Technocracy, Instrumentalism, and Ethics: Rethinking Educational Scholarship in an Age of Fracture

Edward Vickers | pp. 4-22

Abstract  :
This article considers some consequences of the dominance of a technocratic, neoliberal conception of the purposes of educational scholarship. Drawing on the author’s own experience, it considers challenges to critical scholarship on education, comparing the situation in contemporary Britain, Japan, and India. Common themes that emerge include: an economistic focus on “human capital” generation; a pervasive neglect of political context in educational debate; and the mirage of meritocracy. The salience of these themes in the case of China is then given more extended consideration. Finally, it is argued that calls for “transformation” through education, widespread today in international education policymaking, tend to have repressive rather than emancipatory consequences. Despite a rhetoric of “empowerment,” visions of “transformation” often distract attention from societal or structural causes of injustice. The existing social and political order is treated as a given, so that the individual “learner” must adapt to it as best they can. The article emphasises that our mission as scholars should be to revive political and philosophical debate and to refocus public attention on the ways in which our societies as well as our schools need to transform if we are to realise a more emancipatory and humane vision of education.

Keywords: Politics, education, transformation, China, social justice