The Pedagogical State: Education, Citizenship, Governing The Open University, Milton Keynes 24 th and 25 th September Symposium Commentary

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1 The Pedagogical State: Education, Citizenship, Governing The Open University, Milton Keynes 24 th and 25 th September 2008 Symposium Commentary Understanding state-citizen relations is no straightforward affair. It involves a multitude of spaces and actors, formal and informal political practices and the intricacies of subjectivity and citizen-formation. This symposium therefore brought together researchers from education, human geography, sociology, social policy and political theory in order to consider the idea of the pedagogical state as a means of understanding the pedagogic strategies employed to govern citizens, both within and outside the formal education sphere. The following questions acted as a guide for our debates: what pedagogical policies, strategies and forms of address do state and non-state actors use to govern citizens? What is distinctive about pedagogy as a mode of power exercised both within an outside formal education? How do different people experience pedagogical governing practices? The aim of the symposium was to critically interrogate the cultural practices of governing citizens in contemporary liberal societies, and governing through pedagogy was identified as an emerging tactic by which both state agencies and other non-state actors manage, administer, discipline, shape, care for and enable liberal citizens. Hence, discourses of active citizenship, participatory democracy, community empowerment, personalised responsibility, and community cohesion were viewed through the conceptual lens of the pedagogical state. Schools, universities, the voluntary sector, civil society organisations, churches, commercial education and training providers, the media, government departments and state agencies offered fruitful empirical spaces through which pedagogy is worked and re-worked. The language of pedagogy can be useful in elaborating on the sites of formal and informal education, the practices of teaching and learning and the subjectivities of teachers and learners in relation to governing tactics. Because pedagogy cannot be reduced to teaching, learning or education, it provokes us to consider not simply the disciplining and directive facets of education, but also the way in pedagogy is used in order to develop competences and capabilities and to empower subjects in their future self-directed knowledge, experience and activities. Pedagogy also denotes a sense of the science or arts of teaching, which prompts us to contemplate indirect and apparently contradictory modes of governing. Rather than presuming that pedagogical power will be characterised by domination and resistance, critically investigating interventions in the governability of liberal citizens can help us to reconsider the reflexive and sceptical ways in which citizens act, re-act and co-construct governing practices. Such an approach can be useful in trying to avoid potentially simplistic critiques of bureaucracy, the nanny state, teacherly or authoritarian state behaviours, the infantilisation of adult citizens and the schooling of society in so-called neoliberal times. Existing accounts of the pedagogical state can help us to connect some seemingly disparate spheres and can be used to frame research debates on the intersections between education, citizenship and governing from multiple theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. Four principal approaches were initially identified. First, the work of Ian Hunter and Denise Meredyth, (2001) who employ a genealogical approach in order to highlight the seemingly unlikely paring of Christian pastoralism and state bureaucracy in the emergence of schooling in Western Europe. This approach draws a distinction between moral coercion and social governance as a critical response to arguments which conflate schooling and social control. 1

2 Second, the approach pursued in Sam Kaplan s (2007) book, The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey urges us to pay attention to the anthropological detail and geographical specificity of national, military, economic and state relations which he identifies as the driving force behind schooling in Turkey. Third, Basil Bernstein s idea of the pedagogic device, which has in turn influenced many education scholars, including Bonal and Rambler s account of the Totally Pedagogised Society, is notable for how it identifies a strong pedagogic field which has succeeded in pedagogizing our thinking, our desires and our very identities. Fourth, investigating the theoretical strength and empirical evidence of such claims is work which has been undertaken by political theorists such as Clarissa Hayward (2000) Her explanation of the distinctiveness and particularity of pedagogical power as power-without-a-face, exercised in particular socioeconomic environments or contexts offers us a different theoretical grounds on which to explore governing through pedagogy, than that offered hitherto by critical education scholars concerned with the ideological power of public pedagogy and the redemptive force of critical pedagogy. This said, taking lessons from critical educational theorists on the need to better understand pedagogy beyond the school, or what Raymond Williams (1969) termed permanent education, is an integral part of developing a research agenda on pedagogy as a distinctive mode of governing liberal citizens. Governing can be done by state, quasi-state, peripheral state and non-state agencies, and takes place through various institutions and spaces not limited to formal educational establishments. Governing is also of course more than pedagogical, and we need to be careful not to try to re-name yet another state form, or to employ the pedagogical state as an apparently new theory of everything where any critical, descriptive, metaphorical or explanatory purchase is lost. The pedagogical state as a concept, a theme and a potential research agenda required developing and deconstructing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and contributors to the symposium engaged with and problematised the idea in equal measure. Roger Dale considered three distinct periods of educational governance in the UK, including the post-war social-democratic welfare state, Thatcher s market-driven education agenda and Blair s recent stakeholder-based experiments in educational governance. He noted that governance is always a pedagogy, reflecting a relationship between the ruler and ruled, and questioned prevailing assumptions about the link between social expectations and education. This consideration of governing education was followed by a session on governing through pedagogy; expanding the realm of pedagogy to civil society organisations and to pedagogues beyond school teachers. Janet Newman introduced the idea of a pedagogy of public participation, highlighting its role in complicating the politics of progressive agendas, the work of equalities and social justice activists, and the social investment state. She identified the behaviour-changing practices of informing, tutoring, developing and nudging, the subjects of this targeted pedagogy, and the political work accomplished by pedagogy as a kind of coercive voluntarism. Rhys Jones reported on the way in which these very pedagogies played out within the Citizens Advice Bureaux in Wales, in the shadow of the state. He showed how the experience of CABx of both learning about the state through their advice work, and learning by the state through their social policy and campaigning work problematised easy distinctions between state/civil society; active/passive citizens and local/national polities. Contributors also identified a number of pedagogical tactics through which citizens govern and are governed. John Clarke highlighted the way in which so-called ordinary people are enrolled into the architectures of governing, through policies of participation, inclusion, empowerment, emancipation, and through the coming of voice. He showed how such policies in the realm of immigration and policing involved the evocation and constitution of ordinary people and the performing (or failure to perform) of learnt identities of ordinariness, at the expense of political contestation. Sanford Schram examined the (specifically antieducational) pedagogical tactics of self-improvement, training and self-management, sanctions, compliance, punishment and forms of address in the realm of welfare policy in the USA. He argued that these tactics, operating through locally devolved state and private agencies, serve to discipline the poor and result in the disproportionate punishment of black clients. The focus on tactics reminded us of the significance of pedagogical modes of 2

