Through this course you will start to critically examine your own ideas about education, teaching and learning. The critique will be developed through engagement with theories and ideas developed through educational research. You will be encouraged to use these ideas to challenge or support your own ideas about education. Each week we will focus on one key question, using video lectures, key readings and challenges to explore some commonplace notions about education. With the guidance of the course team, you will be asked to use these ideas to critically reflect on your own understandings and experience. By the end of the course, you will have developed a personal response to the main question: what is your preferred future for education?
Lecture 6 What are governments' priorities for education? cont'd
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Do curso por University of London
What future for education?
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Why do governments fund education?
In this penultimate week of the course we expand our discussion still further and consider the role education plays in our societies.
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Dr Clare Brooks
UCL Institute of Education, University of London
[MUSIC]
>> So how is something like globalization affecting education?
>> In a lot of ways two perhaps predominant ways
One is, going back again to things we talked about earlier the,
the globalization is manifested in part through the economy,
the global economy, through an internationally competitive marketplace.
There's been a, a reduction in, in trade barriers, the GATS and
the World Trade Organization have been working hard to create a global
free market in which goods and services can move without without limits.
And in relation to that individual nations do see themselves as
competitive units within that global arena.
And they do very often see education as a key component of their competitiveness.
So that education has become harnessed towards the,
the economic necessities of, of global competition.
So, in that sense education has become colonized by those
global economic necessities and is being re-articulated in those terms.
So, so education is, is, is very much captured within,
in the economic rationalities of, of global competition.
The other factor is important for education is, is, is related to
the way in which education systems themselves compete through things like,
like Pisa and the Pisa testing.
So that education is increasingly seen not simply as a national problem,
more a national concern.
But is related, is, is seen relationally in
terms of how your system performs in relation to how other systems perform.
And that in turn is related to a, a, a global market in educational services.
Again as we touched on earlier.
That education is now a source of,
of of, of income, a source of, of foreign currency earning.
So in, in,
in higher education in particular we now have increasing mobility of students.
Between countries.
For their higher education experience.
And the major economies, are competing to recruit students.
The United States is the biggest recruiter.
But the UK is one of the, the top five recruiting nations in the world.
And this is very important in terms of our economy.
So our higher education system is,
is is, is massively globalized in all sorts of ways.
And in some ways that also relates to issues about funding because that
is a source of direct funding, which is not government related, so
most universities, or many universities now are not primarily relevant,
reliant upon the income they generate from their own government.
They rely on other sources of fee income and other sources of research income
from private sector, from other research funders.
So most universities, the institute of education, for example,
only a minority of our overall funding, income, comes directly from government.
>> So, when we're talking about education,
a lot of people use the term neoliberalism.
Can you explain to us what that is and how it's affecting education?
>> Okay.
In, in the simplest sense I think you have to think about neoliberalism in two ways.
One way is, is what sometimes called neoliberalism with a big n, and
that's the neoliberalism out there.
The neoliberalism of the global economy.
And that's the both a structural system of economic relationships; which stretches
across the globe, which influences almost every aspect of our daily lives in,
in terms of people certainly who live in the West, people who live in England.
The clothes we wear, the films that we watch,
the, the food that we eat, all of these things are.
Globalized in a whole variety of ways.
We wear clothes that are sold to us by American companies but
are manufactured by people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Sri Lanka.
We eat food that is based on street food from Thailand and Mexican burritos.
We watch movies, which, which are made in Hollywood and
crime series that are made, in, in Sweden and, and, and Denmark.
So, so we live in this, this globalized world and, and
that world is organized around markets, around buying and selling.
And, and neoliberalism is, is basically a project which is committed towards,
committed to the generalization of the market as a form of social relationships.
So the insertion of the market into more and more aspects of our lives.
So, more and more of what we do, and what we experience is actually, now bought and
sold, it's part of the market, we talked about that in relation to schooling.
But all sorts of other social goods now are, are, organized around the market.
The health system is,
health system is increasingly marketized directly or indirectly.
We can, we can buy all sorts of services that will enable us to,
to make ourselves better people.
We can we can pay for a councilor, or a mentor, or a life coach.
We can buy books at the airport that will help us make,
make us more efficient or more healthy or, or, be less anxious.
So there's this commodification of an economization of the social.
if, if we have problems in our, in our intimate relationships we can,
we can go to a, a marriage counselor or a,
a, a somebody who will help us improve our sex lives or whatever.
So, even the most intimate aspects of our social lives are now
subject to market relationships of various kinds.
So, in a gen, in a, a, in a general sense, it, it's that,
that generalization of the market, generalization of commodity relationships.
in, in, in all aspects of our, our social lives.
The second aspect is, is neoliberalism with a small n.
And what that means is, is changes in, in who we are, changes in our subjectivity.
Changes in how we think about ourselves, how we value ourselves,
how we think about what we do, how we think about our relations to others and
again there's a spectrum from the public to the private in that,
so the public end, that there's, there's a key change,
in terms of our shift from being citizens to being consumers.
So, increasingly we buy one way or another, services from the state.
The State doesn't provide these services for us in a welfare sense.
So even as, even, even as parents, we can,
we can choose our school in the same way that we can choose our holiday.
Choose our gas and electricity provider.
And of course gas and electricity used to be provided by the state.
As did most transport systems,
as did telephone system, as did the railway system.
As did British Airways was, was state owned, all of these things are now part of
the economy, that part of, of capital, And more and more of the,
the, the essential state services that we now have are becoming part of capital.
So we're, we're, we, we act towards them, we're positioned as consumers but
also in other aspects of lives as, as workers.
Increasingly in higher education.
We are, our, our pay is, is more tightly related to our performance
in terms of annual reviews, in terms of outputs and our productivity.
We have to account for ourselves, in terms of our, our publication.
And the, the quality of our publications, which are rated on a four point scale.
And then those ratings are converted through the research assessment framework
into a funding formula.
Which then is used to fund higher education institutions differently,
on the basis of their, their, the quality of their research outputs.
So this is using the market model to change the way in
which we think about our relationship to our work.
And think about our self worth.
Think about how, how we relate to our colleagues, are they productive,
are they contributing, towards the overall levels of quality and
income within the institution, or are they under performing and need to work harder.
Do we need to work harder?
Should we be working faster, and better, and more efficiently?
Should we be writing more papers?
Should we be out making more research proposals?
So in all of these ways it changes not simply what we do, it changes who we are.
So neoliberalism is both out there and it's also in here, and in here.
It's changing how we think about who we are.
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