Educational Reform: Its Role in the 
Economic Destruction of Society.




Richard Bates
Faculty of Education
Deakin University
Vic 3217




Keynote Address: Joint AARE/NZARE Annual Conference.
Deakin University, Geelong, November 22-26, 1992.



Those of us in the Western World, most particularly in the English speaking 
countries, are currently experiencing the economic destruction of society. 
That is, as the crisis of the international economy deepens, the nation 
states through which our societies have been created come under attack. The 
achievement of a civilised society towards which our nation states have 
largely been directed is being displaced by an overiding goal: that of 
perpetuating an unsustainable economic order for as long as possible.  In 
the pursuit of this goal the social purposes of nation states are being 
traduced, their public assets stripped, their public institutions gutted 
and their struggle towards democracy betrayed. Education, as one of the key 
institutions through which  individual and social aspirations are 
constructed is a prime target and agency in this process of 'reform'.  
Educational reform is a crucial mechanism in the economic destruction of 
society, or, if you prefer, in the subordination of the universal interests 
of society to the partial interests of the economy.

The Crisis of Capital and the Subordination of the Nation State. 

International capital is currently facing four great crises simultaneously. 
Firstly, the crisis of third world government insolvency created through 
the corrupt practices of the sixties and seventies continues to jeopardise 
the financial institutions of the first world as it beggars the economies 
of the third. Secondly, in the first world the excessive speculation in 
real estate and company takeovers of the eighties has produced a series of 
insolvency crises and failures in western financial institutions that 
undermine confidence in the financial system as a whole. Thirdly, the end 
of the cold war has brought about a scaling down of the armaments economy 
which was previously one of the major engines of  economic growth, 
particularly in the United States. Fourthly, the political necessity of 
reintegrating Europe has slowed the German economy to a standstill and with 
it the economies of all other European countries while the production 
capacity of the Asian Tiger economies has further depressed the possibility 
of recovery in Western economies..

The result is pretty obviously a precarious international financial and 
economic system which is subject to sudden disruptions of a very 
substantial kind, as the 1987 crisis made clear and which the current 
chronic balance of payments crises foreshadow.

While various mechanisms are invented to deal with this rather sustained 
crisis (such as emergency loans, rescheduling debt, trade agreements, state 
guarantees etc), two mechanisms in particular are fundamental to the 
strategy currently advocated as a longer term solution to continuing 
difficulties. These are firstly, the plundering of the nation state and 
secondly the application of new technologies of production. Each of these 
strategies demands significant reforms in education.


Plundering the State.

The most blatant forms of plundering the state are those in which 
mechanisms are devised for socialising costs and privatising benefits, as 
Galbraith so eloquently put it. Whilst this  process is fundamental to the 
appeal of the welfare state to capital (in that the costs of health, 
education, social welfare, as well as physical infrastructure and some 
business establishment costs are underwritten by the state rather than 
business) other more blatant examples abound. Recent examples of this are 
the acceptance of the Victorian Government for the financial consequences 
of private sector irresponsibility through the public funding of the 
liabilities of such financial insitutions as Tricontinental, Pyramid and 
Estate Mortgage, a situation paralleled in South and Western Australia- and 
Australian equivalents of the US government guarantees for failed Savings 
and Loan Associations. Other forms of plunder are less direct. 

For some hundred years or more in many Western countries the nation state 
has been regarded as having fundamental responsibilities for the security 
and protection of its citizens from external and internal threat and an 
increasing responsibility for the assurance of their quality of life 
through the development and regulation of public education, health and at 
least a rudimentary safety net of social security. In addition there has 
been an increasing recognition of the claims of marginalised groups, 
whether they be women, people with disability, the economically 
impoverished, or those suffering racial or geographical segregation.  
Taxation policies have facilitated the establishment of a significant 
physical and institutional infrastructure to serve these social objectives 
and expand democratic rights of participation to an increasing proportion 
of the population. State support of educational agencies has encouraged the 
development of significant professional expertise as a crucial element in 
the provision of such public services. Through such mechanisms the state 
has, in very substantial measure, better served an increasing proportion of 
its citizens.

Currently this social infrastructure, physical, institutional and 
professional, which has been constructed to serve the needs of the many, is 
under threat of appropriation so that it might serve the needs of the few.  
The threat takes two particular forms: privatisation and marketisation. 
Education is a particularly good example of the strategies involved in such 
reforms.



