Education, the new politics of differentiation and ordinal citizenship

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue a new politics of ordinal differentiation and its instruments for governing education aims to make invisible a ‘low intensity civil war’ against the labouring classes. It does this through the elevation and ubiquity of actuarial and quantitative measures aimed at producing a new form of differentiated belonging: that of ordinal citizenship. These measures: elevate individual agency, erasing the idea of social class as a nominal identity; assert the importance of classification in a myriad number of instruments of imagination, including rankings, intended to spur individual self-improvement; and replaces social fairness with statistical fairness. These actuarial and quantitative measures, on the one hand reposition us as striving individuals in a new economy of worth and value, through the ways in which ordinal instruments govern a new politics of differentiation and legitimize the rise of ordinal citizenship.