Education as a worldwide political object: the atonement of

conflict1

By Ernesto Treviño Ronzón

My purpose in the following pages is to explore the theoretical

implications of the exclusion of conflict in educational thinking because

of the action of some international organizations. For this, I start taking

into consideration, as a theoretical resource, the discussions about

making people and the citizen as elaborated by Popkewitz and Hacking

in their respective works. After this, and as a referent for discussion, I

speak about some ideas deployed in documents of worldwide

implications like those produced by of UNESCO and OECD-PISA. I close

the paper with a general reflection on the mutual implications of these

topics.

I find quite interesting our recent discussions on making people.

Although I am fully familiar ―basically through Heidegger, Foucault and

Derrida― with the ontological premises of the idea that people or

individuals don’t just exist but exist in mobile contexts of power, values,

nomination, the way in which Hacking (1986) and Popkewitz (2008) put

it is useful because is closely related with things that are going on in our

current and somehow shared existential experience. In this sense,

although I have not yet explored deeply the philosophical implications of

Hacking’s dynamic nominalism and others of his assertions, I do think

1 This paper was written as a reaction paper for the Seminar: Reform and Change in Curriculum,

Fall 2009, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mail: ernezto.tr@gmail.com

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he provides a provocative language to inform a debate about education,

and I think that Popkewitz shows this in his discussion on the

implications of the process of making the cosmopolitan citizen and the

practices of abjection.

In this line of thought, the idea of the cosmopolitan citizen

connects deeply with a process of global interest for thinking of

education as an object of global concern: governance, regulation, design.

We could date this to the foundation of UNESCO (1946), although I

prefer to take, as a more recent marking point, the publication of Edgar

Faure’s document Learning to be. The world of education today and

tomorrow (UNESCO, 1972), a document specifically oriented to

encourage a worldwide agenda for education and where ideas like

lifelong education, democracy, development and education among

others, came to circulation in such a scale. And for the last three decades,

international organism including the World Bank, the OECD and others

have had their word in education, emphasizing its importance for the

economical, cultural, sociological and technological development of the

world ―dressing it with the vocabulary of competitiveness, quality,

innovation.

In this context, education seems to me, more than before, a

political object in the sense that, although education has always

implicated the encounter and imposition of visions about the world,

about society, about school, about what should be taught, who should be

the teacher, who the student, and further, today, is actively linked to the

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economical, environmental, democratic future of the world, and

constructed as a referent of national security in some countries (See for

instance documents such as The partnership for 21st century skills,

2008). However in the past century thinkers like Fritz Machlup

developed wide analysis of these aspects, it is until recently that they are

a concern for public discussion and public policy worldwide. This we can

see in initiatives like PISA, through which we are informed about the

proficiency of students, but most of all, about the success and failure of

some countries on achieving the sort of excellence reflected on the charts.

This sort of global technology (PISA) has lead to several thinkers

and politicians do adopt positions labeled as politically progressive. One

sub-sort of this positions is of particular interest to me, the one which

sees education as a social field or human right, where there is no space or

time for dissent, where words such as conflict, difference and struggle –

dissent relatives- are legitimate as long as they allow us to settle our

differences or to understand each other, in our deeply and common

“human nature”; and to get better in our educational performance,

because, problem solving is a something that we must know to grasp

the future –and for this reason is something we have to evaluate. That

is to say, as long as they are detached from their political affiliation, taste

or bloodline, to be used as a curricular or administrative tool o content:

problem solving, recognition and acceptance of diversity and others, as

school subjects.

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 This way of facing dissent or conflict is also quite common, for

other reasons, in several fields of thinking: cultural studies, politics,

gender, multiculturalism, TIC, among others, where is related to specific

facts in various realms of social life. Some of them are quite dramatic

and have left profound scares on the face of several societies to a point

that consensus or mutual understanding, emerges as a the most

desirable object --state of being-- for education.

However, in the process of seeking this technical achievement, or

human reconciliation we can observe a process of social and political

closure, the construction of a sort of dispositif or device (in the

Foucaultian sense) for conflict-atonement with the properties of the

Greek oxymoron: one which through its very existence provides both,

plausible forms for the understanding or betterment of some social

conflicts, and the seminal substance that kills also promising elements

that could lead to exploitation of difference. What is going on, for me, is

that, for more than one reason, international organizations (as well as

public and private sectors, educational thinkers) are using these words in

senses that castaway the possibility for seeing the difference, the dissent

and the conflict as a legitimate political way of being in the world.

Apparently, the words of international organizations should not be

challenged, there is no room to say that I'm not interested, as a citizen or

as a country, in being regarded through a technology like PISA, or that a

particular agenda, or an item in that agenda, should be debated, because

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saying so implies ruptures, conflicts, the delay of progress, of

improvement, it implies unproductive political conflicts.

Evidently, neither difference nor conflict, consensus or dissent,

can be understood in plain, these terms emerge in a wider web of

meaning and this implies the challenge to construct them. Here is where

the theories of making people are useful to understand these global

discourses, but also, if we are interested, in creating new ways of

constructing conflict and difference. The sociological construction of

dissent and conflict as an undesirable thing in the world of education

leads to the field of impasse and affirmative exclusion.

Is not that I believe that total detention of political difference is

possible, such a thing is a sort of ontological impossibility, but what I

believe is that the right to dissent and to battle for this dissent in

theoretical and political fields is a productive way to challenge some of

the dominant cosmopolitan thesis, the conflict-atonement dispositif,

attempting to make the citizen a programmable entity somehow

indifferent, ashamed or scared toward conflict.

References

- Hacking, Ian (1986) Making up people. California: Stanford

university press.
- Popkewitz, Thomas (2008) Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School
Reform. NY: Routledge
- The partnership for 21st century skills (2008) Transition brief policy
recommendations on preparing Americans for the global skills race.
EUA.