Book Review: Rethinking the Politics of Education (Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education)

The central aim of Nick Peim’s book is to argue that education has never worked as a mechanism to achieve greater social equality. The automatic association of education with social justice and democracy is also questioned. In addition, Peim is highly critical of Education Studies degrees and the Philosophy of Education. Drawing upon Foucault’s account of the ‘great transformation’ that took place in the transition from forms of biopower rooted in physical coercion to forms of biopolitics rooted in ‘capillary’ forms of power, with the role of the school focused on policing the social and intimate life of the learner. Peim coins the notion of ontopolitics partly to avoid the problem of providing a conclusive definition of biopolitics and partly to explain that education is political in nature and function. Within educational institutions there are ritualised disciplinary practices that are crucial in the formation of identities, shaping the subject into a form desired by the institution and from which learners cannot escape. Education has a central role in maintaining social distinctions. Critical education studies as reflected in the work of Henry Giroux, Michael Apple, Stephen Ball, Gert Biesta, and others are underpinned by the unquestioned assumption that education can find its true enlightenment function; is essentially good itself and should be available to all. Barriers to participation, forms of exclusion and bureaucratic state intervention should be addressed allowing the true purpose of education to be enjoyed by all allowing humans to flourish.

In contrast to the views that teaching and learning within formal education institutions in the period from 1945 until the present day can be understood to be in essence good as it aimed to promote individual fulfilment, social justice, and greater equality, Peim argues that formal schooling is about ranking, and ordering individuals based on formal assessment and testing that defines large sections of the school population as failures with limited aptitude, and flawed individuals lacking in academic ability and character when compared to their peers. The role and purpose of equality of opportunity is to propagate and maintain legitimate social distinction, hierarchy, and inequality and to convince people that it is possible to have inequality with a sense of fairness. The processes of socialisation have become managed by the state and performance in the education system comes to shape and define how we should view the economic and moral worth of the person and their place in the wider society.

Education policy and practice following the 1944 Education Act was focused on making appropriate educational provision for different types of learners. All learners remain subject to policing via inspection and measurement of behaviour against the benchmarks of a bureaucratic control grid. With inspection regimes detached from academic control. Schools have always engaged in imposing discipline through repetition and regulation of the body in school. Repetition involves accepting without question which side of the corridor to walk on and at what speed, how to hold a pen ‘properly’ how to sit ‘properly’, lining up in the playground ‘properly’, etc. Sure Start, for example, is primarily concerned with the policing of families and identifies sections of the population assumed to be limited in their abilities to support their children in an appropriate way to be ready for school. The state is then directly involved in the shaping of the citizen

Most recent developments in Character Education are presented as built upon an ethic of self-improvement, personal growth, and realising individual potential but the caring gaze also contains normative assumptions about the correct mode of self, rooted in judgements and misjudgements about lack of character, personal failure and is a vehicle for the conferring and correcting of flawed identities. The overall aim is to exchange pastoral observation and scrutiny into self-surveillance. Character Education is closely associated with a neoliberal cultural logic that devalues some lifestyles whilst promoting others. Affluent Western countries have ‘imposed’ this neoliberal approach to education across the globe in a form that is hostile to local cultures and communities. The book ends with ‘23 theses for rethinking the politics of education’. However, this last section provides a summary of the main points from the book.

The book does not make the case for deschooling society but at the same time rejects the attempts by Ball, Apple, Giroux, and others to make education a vehicle for greater social justice and enhancing social mobility. In the last analysis, Peim provides an interesting and well-informed account of Foucault on biopower and biopolitics with some knowledgeable parallels with Agamben, Derrida, Heidegger, and others to support his analysis. However, after a thorough rethinking of education that the book presents, Peim does not offer or even suggest an alternative to the ‘hegemonic form and idea of education’ or modernity as a ‘schooled society’.