Science, Globalization, and Educational Governance: The Political Rationalities of the New Managerialism

The modern school has been a critical site for imagining possible publics and publicly-defining national purposes. Public education is presumed to provide a collective good to “a public”—“a public” of which the discourse about educational purposes conjures and addresses. Yet the imagined publics and purposes of education have varied considerably at different historic junctures. These variations have been shaped in part by the rise and fall in prominence of two contrasting political horizons and the quite distinctive roles they have envisioned for the state and the market. The first, articulated in classic form by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, privileges the role of the free market, arguing that state efforts to promote the social good are ineffectual compared to unbridled market forces. The second stresses the state’s central role in protecting its citizens from the vicissitudes of the market by insuring social security and increased well-being. Over the past century, assumptions about the state’s responsibility for the social good have been intrinsic to various forms of governance across the globe. Political systems from socialism to social democracy to social liberalism—while differing in ideology and approach—have been founded upon the fundamental principle that issues of governance should be decided on the basis of benefits to “the social.” As Nikolas Rose has argued, “Whatever their differences, in each case the term ‘social’ implied a kind of anti-individualism: the need to conceive of human beings as citizens of a wider collectivity who did not merely confront one another as buyers and sellers on a competitive market.” The social state, to a greater or lesser extent, has been envisioned as a force for social progress, con-