Page 31 - Šolsko polje, XXIX, 2018, no. 1-2: The Language of Neoliberal Education, ed. Mitja Sardoč
P. 31
v. d’agnese ■ concealment and advertising: unraveling ...
education is and should be. OECD, in a sense, accomplishes a fourfold re-
duction of education. OECD, in fact, narrows down education to learn-
ing, learning to assessment, assessment to a performance-based account-
ability measure system and performance-based accountability measure
system is finally turned into PISA. OECD, in this way, ossifies the reg-
ister of human actions and ways of being—a gesture, I would highlight,
that is even inconsistent with OECD’s commitment to innovation. To
be very clear, OECD does not invite another interpretation of educa-
tion than that of competition amongst countries, students, teachers, and
schools. As a result, schooling comes to be seen as just a means through
which boys, girls, and even children, acquire the necessary skills to strive
and compete for “successful professions” (Schleicher, 2018b).
In this way, OECD fails to recognize teachers’, policy makers’, stu-
dents’, and even people’s capacity to autonoumously share, discuss and
set which goals to pursue, thus reducing schooling to a perpetual train-
ing activity aimed at producing one set of skills, namely, those assessed by
PISA and provided by OECD’s and connected agencies’ educational pro-
grammes. That is why OECD’s model for schooling ends in producing
ethical disengagement in educationalists. Being ethically involved, in fact,
entails being concerned with the aims and purposes of education. When
discourse about educational ends is all risolved in advance, we are with-
in what may well been called an authoritarian model of teaching, author-
itarianism being understood as any and every way of educating in which
educational goals and overall vision of schooling are pre-established in
advance. For authoritarian teaching to be enacted you do not necessari-
ly need students repeating sentences, ideas and ways of behaving over and
over again. For authoritarian teaching to be enacted it is sufficient to cut
the cord which binds values, aims and purposes to the concrete practice
of education. OECD, despite its commitment to an education for life,
tends to construe an artificial model of education, one in which the un-
certainties, fissures and vagaries of living are neither considered, nor ad-
dressed. If we believe that schooling is not just a matter of accomplishing
aims lowered from above, but an ethical space in which both students and
society renew and rethink themselves, in which the “startling unexpect-
edness” (Arendt, 1998/1958: p. 177–178) characterising human condition
may arise, OECD’s penetration and influence on education and schooling
has to be unmasked for what it is: an unduly attempt to totalize and fix
the register of human experience.
29
education is and should be. OECD, in a sense, accomplishes a fourfold re-
duction of education. OECD, in fact, narrows down education to learn-
ing, learning to assessment, assessment to a performance-based account-
ability measure system and performance-based accountability measure
system is finally turned into PISA. OECD, in this way, ossifies the reg-
ister of human actions and ways of being—a gesture, I would highlight,
that is even inconsistent with OECD’s commitment to innovation. To
be very clear, OECD does not invite another interpretation of educa-
tion than that of competition amongst countries, students, teachers, and
schools. As a result, schooling comes to be seen as just a means through
which boys, girls, and even children, acquire the necessary skills to strive
and compete for “successful professions” (Schleicher, 2018b).
In this way, OECD fails to recognize teachers’, policy makers’, stu-
dents’, and even people’s capacity to autonoumously share, discuss and
set which goals to pursue, thus reducing schooling to a perpetual train-
ing activity aimed at producing one set of skills, namely, those assessed by
PISA and provided by OECD’s and connected agencies’ educational pro-
grammes. That is why OECD’s model for schooling ends in producing
ethical disengagement in educationalists. Being ethically involved, in fact,
entails being concerned with the aims and purposes of education. When
discourse about educational ends is all risolved in advance, we are with-
in what may well been called an authoritarian model of teaching, author-
itarianism being understood as any and every way of educating in which
educational goals and overall vision of schooling are pre-established in
advance. For authoritarian teaching to be enacted you do not necessari-
ly need students repeating sentences, ideas and ways of behaving over and
over again. For authoritarian teaching to be enacted it is sufficient to cut
the cord which binds values, aims and purposes to the concrete practice
of education. OECD, despite its commitment to an education for life,
tends to construe an artificial model of education, one in which the un-
certainties, fissures and vagaries of living are neither considered, nor ad-
dressed. If we believe that schooling is not just a matter of accomplishing
aims lowered from above, but an ethical space in which both students and
society renew and rethink themselves, in which the “startling unexpect-
edness” (Arendt, 1998/1958: p. 177–178) characterising human condition
may arise, OECD’s penetration and influence on education and schooling
has to be unmasked for what it is: an unduly attempt to totalize and fix
the register of human experience.
29
