and safeguarded by the various functions of education. There are of course serious objections to such an approach to education put forward by theorists who adopt either conflict, critical and neo-Marxist perspectives. The common ground of these approaches is that education is a means of social reproduction of those social groups (or classes) who are better socially positioned, have different aspirations, have access to better life opportunities through their material and symbolic resources and generally end up with gaining better social rewards. Thus, education in essence is a field of social antagonism whereby it is characterized by symbolic (and real) domination and subordination.

A key advocate of this perspective has been the French sociologists Pierre Bourdieu whose theoretical framework on the role of education in cultural and social reproduction is built around the concepts of habitus, field, social and cultural capital. For Bourbieu the cultural capital of the dominant (usually middle and upper class) groups, in the form of practices and relation to culture, is assumed to be the legitimated form of knowledge and therefore it is rewarded by the school by giving access to educational capital and prestigious qualifications. Lower-class students are disadvantaged in this process because their social and cultural capitals are not of the currency that the school rec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Politics and Education
• 3. The Politics of Education: Challenging Racial Discrimination and Disadvantage in Education in the British Context
• 4. Combating Ethnic Educational Disadvantage in the Netherlands: An Analysis of Policies and Effects
• 5. The Expanded Federal Role in US Public Schools: The Structural Forces of Globalization, Immigration and Demographic Change
• 6. Building the Nation at School: Spain’s Tables Turned
• 7. The Politics of Education in Post-War Germany: From Europeanized Nationhood to Multicultural Citizenship?
• 8. Multiculturalism, Education Practices and Colonial Legacies: The Case of Canada
• 9. Educational Politics and Cultural Diversity in Greece
• 10. An Ecological Approach to Understanding the Development of Racism in Schools: A Case-Study of a Belgian Secondary School
• 11. Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index