3 governing outside of formal educational institutions and provoked us to deliberate the political implications of rethinking the cultural practices of governing through the grammar of pedagogy. The wider implications of the politics of pedagogy and the role of both state and non-state agencies in the making up of pedagogical subjectivities were themes developed through Denise Meredyth s paper on Youthworx, a youth media/development project run by the Salvation Army in Australia. Her analysis of the ambiguous political rationalities of community and government agencies involved in the provision of youth services demands that we interrogate the professional and personal ethos, commitments and interests of specific actors in the making up of moral personalities and self-governing citizens, without relying on existing critiques of the strategically neoliberal state. Sarah Hall further complicated the assumption that pedagogical subjectivities are produced only through state strategies by introducing us to the spaces of business education providers in London s financial industries. She showed how such organisations frame education in terms of economic competitiveness, drawing on sports psychology, embodied risk-inclined identities and the global imaginary of leadership in order to (re)produce particularly profitable subjectivities and psy-knowledges. Michael Bailey considered the production of liberal worker subjectivities in early 20 th Century Britain, through an apparatus of educational organisations ranging from the Workers Education Association, the University Extension Movement to the BBC. He demonstrated how this liberal form of governmentality relied on ensuring a regime of educated citizenship, and identified some of the different lefts narrated in working class education during this period. Several contributors signalled the importance of narrative to their accounts of citizenship, education and governing. For Maki Kimura, contemporary narratives of key citizenship issues around multiculturalism, racism, extremism and immigration produced in academia are contrasted with existing policy and practice in UK Higher Education Institutions, and through consideration of the wider cultural imperative of university-level education as opposed to compulsory schooling. Lynn Staeheli presented on the way in which post-conflict states narrate and address particular histories (whilst omitting others) in constructing a sense of the nation and a felt history of cosmopolitan nationalism through education. Meanwhile, Clarissa Hayward discussed the way in which bad stories are narrated through both personal and collective identity-work. She examined in particular how racialised identities in the USA were translated into material and institutional forms through processes of social reproduction and a narrative pedagogy employed by the state. The interconnected themes of governing, tactics, subjectivities and narrative recurred throughout the symposium, and presenters and discussants, Clive Barnett, Melissa Butcher, Allan Cochrane, Nick Mahony and Michael Saward, helped to relate these themes to a number of important problematics. It was argued that conceptualising the state as pedagogical risks presenting a rather too tidy and linear account of governance regimes, where oftentimes competing, conflicting and concurrent state interests are collapsed into an overall rationality. In addition, states act alongside, against and increasingly in partnership with non-state agencies in the practices of governing, some but by no means all of which are tactically pedagogical. Hence we need to be careful not to employ the pedagogical state as a definitive and all-encompassing category since this would diminish its analytical strength. A consideration of the cultural practices of governing through pedagogy, by contrast, allows us to consider the personal and political complexities of the tactical decisions, institutional organisation and the image of the state which make up our everyday experiences of governing and being governable. It may therefore be useful to employ the analytic of pedagogy in order to better understand the multiple state and non-state interests involved in governing diverse liberal societies, and to raise the question of whether state policy can only ever be thought of as regulatory or interfering. Interrogating the multiple sites of governing through pedagogy can therefore highlight a distinction between orchestrated strategies and manageable tactics. The identification of such tactics by the symposium contributors was fertile ground for grasping the intricacies of pedagogical governing, and its contribution to making democracy technically achievable. Whilst it could be argued that all governing must be pedagogical insofar as liberal societies rely on developing the self-management and self-improvement of 3

