Presentation by Professor Kristiina Brunila in the on-line webinar Can education help us to build peaceful, just, and sustainable futures for all?
Discussion of UNESCO’s Futures of Education initiative report.
University of Turku, CELE-centre, Finland, December 2, 2021.
I’ve studied education policies, practices, changes in governance, power and inequalities for 20 years now. And based on that experience I sometimes wish I had become a gardener instead of being an educationalist. One thing I’ve learned is that what I think we need to do is to stop romanticising education and we need to kill off the naivety related to it. Perhaps after killing off these darlings, we could start talking about education more seriously.
First, before saying anything about the UNESCO’s ‘Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education?’ report, I want to address three things we already know (or should know). First, managing the future has become one of the major focuses of global governance in education, to create future-proof education in managing future workforce and populations or perhaps just becoming more efficient in governing the present, which also relates to ‘objective’ and ‘evidence-based’ policy resting on the perception that each individual acts in a way that can be tracked, calculated and predicted through using statistics and mathematical models (e.g. Mertanen, Vainio & Brunila, in press).
In these arguments, education seems unable to respond to the needs and interests of the market and future megatrends, such as globalisation and digitalisation. Policy reforms repeatedly declare that education is in crisis and therefore not delivering what it is supposed to deliver. What is said between the lines is also that we educationalists have failed.
Second, there is a call for a new kind of understanding of on-going and overlapping changes in education governance that might be studied but so far separately. In Helsinki and in our on-going Interrupting Future Trajectories of Precision Education Governance (FuturEd) research project, together with our partnership network (and here I want to mention scholars from Tampere, Turku and Melbourne) have addressed with a concept of precision education governance bringing into analysis
- A) arrangement of education policy in globalised and localised networks including multiple stakeholders and agendas;
- B) arrangement of edu-tech business combining digitalisation, datafication, privatisation and marketisation and finally;
- C) arrangement of behavioural and life sciences in education.
We are already witnessing a shift from education to learning and from knowledge-based to skill-and-emotion-based behavioural governance. This behavioural governance is filled with promises of optimisation, to provide individuals to reach their full economically-driven potential and vitality. In other words, making of human capital with the rhetoric of wellbeing, success and equality.
And then third, we know the historically reformed and rather ambivalent relationship between education and inequalities which has also been one my research areas for the past 20 years, especially in the global north. While education’s public discourses have enhanced equality, equity, social justice, human rights and so on, in practice, educational systems have ended up reproducing inequalities related to gender, ethnicity, sexuality, poverty, ableism and so on. In education we have a rather peculiar situation; we have all the old inequalities in our hands which we have not addressed for a range of reasons, and now the changes in education governance are bringing new ones.
UNESCO is among the intergovernmental organisations (IGOS) practising so called ‘soft governing and UNESCO as other intergovernmental organisations hold power in providing information, ideas, and legitimacy for certain actions. Although the IGOs do not have ‘direct’ power over nation states, their influence shows in a nation-state’s policy making. And of course, while seeking to solve the global crises of education, they pave the way for longer-term transformations to education systems, institutions and practices.
For example, compared to the OECD, the overall tone of the current UNESCO report is quite humane. For example, all the imaginable concepts related to societal inequalities are listed. It is very impressive. The report also provides some welcoming critical aspects, such as those related to digitalisation and datafication, big data bias, and hacking human learning through neurotech and biotech. It also enhances the importance of public schooling and in principle aims to challenge forms of individualisation and instead enhances collectivity. Therefore, one could use the word refreshing when referring to the report and inequalities.
Because of the time limit, I will address only three of the issues that are concerning me, partly related to the report and partly in general. In a way, there are two quite strong key lines in the report which do not necessarily overlap very well. The first enhances social justice, equality, equity and human rights and the other precision education governance or at least central ingredients related to it with wider and stronger global and local networks, digitalisation and life and behavioural sciences but not so clearly as OECD does.