New Technologies of production.

Simultaneously with the attack on public institutions and public wealth 
there is an attack being mounted on the people themselves.  It is being 
facilitated enormously by the development of particular technologies of 
production, firstly in manufacturing and secondly in knowledge management 
industries.  Just as Therborn could say farewell to the working class in 
the nineteen seventies  as such technology revolutionised the manufacturing 
sector, we can now say farewell to the middle class as information 
technology revolutionises communications and service industries and the 
management of production and distribution. 

The effects of the ways in which these technologies are being deployed are 
clear. They both create and concentrate wealth while simultaneously 
depressing and marginalising larger and larger fractions of the population. 

The Australian experience here is typical. While the earnings of the top 
one per cent of the workforce equalled those of the bottom eleven per cent 
a decade ago, they now equal the earnings of the bottom twenty one percent 
(Ellingson, 1992).  Over the past decade and a half some 400,000 middle 
class jobs have dissappeared and the middle class share of income has 
dropped substantially, by three per cent in the final year of the last 
decade alone. Teachers have been a significant component of this class and 
their real incomes have dropped by over ten per cent in the last decade.  


As the middle class is displaced it typically moves down the occupational 
hierachy in significant numbers thus displacing less highly educated labour 
and adding to the disposession of the working class. Collectively there are 
now roughly a million unemployed most of whom are, or were, middle and  
working class breadwinners.  The working class itself is now fractioned 
into short and long-term unemployed. The underclass of the long term 
unemployed includes many among the young, the disabled, Aboriginals,  those 
on long term welfare for various reasons, women and a rural peasant class. 
Significantly it also includes 700,00 children living in poverty 
(Ellingson, 1992). Human Rights Commisioner Brian Burdekin suggests that 
such a situation reveals Australia as a barbaric society.   It is difficult 
to disagree.

There are, of course, other effects of the applications of technology. The 
massive increases in the scale of our appropriation of the planet through 
resource extraction, industrialisation and chemicalisation have resulted in 
major environmental crises many of which seem to be irreversible and some 
of which may be life threatening on a global scale.

Such problems are first and last social problems  and must be responded to 
in social terms.  It is our forms of social organisation, including our 
organisation of economic activity in ways which allow the unfettered 
exploitation of physical, human, and social resources for private gain, 
which necessitate reforms of our education system. The reforms required 
are, however, vastly different from those proposed by those who would 
subordinate society to the demands of the global economy. I shall return to 
this theme later in my paper. For the moment I wish to turn to a 
consideration of the current educational reforms being pursued by English 
speaking governments as the ideology, strategy and effects of these reforms 
are currently addressed by educational research.

Educational Reform: Privatising and Marketising the Social.

The ideology of current reforms is now quite clear. Despite earlier 
confusion over apparent similarities between the reform agenda of the new 
right and some of the aspects of progressive educational reform proposed in 
the sixties and seventies (such as increasing differentiation as a response 
to social diversity, increased autonomy and local participation in 
schooling, increased professionailsation of curriculum and assessment) we 

can  be quite confident that the ideological manoeuvre involved (Grace, 
1990) is now transparent. As Snook makes clear:

This whole model of school reform assumes that the way to improve education 
is to control it more rigidly and to hand it over to the market. It is not 
about the quality of teachers, it is not about professionalism, it is not 
about teachers and their knowledge and their dedication and their concern 
for children or their ethical standards. It is about control by market 
forces.
(Snook, 1992:7)

Why, it might well be asked, is the transformation of education from a 
public good to a private market so important.  The answer, again, is 
becoming clear. As the limits of current markets for goods are reached  new 
markets must be found so that capital can continue to accumulate and 
concentrate. Privatising the social assets of the public sphere and 
transforming their supply of services into profit driven markets increases 
the possibility of further accumulation.  Thus, health, transport, prisons, 
education and other public agencies, if they can be captured by the private 
sphere, can be made to serve the purposes of profit and capital 
accumulation.   

However, on the surface, a blatant attempt to capture public resources for 
private profit might well be resisted by the public as a whole. Except for 
one major factor.

