The marketisation of education and the democratic deficit

Carl Anders Säfström,Niclas Månsson

doi:10.1177/14749041211011293

Abstract

This article deals with the question of what has happened to ‘the public’ in the Swedish education system during the last three decades. In our search for an answer we illuminate and discuss how the process of marketisation, together with the learnification and individualisation of education, replaced ‘the public’ from public education with the logic of the market place. To shed some further light on the current discourse on Swedish education, we contrast two principles in education and teaching, the aristocratic principle and the democratic principle. According to the aristocratic principle, education is about fixating and reproducing existing power relations as the cornerstone of a well-ordered society. According to the democratic principle of education, equality is the cornerstone of a well-ordered democratic society. Considering the shift in the very infrastructure of the Swedish educational system, we arrive at the conclusion that the principles in education and teaching are characterised by the aristocratic principle, rather than those we have characterised as democratic principles. The educational message is clear: upcoming generations are to accept the rules of the market economy and play the game accordingly.

Highlights

The year 2011 was a year of educational reforms in Sweden that involved new curricula for the entire school system, including pre-school, compulsory school and upper secondary education and a new organisation for teacher education (Beach and Bagley, 2012)
In this study we describe how the publicness of education has gone from part of a democratically controlled state education, financed by public taxes to meet the needs of everyone’s education with a clear focus on social shared values, such as democracy, solidarity, equality and equity, to embrace individualisation, learnification and competition as the guiding principles for a good education
Important to stress that the school is still public but has replaced public values with individualisation, learnification and competition, and by so doing redefining the very meaning of public education

Summary

Introduction

The year 2011 was a year of educational reforms in Sweden that involved new curricula for the entire school system, including pre-school, compulsory school and upper secondary education and a new organisation for teacher education (Beach and Bagley, 2012). Teaching – instead of being about identification and purification of so-called natural abilities and talents defined by the socio-economic power structure in which an institution exists – serves to extend social relations within an understanding of an ethical-political orientation to social life, which for the sophists was the true meaning of paideia (Jaeger, 1965 [1939]: 300).

Results

Conclusion