Although the report lists an impressive number of ideas related to inequalities, what is not addressed at all or just very briefly is the role of education itself in producing and reproducing inequalities and privilege or the status quo, if you like. More generally and I am not referring to the report now; in terms of inequalities, education is usually mainly the cure, not necessarily the problem. Of course, this is a wider problem and not just UNESCO’s problem.
In general, and in terms of inequalities (and this is very typical for example here in Finland) it looks as though we are constantly arguing for the need for more education for more people rather than necessarily questioning the role, purpose and methods of education. We go for quantity over the quality while we refuse to look at what is going on in education, what its aims and agendas and methods are.
In terms of inequalities in education, what is typical is that we tend to focus on the estimation and remediation of inequalities and exclusion so that our focus becomes instrumental rather than substantive; we become concerned and obsessed with numbers, things like performance gaps, participation rates and so on – and we think this tells us what to do with inequalities. Numbers are decontextualised knowledge, with numbers you can put your own interpretation and do whatever you like – and I guess that is why there is this obsession among policy makers.
And how do we overcome the gap between those who tend to think they know the best, the persistent we, and those who are the targets of the supposedly correct knowledge?
The final issue I address is the report’s main focus, how the report invites us to reimagine a future in which a new social contract is negotiated. The new social contract aims to move away from top-down towards multi-centric action, towards more complex education assemblages, structures that shape and enable education as multiple networks forming stronger alliances.
When we look at changing education governance towards precision education governance, global powerful networks that form new alliances with edu-tech-bio-business, consultancies, industries and so on with a much stronger economic ideology, I am afraid that this idea of collaboration and networks quickly becomes a bit vague or at least naïve. How do we form networks and new alliances by avoiding marketisation, privatisation and commercialisation that are already everywhere?
And in terms of welfare states, I am wondering what the role of the state is in this contract idea. If we acknowledge how strongly welfare states have already shifted towards a neoliberal emphasis so that economic growth and competitiveness are even presented as requirements for social justice and equality.
(This I added after the presentation) With my colleague Hanna Ylöstalo we wrote how the neoliberal ethos and its alliance with therapeutic vocabulary and methods has formed a new joint framework for the rise of the therapeutic Nordic welfare state model. We did so by analysing the recent round of policy reform in education and employment policies and practices in Finland. We argued that neoliberal welfare state reform is not only intensified by the therapeutic ethos, but that the state also acts as a powerful instrument of this reform.
So, it is not only competitiveness and efficiency that are shaping citizens, but also even more persistent changes in the ways citizens are perceived and how they should perceive themselves both as psycho-emotionally vulnerable but also necessarily self-responsible, resilient and competitive. Here the purpose of education becomes to release its targets from emotional and behavioural burdens and guide the means for how the life and the self should be actualised and obtained to optimise the potentials of life and where behavioural and life sciences and new types of alliances and agendas play a central role while education is forced to open up to a society or market. Moreover, education tends to be dressed up as neutral and objective techniques that are supposed to enable the psychological growth into the ideal set of existence, which can be summarised as flexible and resilient self-governing subjectivity (addition ends.)
So, the relationship between state and citizenship is already changing and where education plays a role. Because of this, it is difficult for me to see how this contract idea would change the shift rather than just enforce it. In terms of responsibility and power, where would responsibility and power be and who and what would be responsible?
The webinar proposed a question about how to realize the UNESCO report’s bold aspirations.
Well, I have not yet decided to become a gardener although it is very tempting. I think there is still room for education and educationalists, completely undressed from romanticism.
As educationalists, I guess we should keep interrogating our epistemological and ontological assumptions, all the information and other resources we use, practices in which we engage and the meanings and politics we assign. We could be much more rigorous in the things we do not know – we always tend to know best, and I don’t think we do nor should. But we also need to be aware what we know and what edu-preneurs don’t know.
Inequalities and privileges in education call for going beyond the mainstream and paying attention to power relations and their outcomes, ourselves included. It also means recognising that our desire to know best and formulate ways of seeing may not help us to see the limitations of those ways of seeing so that we end up reproducing the social, political, theoretical and methodological status quo and inequalities.
Professor Kristiina Brunila
AGORA for the study of social justice and equality in education -research centre
University of Helsinki