The politics of education: An overview
The politics of education: An overview
The post-war demand for mass education enhanced the right to education. However, it also transformed education into a political institution, with politics determining who received an education and for what.
This article was written in preparation for our round table on Politics of Education
Particularly since the end of the Second World War, education has become a significant domain of politics, with both policy and power playing a crucial role in determining who receives an education and for what purpose. A century before, American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) had questioned why political leaders were becoming interested in mass public education: “‘If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused.’ I notice too that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear; ‘This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats.’”[1] Arguably, post-war developments in education saw Emerson’s apprehensions move at an industrial pace, with mass education used as the “right way keep their perspectives and their understanding and narrow,” in the words of public intellectual and linguist Noam Chomsky, in order to “discourage free and independent thought and frighten them into obedience.”[2]
The promises of post-war education
The demand for education at a mass scale sprang up after the Second World War. Urbanisation, the growing affluence of populations in North America and Europe, the shift away from the norm of a single working parent, and the need to meet the industrial requirements of modern scientific technology, all raised the demand for education, including secondary and higher education.[3] The rise of independent nations and post-colonial nationalisms also meant that education had become an instrument of national development. The quantity and outreach of education increased significantly, particularly to reduce illiteracy and build national solidarities. Between 1950 and 1970, as a result, the number of universities in many countries doubled or trebled across many countries.[4]
While the demand for the provision of mass education enhanced the right to education, and raised the expectation for social reconstruction, it also transformed it into a core political institution of any post-war nation. The bureaucratic and managerial revolutions in the early 20th century transformed education into a more instrumentalist tool, using schooling, students, and curricula to build a certain view of not only a nation but also a certain kind of economic and political life.[5] Politics was now able to significantly determine who received an education and for what. In Class, bureaucracy, and schools: The illusion of educational change in America, Katz argues that the developments in mass education reforms intended to train and socially discipline school children into ‘working-class’ men who were able to ‘perform’: take direction from supervisors, work independently, and produce results that were evaluated and certified.[6] Easterly further explains this by maintaining that as economic development “proceeds and physical capital rises, the return to skills increase and industrial capitalists would be willing to invest in mass education so as to gain a skilled labor force to complement their physical capital.”[7]
There is politics in education
This emphasis on performance also meant that the wartime dream of “daring the school to build a new social order was increasingly lost.”[8]Education was used less and less as the most important social institution for maintaining democratic ideals and securing democratic government. As Zeigler, Jennings, and Peak note, people undergoing education were ill-informed to meaningfully participate in electoral democracies.[9] Education did not articulate alternative visions, leaving people ill-informed about issues and letting leaders run unopposed by emphasising reputation rather than policy differences.[10] Chomsky’s appraisal of the politics of education in particular reflects the negative relationship between education and democracy that politics mediates. According to him, the education had been repurposed in the twentieth century to part for the maintenance of “the intelligent minority,” while at the same time keeping “the middle men out and ignorant.” Otherwise, the poor “would take their voting power to divide the property of the riches.”[11] Bourguignon and Verdier support Chomsky’s appraisal by arguing that an ‘oligarchy’ opposes widespread education because educated peoples are more likely to demand political power, i.e. democracy.[12] Even if the country is already ‘democratic’, more educated peoples will be more likely to be politically active and thus more likely to vote for a redistribution of income and power away from the ‘oligarchy’.[13] Hence, the oligarchy will resist progressive mass education even in a democratic society.[14]
As Katznelson and Weir note, for a significant time, only the Roman Catholic Church had serious reservations about these developments, “because their schooling involved social culture and religious enlightenment as much as preparation for work.”[15] The Roman Catholic Church was particularly sensitive in noticing these developments because of explicit marginalisation of religion with scientific-realist education in schools and universities in North America and Europe. To be sure, this shift in the politics of education remained largely unidentified in the decades prior to 1960. The idea of an educational system free of politics was so persuasively implemented by political institutions, such as calls to “get politics out of the schools and get the schools out of politics,”[16] that the politics of education was detected very late in 1959 with the publication of the seminal essay ‘Toward an Understanding of Public School Politics’ by Thomas Eliot in the American Political Science Review.[17] Eliot specifically argued that scholars had thoroughly neglected the political dimensions of education and its implementation. Only decades later did the impact of these developments on the humanities start to be globally recognised. In August 2017, for example, the World Humanities Conference Liège in Belgium organised with UNESCO declared: “The humanities were at the heart of both public debate and the political arena until the Second World War. In recent years their part was fading and they have been marginalized. It is crucial to stop their marginalization, restore them and impose their presence in the public sphere as well as in science policies.”[18]
Education for difference