Within the context of the current disorganisation of the workforce (and 
consequently, the wider society ) referred to above, various strategies 
emerge in terms of protecting or reducing various historical advantages. 
While the struggle for educational reform has largely been towards the 
universalising of access and benefits, the struggle to capture education 
for sectional benefit has always had to be resisted. When social conditions 
change, then the balance of this battle also changes.  Understood within 
such a history of educational reform we can see that 

(Ball, 1992:2)

Where the battle for position is intensified through changed economic 
circumstances a middle class under threat might well see a marketised (and 
possibly even privatised) education system  as being significantly to its 
advantage. Indeed, despite it being relatively early days in the move 
towards the education  market, the reality of such expectations is becoming 
clear.  For instance Ball suggests that in the emerging education market in 
England:

(a) the strategic processes of choice systematically disadvantage working 
class families and (b) the link between choices and resources (via per 
capita funding) disadvantages working class schools and communities 
(ramifying and interacting with other collective consumption inequalities). 
In other words, the operation and effects of an education market benefit 
certain class groups and fractions to the detriment and disadvantage of 
others. 
(Ball, 1992:19)


So the creation of educational markets based upon 'choice' might well be 
seen to provide a relative advantage to the middle class in its battle to 
maintain position and privilege against the logic of labour market 
restructuring: for the market, like class, is a mechanism of exclusion. 

But markets, despite their promises, do not provide unfettered choice. The 
promise of relative advantage through choice which allows both the 
expenditure and the accumulation of cultural capital can only be delivered 
if the service itself can be depended upon to perform appropriately.

In other words, in order for educational markets to be legitimated in the 

eyes of consumers they must be structured so as to produce particular 
benefits.

The Structuring and Control of Educational Markets.

Simultaneously with the fragmentation of education systems into a series of 
competitive units (under the guise of greater local control and 
responsiveness) two major structural controls are being imposed so that 
market 'guarantees' can be provided. The first is curricular, the second 
evaluative. 

The restructuring of curriculum on a national standardised basis is 
currently taking place in most English speaking countries. As a framework 
within which teachers may work there is nothing objectionable to this as 
such. However, typically the form of such curricular structures is being 
constructed to impose a matrix of topics, levels and competencies which is 
inflexible and completely contrary to what research says about the 
construction of effective pedagogical processes. It also moves directly 
counter to the increasing differentiation of complex, multi-cultural 
societies.  Moreover, the curriculum is frequently presented in terms of 
purely instrumental utility related to the 'world of work'. 

In Australia the subordination of national curriculum development to the 
revivified Australian Education Council under Minister Dawlins and the 
articulation of a national agenda through the jointly owned Curriculum 
Corporation  displays this characteristic quite clearly. Moreover, the 
Finn, Mayer, Carmichael Reports which are also directed towards the 
reconstruction of curriculum exclude all matters that are not instrumental, 
work-related competencies, declaring that such issues as 'cultural 
understanding' are either irrelevant or too difficult to encompass within 
their specific  (narrow?) objectives.

Comparable situations exist in England and New Zealand. 

Moreover, systematic audits of schools to ensure compliance with the 
specified curriculum are also proposed.  The result is, as Hargreaves and 
Reynolds suggest, a system which ensures '... not choice and diversity, but 
the enforcement of traditional academic homogeneity through the state 
regulated market of parental choice' (1989:27). Colours are not allowed but 
you can have your choice of greys!

The basis of choice is theoretically at least, to be a public assessment of 
relative performance on state determined tasks between schools and other 
educational agencies. The performance is to be judged on strictly 
comparable criteria of the nationally prescribed curriculum tasks. 

In the United Kingdom a policy of raw score publication of test results is 
supposed to allow parents to choose good schools and avoid bad schools. The 
effect, however is rather to ensure that certain oversubscribed schools can 
'capture' the market by ensuring, not that their internal processes foster 
the greatest increases in student learning, but that their selection of 
their intake is sufficiently rigorous to ensure success  by ensuring that 
only the most able enter their portals (see Ball, 1992:13). The effect of 
such policies is simply to hierachise schools and to exaggerate relative 
advantages and disadvantages rather than to improve performance of either 
poor schools or the system as a whole.



Educational and Labour Markets: Is there a Link?

One of the fundamental public justifications for the construction of 
educational markets is that the existing educational systems have failed to 
produce the right mix or standard of skills required by a dramatically 
changing labour force. Thus existing education systems are responsible for 
the unemployability of youth. The solution is to create an educational 

market which will in some mystical way, adjust itself to the requirements 
of the labour market. The invisible hand will look after us all.

