New Right View on Education

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  Individualism And Community

  Education And Social Policy In The Postmodern Condition

  • Michael Peters, James Marshall(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  laissez-faire economic theory; and there is a neo-conservatist strand which revives classical conservative values concerning the family, women and their role as mothers, other cultures, and the superiority of ‘objective’ views about knowledge. On the conservative world-view poverty is the outcome of an inadequacy to provide for one's own needs, or in the case of a male the family's needs, and often this is underpinned by a belief in biological determinism. In which case there is little that can be done to assist or improve the human condition.

  The combined and intertwined nature of New Right views as they affect education are set out in Figure 4.2 . In educational terms commitment to the free market involves (in Fig. 4.2 , 1a) the belief that ‘excellence’ and ‘quality’ in education will be served, and scarce public resources better utilized, by adopting market-type arrangements such as dezoning, institutional decentralization and competition between schools. That the market is seen as morally superior is evidenced by the opportunity to choose between schools, and the accompanying claim that this promotes freedom.

  The assumption here (4.2, under 2) is that society is constituted by competitive and possessive individuals, capable of making choices which are in their best interests. For such individuals education becomes a commodity purchased by individuals for individuals, and utilized by those individuals for their own personal advancement. Obscured in this notion of individualism and education are the beliefs that knowledge is shared and the outcome of agreement and social interaction, and a more traditional belief that education is not only for the good of the individual but also for the good of society, where society is construed not merely as a collection of individuals but as a cohesive,

  Figure 4.2: The New Right: Main Theoretical Elements

  intrinsically social, community. Contrasted here are the notions of society as an atomistic, fragmented, hedonistic collection of self-interested individuals and that of society as a community based upon shared interests (Dewey, 1916), public goods, and the notions of altruism, empathy and respect for persons.

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  A Socially Critical View Of The Self-Managing School

  • John Smyth, John Smyth(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The term ‘New Right’ (see Bosanquet, 1983) refers not to any specific group but to a movement represented by a collection of lobby groups concerned, among other things, to bring about the ‘liberation’ of public services from ‘excessive state control’ through their ‘privatization’. The political philosophy of the New Right is that of ‘liberalism’, defined in F.A.Hayek’s sense of limiting the powers of government in the interests of the liberty of the individual and a ‘free society’. Hayek (1960) argues that contemporary liberalism is sometimes misleadingly presented as a doctrine of minimal government, where the latter limits itself to the maintenance of law and order. In fact, liberals are not necessarily opposed to government concerning themselves with social welfare or economic affairs; the important issue is the character and extent of their involvement (Hindess, 1987).

  As far as education is concerned, the objective of the New Right is the transformation of whole systems of national, state or local authority controlled schooling, so that most schools would become individual self-managing ‘private’ institutions. Schools would have the legal status of non-profit-making charitable trusts, much like the existing English public (i.e., private) schools. As one leading proponent of right-wing policy explains, the plan is ‘to create, as near as practicable, a “free market” in education. To use a popular term, it is in some sense to “privatise” the State education system’ (Sexton, 1987, p. 10).

  The New Right argues that education should be regarded as a ‘commodity’ and teachers as its ‘producers’. Hitherto, education has provided an inadequate service because it has suffered from the effects of ‘producer capture’. According to the rightwing Adam Smith Institute Omega Report, Education Policy

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  Towards A New Education System

  The Victory Of The New Right?

  • Clyde Chitty University of Birmingham.(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Times Educational Supplement (17 July 1987), the main effects of the government’s proposals would be to ‘raise costs and lower efficiency’. Open enrolment signified ‘the negation of planning’. If market forces were allowed to prevail, planning would, in future, be retrospective: ‘a matter of picking up the bits and presiding over the bankruptcies after the consumers have made their educational purchases’. Once the measures were implemented, it was extremely doubtful whether it would any longer make any sense ‘to talk about a “system” at the local level’. A ‘blight’ would be put on ‘all plans for restructuring, closures and mergers’. Some regarded this as unnecessarily alarmist, but one thing agreed upon by all commentators was that the new proposals represented something of a victory for New Right pressure groups and for those in charge of the Downing Street Policy Unit.