Politics, it can therefore be argued, has determined the way in which education has existed. In the UK, for example, the shift in political ideology also meant that the norm of a modern form of publicly-funded, compulsory mass education came under fire. Starting with the Conservative-led coalition in 2010, public funding was drastically reduced under the policy for austerity. By 2020, according to the UK Institute for Fiscal Studies, England’s state schools reported suffering the biggest fall in funding since the 1980s.[19] This political effort to shrink funding for education in the UK, either to students or university, has had a harsh impact on theology and the study of religion in particular. It has meant cuts in the financing of their research and teaching; their lower share of or even elimination in the space and structure within the university; and their evaluation by methods typical of scientific activity, resulting in policies that deem these subjects weak on social impact.[20] Indeed, the impact of Conservative Party reforms in higher education has been so harsh that theology and the study of religion started to rapidly disappear during the Conservative tenure. A recent report found that since 2012, when higher tuition fees were introduced, the number of students studying Theology and Religious Studies (TRS) degrees fell by a third. Major theology schools in Bangor University, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Sheffield were either closed or phased out.[21] As recently as April 2021, the University of Chester, which has an Anglican foundation, issued redundancy notices to the ten remaining academic staff in its department of theology and religious studies. Calling it an “unnecessary act of vandalism,” as many as 800 religious leaders and academics protested this move in a letter organised by the TRS-UK, the TRS departments’ professional association in the UK.[22] The letter stated that the redundancies would “severely damage the capacity of a flourishing department to continue its significant contribution to TRS disciplines nationally and internationally.”[23] The department, the letter highlighted, has an “outstanding record” in securing funding for research, having secured £2.5 million in the past cycle, which is “an exceptional sum for a Humanities department.”[24] Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford, explains that the disappearance of theology and the study of religion in UK universities is caused by a policy preference for money-making disciplines: “The obvious line is to go for is those disciplines that provide lots of money very quickly – medicine is clearly at the extreme end of that – which is a problem for those disciplines regarded, quite wrongly, as marginal, like music.”[25]
UK schools in the most deprived areas were worst affected by the government’s austerity policy. A study by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) confirms this: disadvantaged young people became less likely to achieve the required education by age 19, with educational attainment extremely poor among ethnic groups and young people with additional needs.[26] This was evidence of how the education determined by political priorities was leading to the exclusion and marginalisation of more vulnerable communities. Conservative Party reforms in higher education in the UK were also significant: they sharply increased the maximum tuition fees for UK and EU undergraduates at English universities. An analysis of the UK’s funding and regulatory framework, also by the LSE, revealed that the role of central government in England increased under the Conservative Party and that of local government declined.[27] Communities in England were now less able to determine the kind of education they needed.
Moreover, as Professor Jacqueline Stevenson, Director of the Lifelong Learning Centre and Co-Director of FLaG, University of Leeds, points out, this marginalisation has directly extended to many religious students themselves. These students, Stevenson argues, have been marginalised by the policies and practices of UK higher education that assume that “UK higher education is (and should be) a secular space.”[28] This, Stevenson adds, “secularises students so religion becomes irrelevant fairly quickly; and/or that religious students are the cause of (potential) threat and so need to be managed.”[29] As a result, religious students frequently have their religious freedom reduced on the higher education campus. The use of education by politics to exclude and marginalise religious students is also evidenced by the recent developments in France. On 7 April 2021, as part of a larger bill, ‘Strengthening Republican Values’ introduced by President Emmanuel Macron to fight “Islamist separatism,” the French Senate approved a series of bans on religious practice in the context of education.[30] It banned Muslim prayer at universities and also other religious activities deemed to affect educational activities across the country, prevent Muslim families from giving their children a home education, and stop hijab-wearing mothers from accompanying children on school trips.[31] Critics argue that this is the political use of education to exclude Muslims and their identity from French society. French legal scholar and commentator Rim-Sarah Alouane says that French politicians are weaponising laïcité – specifically, the division between private religious life and public secular life in education – to not address extremism but control Muslims.[32] For example, hijab-wearing mothers targeted by the bill are not civil servants and as a consequence, religious neutrality can be not imposed upon them.[33] France, it follows, is using laïcité to limit the increasing participation of Muslims in the civic and social life of France: “Sadly, for many in our political elite (across the political spectrum), a good Muslim is an invisible Muslim.”[34]
The paradoxes of education
The provision of and right to education, particularly since the Second World War, to mould and use people diametrically contrasts with what educational progressives of the 20th century had originally imagined: the emancipating and democratising role of education in social and political life.[35] While publicly-funded mass education was of use to political elites, this form of education has come into question with recent developments in countries, like the UK. The reduction of public funding for education in the UK highlights the role of education as a tool to socially exclude certain kinds of people and maintain certain kinds of socio-economic differences. This specific paradox of education – to exclude and marginalise people to maintain social selection instead of social mobility – is most strongly felt in the context of education in France, which has invalidated the participation of Muslims as Muslims in public life with targeted reforms in its national educational system. With this profound instrumentalisation of education by politics over time, it is important to pause and reflect whether a more benevolent politics of education is possible at all.