In New Zealand the claim is made by the Porter Report and echoed by other 
New Right documents that "Participation and performance in such areas as 
mathematics and science is poor compared to other advanced nations' . As 
Ivan Snook points out, not a shred of evidence is presented to support this 
assertion. Indeed as Warwick Elley demonstrated by appeal to the best 
educational research available quite the opposite is true: "New Zealand's 
educational performance levels in the basic subjects are very high by 
international standards' (Elley, 1991:1). Lauder (1991), Peters (1992) and 
Snook have reinforced this assessment. Similar assertions are made in 
Australia despite similar evidence to the contrary ( McGaw 1992).



But the promise is still made that by reorganising education, skills can be 
brought into line with what is required in the world of work and that this 
will increase performance, employment, the rewards of work  and 
international competitiveness.  In New Zealand Peters (1992) and Snook 
(1992) among others have shown the fallacy of this argument. 

For, while we are constantly regaled with promises of the 'new economy'  
none of the documents that hails its advent does more than sketch vague 
generalisations about the shift from manufacturing to service industries 
and the presumed rise in skill levels that is required. As Snook points out

All in all, the documents discussed fail to adequately define the 'new 
economy' or the kinds of workers it requires. They imply but never 
demonstrate that service industries will require higher levels of skill 
than the primary and manufacturing sectors did, or that non-manual jobs 
will need more knowledgable workers than many of the manual jobs which they 
will supercede.
(Snook, 1992:7)

Moreover, all available research indicates that the highest  of growth in 
employment internationally is in low wage/low skill  areas rather than high 
skill/high tech areas (Watkins, 1992).  This conclusion based on 
international data was supported by the Victorian Government's Department 
of Labour which in a 1990 report indicated that by the turn of the century 
there would be a substantial oversupply of highly skilled labour and an 
undersupply of clerks (25.1%) sales persons (25.3%) and labourers (22.6%) 
(see Bessant, 1992).

What this seems to mean is that the reorienting of the education system to 
secure appropriate skills for the world of work is proceeding on quite 
specious grounds. Firstly, no-one has yet demonstrated what particular 
skills are required by the new economy or in what mix. Moreover, education 
systems already seem to be, by any objective criteria, producing more 
people with high levels skills than the new economy can absorb. Moreover, 
what research there is seems to indicate that the high tech industry of the 
present, let alone the future, increases only marginally the demand for 
high tech labour, but serves to massively displace middle level skills in 
favour of low skill/low wage labour. Indeed, that is what it is designed to 
do. 

Managerialsim and the new order.

What is noticable about the ways in  which these transformations are being 
brought about is the replacement of processes of participatory (or in many 
cases even representative) democracy by the authority of managerialism. As 
Snook observes:

The New Right is profoundly undemocratic. The Libertarian theory is opposed 
to the involvement of ordinary people in the affairs of government. They 
believe that those with money, those who have proven themselves in 
business, are really the people who should be making our decisions for us. 
I regard that as not only profoundly undemocratic, but as a very dangerous 
tendency for our society.
(Snook, 1992:11)

Ironically, the New Right champions the imposition of unrepresentative 
management on social institutions as a defence against 'provider capture', 
and by doing so disenfranchises the professional expertise which sustains 
them.   The intent is clearly to bring teachers (along with other 
professionals) to heel, to reduce their autonomy and subject them to 
processes of accountability which allow them to be managed by those whose 
yardstick is not professional knowledge or expertise but 'performance 
indicators'. 


Perhaps the most extreme example of this is the about to be published New 
Zealand  Government document 'Education for the 21st Century' which 
consists of nothing more than the briefest of all statements of current 
conditions, a series of   lists of targets expressed in numerical or 
percentage terms  and some one sentence statements of monitoring and 
evaluation procedures. The document is devoid of context and devoid of 
argument. It is as complete an example as one could get of the practices of 
the new managerialsim.

Another example of such managerialism is the development of competency 
standards for the professions - a movement which is well under way in 
Australia. Here again is an ideological maneouvre of the most transparent 
kind, for who could possibly be opposed to greater competence among 
professionals? The mechanisms through which such competence is to be 
promoted, however, display all the managerial subtlety of the attempts to 
impose performance indicators on schools  and may well serve to depress 
rather than enhance professional performance (Bates, 1992c). 

Again, the recent DEET Discussion paper on Teacher Education also displays 
a willingness to sacrifice professional interest and commitment to the 
managerial imperative of control (Bates, 1992d). 


