Abstract
This paper concerns the relationship between teaching and political action both within and outside formal educational institutions. Its setting is the recent period following the 2010 Browne Review on the funding of higher education in England. Rather than speaking directly to debates around scholar-activism, about which much has already been written, I want to stretch the meanings of both teaching and activism to contextualise the contemporary politics of higher learning in relation to diverse histories and geographies of progressive education more generally. Taking this wider view suggests that some of the forms of knowledge which have characterised the university as a progressive institution are presently being produced in more politicised educational environments. Being receptive to these other modes of learning cannot only expand scholarly thinking about how to reclaim intellectual life from the economy within universities, but stimulate the kind of imagination that we need for dreaming big about higher education as and for a practice of democratic life.
Highlights
Even before the Browne Review of higher education was initiated by the last British Labour government in 2009, it had become very difficult to speak or think critically about education as a critical cultural practice, or as a practice of freedom, or as an institution of social power and site of political struggle, in the UK
The subsequent four decades of increasingly economistic, utilitarian and technocratic discourses about schooling and higher education, combined with the gradual institutionalization of performance monitoring, auditing, managerialism and marketization in schools and universities, has created an environment of what Michael Fielding and Peter Moss (2011) have called a state of ‘historical amnesia’ about the nature, purpose and politics of education. This discursive regime reconstructs the idea of education as a politically barren field of activity, into which no critical life can seep and upon which nothing critically creative or transformative can possibly grow – or in the framework of the competitive knowledge economy, upon which nothing radically transformative should grow, unless it can demonstrably contribute to the consolidation of elite power
One notable response to the resulting crisis of hope has been the elaboration of contemporary forms of anarchistically-inspired prefigurative politics, which are mobilised by people for whom the loss of hope in existing institutions and systems is not a reason for despair but as a strategy for decolonising knowledge and a catalyst for cultivating new political and cultural possibilities (Gibson–Graham 2006; Gordon 2007)
Summary
The most immediate way to recover a sense of the political significance of educational work is to keep alive the knowledge that universities and schools are critical sites for the negotiation of power within society (Apple 1995, 2013; Bernstein 2003; Boler 1999; Freire 1985). Struggles over the distribution of personal, local and national resources; the establishment and challenge of social hierarchies and classifications; homogeneity and diversity, recognition and respect, standardisation and autonomy, hegemonic and subaltern knowledge, and control and freedom are constantly being played out. These struggles are ongoing at all levels: pedagogy, curriculum, educational relationships, assessment, arrangements of space and time, and institutional forms. It is significant that these are parts of a wider movement consisting of many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of discrete actions across the world; it is significant that the landscape of striving for educational justice is itself divided amongst people dreaming different visions of the future and making different kinds of educational demands
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