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[1] EMERSON – ESSAYS – NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS
[2] Noam Chomsky: Education For Whom and For What
[3] Education – Education in the 20th century
[4] Education – Education in the 20th century
[5] Politics of Education – Education
[6] Katz, M. B. (1975) Class, bureaucracy, and schools: The illusion of educational change in America. New York: Praeger.
[7] Easterly, William. (2015) The Political Economy of Growth without Development: A Case Study of Pakistan. In In Search of Prosperity (pp. 439-472). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[8] Counts, G. S. (1932) Dare the school build a new social order? New York: John Day.
[9] Zeigler, L. H., M. K. Jennings, and G. Wayne Peak. (1974) Governing American schools: Political interaction in local school districts. North Scituate, MA: Duxbury.
[10] Zeigler, L. H., M. K. Jennings, and G. Wayne Peak. (1974) Governing American schools: Political interaction in local school districts. North Scituate, MA: Duxbury.
[11] Noam Chomsky: Education For Whom and For What
[12] Bourguignon, François and Thierry Verdier (2000) Oligarchy, democracy, inequality and growth,
Journal Of Development Economics (62)2 pp. 285-313
[13] Easterly, William. (2015) The Political Economy of Growth without Development: A Case Study of Pakistan. In In Search of Prosperity (pp. 439-472). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[14] Bourguignon, François and Thierry Verdier (2000) Oligarchy, democracy, inequality and growth,
Journal Of Development Economics (62)2 pp. 285-313
[15] Katznelson, I., and M. Weir. (1985) Schooling for all: Class, race, and the decline of the democratic ideal. New York: Basic Books.
[16] Politics of Education – Education
[17] Eliot, T. (1959) Toward an understanding of public school politics. American Political Science Review 53.4: 1032–1051.
[18]The place of the humanities in today’s knowledge society
[19] England’s state schools suffering biggest fall in funding since 1980s, says IFS
[20] The place of the humanities in today’s knowledge society
[21] Religious leaders call on University of Chester to end redundancies in theology department
[22] Religious leaders call on University of Chester to end redundancies in theology department
[23] Religious leaders call on University of Chester to end redundancies in theology department
[24] Religious leaders call on University of Chester to end redundancies in theology department
[25] Theology could disappear from UK universities
[26] The Conservatives’ Record on Compulsory education: spending, policies and outcomes in England, May 2015 to pre-COVID 2020
[27] West, Anne (2015) Education policy and governance in England under the Coalition Government (2010-15): academies, the pupil premium and free early education. London Review of Education, 13 (2). pp. 21-36.
[28] “Questions of marginalisation in UK Higher Education”: Guest seminar and PGR Workshop | School of Sociology and Social Policy | University of Leeds
[29] “Questions of marginalisation in UK Higher Education”: Guest seminar and PGR Workshop | School of Sociology and Social Policy | University of Leeds
[30] French Senate adds ban on prayers at universities to anti-Muslim law
[31] French Senate approves amendment to ban prayers at university corridors
[35] Cremin, L. A. (1961) The transformation of the school: Progressivism in American education, 1876–1957. New York: Knopf.