Ball, points to similar intentions in England.

In the restructuring of teachers' pay and conditions, in specialist 
training for school management, in central control over curriculum and the 
posibility of comparative testing (of students, schools and teachers), the 
three basic elements of classical management theory are clearly in 
evidence. First, decision-making is formally lodged within the management 
team, seperating policy from execution. Second, systems of quality control, 
time and motion study, and monitoring are brought into play through the 
development of teacher appraisal schemes and the use of cohort testing. The 
development of graded assessment schemes also fits quite neatly into  a 
system of performance comparison between teachers.... Third, efforts are 
made to link pay and promotion directly to performance.
(Ball, 1990:154)

The logic of such managerialsim flies in the face of the overwhelming bulk 
of the best educational research which despite the assurances of the would 
be managers that we can have excellence and efficiency too (that is  higher 
perfomrance with lower costs)  shows that

true community of professionals who talk a lot among themselves about school related matters. Good schools, contrary to the doctrine, spend more on education, pay more to teachers, have lower teacher/pupil ratios and have more resources. 
(Snook, 1992:8-9)

 Research points in the opposite direction to the imposition of 
managerialism. Moreover there is also ample historical evidence that the 
blind imposition of such managerialism produces both social tragedy and 
decline in the performance of educational systems (Callahan, 1962)

Is There any Hope ?

In the face of this series of crude  ideological manoeuvres which press 
towards a new educational settlement which reduces both education and 
society to be handmaidens of the economy, appropriates public assests in 
the service of private interests and subordinates the democratic interest 
of the people as a whole to the managerial interests of the few, what can 
we hope for?

Firstly, while the proposed managerialist scheme is enacted in legislation, 
as with most centrally devised schemes and despite some quite coercive 
provisions, actual practice turns out to be modified in unexpected ways as 
settlements have to be reached with those who are expected to 'implement' 
decisions. 


As Wallace et al (1992) show in the British case, the move towards Local 
Management of Schools which is the British euphemism for managerial 
capture, has resulted in some suprising alliances and modifications. Parent 
governors seem to have sided with teachers and pupils more frequently than 
not in debates over resources, curriculum and assessment once they have 
become familiar with the complexity and difficulty of teaching and learning 
under increasingly impoverished conditions.

In New Zealand as Codd et al (1992) report, proposed manageralist forms of 
assessment and accountability have been to a substantial degree, subverted 
and forms of assessment more appropriate to diagnostic, professional 
purposes are on the agenda. 

Again in New Zealand moves towards the bulk funding of teachers salaries, 
seen by the government as crucial in the deregulation of schooling have 
been overwhelmingly rejected by the boards of governors who are to 
implement them: of 826 submissions in this regard, 825 want the Bill 
withdrawn (Austin, 1992). 

There are also signs that governments are showing their true colours and 
the rhetoric of local 'ownership' is wearing very thin as central political 
control is clearly spelled out (See  Codd and Gordon, 1991). Moreover, as 
Ball and Bowe (1992) point out with regard to the English experiment, there 
is a serious tension emerging between the rhetoric of consumer choice and 
the rhetoric of management control as the reality of practice begins to 
bite. The outcome is much less certain than the managers would have us 
believe.  

In the Australian scene the complexities of state/federal relations and the 
contradictions created by an avowedly socialist government selling the farm 
to private interests create a series of difficulties which may yet 
galvanise an effective opposition within the Labour movement. Moreover, in 
Victoria the ruthlessness of the Kennett Government in its attack on the 
public sphere which appears to include the closure of up to 200 schools and 
the displacement of some 2000 teachers has consequences which are not 
solely confined to the teaching profession. The reduction in access to and 
quality of education in an era where education is proclaimed by the 
government itself as vitally important contains its own contradictions.



What should we be fighting for ?

We have enough research now to describe pretty clearly the conditions under 
which good schools operate.  They are not the conditions promised by the 
reforms of the economic rationalists. Quite the converse. As the OECD 
Report Schools and Quality makes clear  the world wide literature suggests 
the following characteristics:

1    Collaborative planning and decisionmaking among all staff.

2.   Positive educational leadership from senior staff.



3.   High staff stability

4.   Staff feel secure and supported

5.   Procedures are orderly

6.   On going school based staff development.

7.   Carefully planned curricula

8.   High levels of parental support

9.   A school wide system of values

10.  Maximum use of learning time

11.  Confidence that resources will continue to be available.

In short a collegial, professional style of curricular and pedagogical 
development within  a secure school culture supported by its community in 
both values and resources. This is all but the converse of the 
managerialist market model proposed by the economic rationalists.