4 individuals and communities, it is also important to retain a sense of the distinction between pedagogy, education and teaching in the making up of governable subjects. This distinction has implications for the nature of relationships between the pedagogue and the subjects of pedagogy. It also demands that we ask questions about the nature of pedagogy what is its history, how is the term currently used, is it qualitatively different when employed outside of education systems and how does it configure subjects differently in space and time? How are different pedagogies employed in different spaces? Furthermore, we should not assume that pedagogical tactics are straightforwardly effective and as some contributors pointed out, we must pay attention to how pedagogical tactics sometimes/always fail. Do the realms of policing and welfare, for instance, indicate the failure of pedagogy to adequately educate liberal citizens? Or does the educational realm itself rely on built-in failure to mark out the educationally successful as a social elite? How should we therefore understand people who choose home-schooling or private education, who drop-out or are excluded from school, through lens of the pedagogical state? These subject positions attest to the importance of considering how different people experience pedagogical governing. Such tactics cannot be described as uniformly delivered or received. Indeed particular pedagogies are targeted at particular subjects and objects, for instance, parenting classes, family learning initiatives, skills for sustainable communities, learning regions, smokers, migrants, vulnerable young people, the hard to reach, jobseekers, management professionals, future employees, entrepreneurs, university lecturers and so on. We therefore need to pay due attention to who is being taught/ tutored/ educated/ trained/ conditioned/ developed, as well as to who is doing the teaching/ tutoring/ training/ educating/ conditioning/ developing. How do they relate to each other, as well as the practices, spaces, institutions and imaginaries that shape their relationship? How do these aspects intersect with existing relations of class, ethnicity, gender, ability, sexuality, religion and so on? How are people encouraged to take up multiple and flexible subject positions through lifelong learning, most notably as both public citizens and private persons? Finally, to make a methodological as well as theoretical point; how should we represent pedagogical subjects and subjectivities, themselves reflexive, educated and intellectual citizens immersed in the practices of pedagogical governing? As social researchers, we need to recognise that we are equally immersed in the practices of pedagogical governing, not least in our teaching and in the communication of our research. Understanding dominant state, non-state, personal and institutional narratives needs to be paired with a reflexive approach to our own narrations of the pedagogical state. Can we describe the state s essential character and pin down the ways in which its subjects are made governable? How should we represent the pedagogical state as a teacher, a schoolmaster, a tutor, a nanny, a paternal figure, a developer, a capacity builder or controller? How does the state represent itself, and those it claims to represent, in everyday life? Where/how are these representations manifest through government advertising, public education campaigns, in local government services, through schools and universities, via the media, voluntary organisations, government-funded agencies? Who mediates these representations and how are narratives translated between different social spheres or contexts? Is the pedagogical state growing in prominence and/or intensity? Is it spreading geographically and does it change over time? Are all states equally pedagogical, or can we only describe liberal democracies in these terms? Does a narrative of the state obscure the dominance of marketdriven pedagogies, and does it adequately explain new images of education, citizenship and governing that are produced? These questions help us to rethink the contemporary politics of governing in light of theoretical insights offered by the language of pedagogy. Governing through pedagogy plays out in a variety of empirical sites, employs a number of sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting tactics, and narrates particular subject positions and social relations. Such governing also gives rise to unintended consequences. The symposium helped to establish what kind of questions are worth asking within a research agenda focused on understanding governing through pedagogy. The ongoing question of the right education for citizenship will necessarily remain unresolved. And the question (preferred by both academic critics and much popular commentary) of how governments get at people through ever more dubious techniques and towards self-serving ends, whilst it might make us feel more clever, 4

5 may obscure an important opportunity to ask where, when and what kinds of government interventions are indeed legitimate. References: Bonal, X. and Rambler, X. (2003) Captured by the Totally Pedagogised Society: teachers and teaching in the knowledge economy, Globalisation, Societies, Education 1: 2, pp Hayward, C.R. (2000) De-facing Power. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hunter, I. and Meredyth, D. (2001) Popular sovereignty and civic education in D.Meredyth and J.Minson (Eds.) Citizenship and Cultural Policy. SAGE, London. Kaplan, S. (2007) The Pedagogical State. Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Williams, R. (1969) Communications. Penguin, London. Jessica Pykett, October