  The Influence of New Right Thinking

  The philosophy of the so-called New Right can be seen as one expression of the new politics which emerged in the 1970s in response to the world economic recession, the exhaustion of Fordism as a regime of accumulation and the break-down of American hegemony. The New Right encompasses a wide range of groups and ideas, and there are many internal divisions and conflicts. What the term could not be said to signify is either a unified movement or a coherent doctrine. Yet according to Gamble (1988), there are certain important beliefs which are common to all adherents of New Right philosophy:

  What all strands within the New Right share … is the rejection of many of the ideas, practices and institutions which have been characteristic of social democratic regimes in Europe and of the New Deal and the Great Society programmes in the United States. The New Right is radical because it seeks to undo much that has been constructed in the last sixty years. New Right thinkers question many of the assumptions which have become accepted for the conduct of public policy while New Right politicians have sought to build electoral and policy coalitions which challenge key institutions and key policies … As a political programme, the New Right is identified with opposition to state involvement in the economy. They are fierce critics of Keynesian policies of economic management and high public expenditure on welfare. But New Right politicians are also renowned as advocates of national discipline and strong defence … To preserve a free society and a free economy, the authority of the state has to be restored. (pp. 27–8)

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  Politics and Policy Making in Education

  Explorations in Sociology

  • Stephen J. Ball(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Black Paper/ Hillgate thrust, does address itself to the centre of controversies about educational practice and to a number of real ambivalences experienced by many parents in their dealings with schools. The coherence of the message lies in the steadfast reassertion of certain preferred discourses organised around the bourgeois, liberal-humanist approach to education. In treating the comprehensive/progressive discourses as an aberration, as irrational, the New Right are attempting to ‘re-naturalise’ the previously dominant, previously unproblematic conception of education. They are what Wexler and Grabiner (1986) term ‘cultural restorationists’, seeking to revalorise traditional forms of education. The three message systems of schooling – curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation – are tightly inscribed, one within the other, in the deconstructive/ reconstructive strategy. But as well as reassertive the project is also radical. For the New Right have given a whole new set of accents to the issue of control, the governance of education. As we have seen, control is reconstituted on the twin bases of central state control – of the curriculum, of testing and of teachers – and free-market, parental choice. These modes of regulation are intended both to provide social and political stability and to isolate and neutralise, as far as possible, the influence of reformist public educators – the egalitarians.

  The New Right discourse is in some respects exemplary. The transformations achieved by it, the spaces it opens up and closes down, from within which subjects may take up a position, and the objects of which they may speak, with which they may deal, are articulated in terms of specific displacements and exclusions. That is to say, part of the significance of the discourse is the impossibility of reply. The culpable teacher, the implicated educational establishment, are excluded from valid participation in the debates which affect them directly and within which they are spoken of. The discourse rests upon their failings and their culpability, thus their responses, their anguish, their outrage can all be set aside, for ‘they would say that wouldn't they’. As we have seen, in their construction of possible policies they represent perfectly the Thatcherist cri-de-coeur

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  Taking Education Really Seriously

  Four Years Hard Labour

  • Michael Fielding(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The neo-liberal mechanisms for improving the commodity value of educational outcomes are associated with the market, namely competition (parental choice), transparency (performance indicators) and comparison (league tables). However, the educational policies of the Conservative government constructed a quasi-market rather than a free market. The latter would have implied a radical programme of privatisation and a degree of curriculum diversity between schools. Instead there was growing standardisation and centralisation—evidenced both in a national curriculum and in its assessment arrangements. New Labour therefore inherited a somewhat contested, ambiguous and incomplete neo-liberal project.

  One could read the Prime Minister’s post-election promise that he would place ‘Education, education, education’ at the centre of his government’s agenda as indicative of his intention to continue the neo-liberal policies of the previous administration, albeit with greater ferocity. Education, it could be said, is one of the few levers left to the nation state as it struggles to exercise some control over the ‘relentless’ expansion of global capital. Indeed, the idea of a Third Way may simply be a case of government ‘spin’, permitting New Labour to appear committed to its traditional values while masking its impotence in the face of global capital.

  School improvement and the restructuring of educational research under New Labour

  New Labour appears to share at least two of the concerns of the neo-liberal right: the first is the improvement of standards in schools; the second is the discrediting of professional identities that stand in the way of that process. At the time of writing we are witnessing the continued discrediting of educational research and of sections of the research community (see Hillier et al. 1998; Tooley and Darby 1998). Researchers are accused of researching topics that are ‘irrelevant’, of communicating their findings in impenetrable ‘theory-laden’ jargon, and of being ‘politically motivated’. The Secretary of State for Education feels free to pour scorn on research simply because he disagrees with its findings (Reeves 1999). These attacks would be tedious were they expressions of personal prejudice, but is not a much more insidious process taking place, one that seeks to redefine what education research can and cannot be, what educational researchers can and cannot do? Government policy appears to be based on the assumption that improving the commodity value of learning is the sole

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