They are also. notably, social rather than economic criteria.  That is, 
they display quite clearly the fundamental connection between schooling and 
social, rather than simply economic criteria. In this the findings on 
effective schools equate quite well with the results of Robert Lane's 
synthesis of over a thousand investigators' enquiries into the impact of 
market forces on peoples lives. Ted Wheelwright summarises Lane's  
conclusions like this:

His central concern is with the effects of economic activity on human 
learning, personal development, and happiness, and he considers that the 
most important criteria for judging markets is the satisfaction that people 
get from their experience of markets, and not markets' efficiency in 
producing and distributing goods and services. Income, goods and services 
are only means to ends which are satisfaction, happiness and human 
development. 
(Wheelwright, 1992:47)


In making this judgement Lane's conclusions are similar to those of an 
Australian study which clearly rejected a solely economic model of society:

 what Schumacher (1975) labelled almost two decades ago 'people centred theories' of dealing with social organisation. People should matter in the future Australian society where all members are assured of equitable chances of developing their potentials and sharing equitably in what their society has to offer.

(Campbell, 1992)

Moreover, there are indications that despite the interference of economic 
rationalism with its deregulation of markets and its treatment of the 
social as subordinate to the economic,  there is still a strong commitment 
to more than simply the production of wealth in uncertain times. Indeed,  
as Adam Smith himself pointed out the market itself depends upon the 
existence of a community of sentiment which sustains the values and 
commitments upon which it depends. Or, as Gitlin put it more recently and 
more evocatively

Now that Soviet style socialism is defunct, 'the Market' is the world's 
leading utopia... But  a working market requires something that buccaneer 
capitalism cannot deliver - a shared commons where the market takes place. 
A healthy society requires, and produces, a spirit of civility- a 
generosity of feeling, a widespread commitment to the furtherance of the 
common conversation about the common good. To use an old fashioned term, 
civil society cultivates and requires civic virtue. The ideal of Main 
Street...is one in which neighbours watch out for one another. But today 

the ideals of Main Street are constantly eaten away by the pursuit of the 
main chance...When marketplace reasoning predominates everywhere, the war 
of all against all explodes the provisional truces. In everyday life social 
responsibility decomposes... In the culture, the dissolution of solidarity 
in the solvent of indiscriminate rage gives us the embattled, desperado 
masculinity of slash and grunt movies.
(Gitlin, 1922)

Educational reform which adresses solely economic criteria within a society 
in which the social is subordinated to the economic through the 
reconstruction of public institutions in the service of the market is a 
significant contribution to the elimination of the social from the 
consciousness of individuals.  And, as Rousseau reminded us 'take from the 
individual all that is society ...and you are left with blind sensation', a 
blind sensation that might be either the satisfaction of consumption or the 
rage of dipossession.

But, clearly the culture provided by the market is, because of its 
exclusion of the social, unable to satisfy the needs of individuals for any 
depth of meaning in their existence. 'I consume therefore I am'  ( with its 
concomitant 'I cannot consume, therefore I am not') is as inadequate a 
definition of the self as it is a mechanism for the construction of society 
(Bates, 1992).

There is, therefore, a deepseated sense in which the educational reforms 
currently in vogue in English speaking countries, located as they are in a 
panic reaction to conditions of economic crises currently facing Western 
capital, constitute not only an attack on society, but also an attack on 
our very selves. The aspirations of the people are clear and, beyond a 
certain threshold, overwhelmingly social and personal in nature, for the 
construction of the self is simultaneously the construction of society. The 
denial of the social is the denial of the self. 

Educational reforms which further the economic destruction of society  and 
deny the social responsibility of education will serve us and our children 
poorly indeed. 

We need to fight not only for an education system that recognises its 
preeminently social role, but also for the reassertion of social objectives 
as the prime task of politics and the subordination of the economic to 
social imperatives in the wider sphere. Such a task is quite in keeping 
with our forbears commitment to the establishment of social democracy in 
both Australia and New Zealand.

