Marx’s Ghost in the Shell: Troubling Techno-Solutionism in Post-Secondary Education and Training Policy Imaginaries

Abstract

Post-secondary South African education policy is pinning its hopes of increased access to education on technological changes, especially in light of increased demand for education while persisting with fiscal austerity. This article examines one policy text—the Open Learning Policy Framework—that exemplifies this techno-solutionist policy logic in the post-secondary education and training sector. Structured around the triad of “context-text-consequences”, the article conducts a critical discourse analysis of the Open Learning Policy Framework, positing that techno-solutionism performs an under-labouring role for other more commonly critiqued logics such as new managerialism, social justice as equality and/or equity, and human capital theory. It further troubles the Open Learning Policy Framework’s definition of “open learning”, examining it as a truth/power regimen that constructs the object it espouses to describe. Finally the article considers some of the consequences of such a pivot in education, including the invisible transformation of relations in pedagogic labour, and the subjectivity of students engaged in “open learning” as individualistic neoliberal “lifelong (l)earners”. The article attempts to “raise awareness” of such relations and their constraints on imagination, with the aim of provoking alternative imaginings about how technology and education might produce humanising and emancipatory education.