Abstract:
Privatisation is one of the biggest issues currently facing education globally. The entry of new non-state actors into education policy making and service provision has been enabled by state restructuring. The state has become an enabler of network governance with private companies, NGOs and philanthropic actors. One response to this changing politics has been the mobilisation of Education International and teachers’ unions in response to the global education industry seeking to maximise economic opportunities opened up by state restructuring and technological changes that create new opportunities to profit from data work in education. What is being contested here is the ideal of public education in the face of political and technological challenges to its integrity. In this paper, we draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to problematise these new relations between thought/learning, public education, technological change and privatisation.
For Deleuze, thinking or learning does not occur through recognition; it requires disruptions of perceptual and cognitive schema. Something must force us to think and thought is a deterritorialising force. In their collaborative writing, Deleuze and Guattari developed a theory of the relation between capitalism and State formations that attributes a deterritorialising function to capitalism and a reterritorializing function to the state and the family. Each of these institutions, which can be considered primary sites of education in capitalist societies, provide a model for thought and desire that captures learning in pre-existing territories. In contrast, the deterritorialising force of thought and capital raises interesting questions concerning possible affinities here. Moreover, as an anti-Platonist, Deleuze does not recognise transcendental forms and thus provides no conceptual grounds for conceiving of an ideal ‘public’ against which the privatisation of education can be opposed. Deleuze is also critical of actually-existing-democracy due to its consensualism and its alliance with essentialist groundings of human rights. But, Deleuze and Guattari are also strongly critical of the commercialisation of education and of conceptual work by the advertising industry. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s seven axioms of capital as outlined in A Thousand Plateaus presents us with interesting problematisations of the relations between learning, democracy, public education and privatisation that unsettle the coordinates that usually structure debates about these issues. The paper will develop a theoretical argument concerning these problems through readings of key texts on public education in the Deweyan/progressive tradition of educational scholarship.
For Deleuze, thinking or learning does not occur through recognition; it requires disruptions of perceptual and cognitive schema. Something must force us to think and thought is a deterritorialising force. In their collaborative writing, Deleuze and Guattari developed a theory of the relation between capitalism and State formations that attributes a deterritorialising function to capitalism and a reterritorializing function to the state and the family. Each of these institutions, which can be considered primary sites of education in capitalist societies, provide a model for thought and desire that captures learning in pre-existing territories. In contrast, the deterritorialising force of thought and capital raises interesting questions concerning possible affinities here. Moreover, as an anti-Platonist, Deleuze does not recognise transcendental forms and thus provides no conceptual grounds for conceiving of an ideal ‘public’ against which the privatisation of education can be opposed. Deleuze is also critical of actually-existing-democracy due to its consensualism and its alliance with essentialist groundings of human rights. But, Deleuze and Guattari are also strongly critical of the commercialisation of education and of conceptual work by the advertising industry. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s seven axioms of capital as outlined in A Thousand Plateaus presents us with interesting problematisations of the relations between learning, democracy, public education and privatisation that unsettle the coordinates that usually structure debates about these issues. The paper will develop a theoretical argument concerning these problems through readings of key texts on public education in the Deweyan/progressive tradition of educational scholarship.