As Simon Marginson (1992) reminds us, Jonathon Swift (1729) had an 
appropriately economic rationalist solution to this problem through his 
modest proposal to fatten such children for the tables of the reach, thus 
creating a new gourmet delight, improving the incomes of the poor and 
having the potential of contributing to the balance of payments problem. 
 I have addressed this issue in two recent papers: 'The Emerging Culture of 
Educational Administration and what we can do about it' (1992a) and 
'Leadership and School Culture' (1992b) as well as in 'Who Owns the 
Curriculum?' (1991)


References

Austin, M. (1992)  (1992)  A Principal's Role:  Today and Tomorrow .  Paper 
to Bay of Plenty Principal, Conference, October.

Ball, Stephen (1990)  Foucault and Education  London, Routledge

Ball, Stephen (1992)  Education Markets, Choice and Social Class:  The 
Market as a class strategy in the UK and the US.  Unpublished paper:  
Centre for Educational Studies, King's College, London.

Bates, Richard (1991) Who Owns the Curriculum?  pp    in P. Capper (ed)  
Pathways to the New Century  Wellington, N.Z.  New Zealand Post Primary 
Teachers Association.

Bates, Richard (1992)  Barely Competent:  against deskilling of the 
professions via the cult of competence.  Seminar on Competency and 
Professional Education.  Faculty of Education, Univesity of Canberra, 
September.  

Bates, Richard (1992)  Leadership and School Culture.  Keynote Address:  
II Congreso Interuniversitario de Organizacion Escolar, Universidad de 
Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain, December.

Bates, Richard (1992)  The Emerging Culture of Educational Administration 
and what We Can Do About It. Keynote address, National Conference of the 
Australian Council for Educational Administration.  Darwin, July.

Bessant, R. (1992)  Clever Country or Clever Gimmick. Australian 
Administrator 13 (5)

Callahan, R. (1992) Education and the Cult of Efficiency  Chicago, Chicago 
University Press

Campbell, W.J. (1992) (ed)  Towards an Educational Curriculum for 2000 and 
Beyond  Nathan, Queensland.  World Educational Fellowship

Codd. J. & Gordon, L. (1991)  School Charters:  The contractualist state 
and education policy.  New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies 26 (1) 
21-34

Codd, J., McAlpine, D., & Poskett, J (1992)  The Reform of Student 
Assessment in New Zealand:  Whose Agenda?  What Effects?  Paper presented 
to NZARE/AARE Joint Conference.  Deakin UNiversity. November

Department of Employment, Education and Training (1992)  Discussion Paper 
on Teacher Education  Canberra

Elley, Warwick (1991)  How well do New Zealand

 Studewnts Achieve by International Standards?  University of Canterbury, 
Christchurch

Ellingson, Peter (1992)  'The Recession not everyone had to have'  The Age  
Saturday Nov. 14.


Gitlin, Todd (1991)  Unicivil Society Image  April 19.

Grace, Gerald (1990)  The New Zealand Treasury and the Commodification of 
Education.  pp  27-39 in  S. Middleton, J. Codd, A. Jones, (eds) New 
Zealand Educational Policy Today  Wellington:  Allen & Unwin

Hargreaves, A. & Reynolds, D (1989)  Educational Policies:  Controversies 
and Critiques  London:  Falmer Press

Lauder, Hugh (1991) Tomorrow's Education:  Tomorrow's Economy  Report 
Commissioned by the Education Sector Standing Committee of the New Zealand 
Council of Trade Unions.  Wellington

Marginson, Simon (1992)  Education as a Branch of Economics:  The Universal 
Claims of Economic Rationalisation  pp. 1-14 in Rationalising Education 
Melbourne Studies in Education 1992

Peters, Michael (1992)  A Critique of the Porter Report.  pp4-14 in Delta 
46  Massey University.  N.Z. 

Snook, Ivan (1992)  A Skilled Workforce and the School Curriculum  Paper 
presented to the Wellington South Principal's Association.  Parina, July.

Snook, Ivan (1992)  Reform in Education:  A Better Way.  Keynote address, 
Western Bay of Plenty Principal's Association. Tarranga  August

Wallace, G.  (ed)  Local Management of Schools:  Research and Experience  
Clevedon, Multilingual Matters.

Watkins, Peter (   )

Wheelwright, Ted (1992)  'The Ends of Economics'  pp 45-47 in Arena 
Magazine No. 1.  November




Keynote Address: Joint AARE/NZARE Annual Conference.
Deakin University, Geelong, November, 1992