Introduction

The following quotation is from a headteacher:

What is being said gives recognition to what Arendt (1958) calls the fact of plurality, where education is a site for all humans to develop and accomplish. Hence knowledge production for plurality within and for education is concerned with recognising variety within standpoint formation, communication and persuasion. At the same time such plurality is located in values-generated understandings of the purposes of education: it is not enough to know that there is a range of ways to know, learn, teach and assess, it is vital also to know that how to access knowledges and knowings, combined with the opportunities to demonstrate knowledgeabilities, is a colonised power process. The continued dominance of the private over the common purposes of education is the focus of this chapter, where I focus on access to a school and examine what this means for plurality. Notably, through the deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity (EPKP) I give prime attention to the demand side and how deregulation by the state means that parents have been offered ‘choice’ in the public system through schemes such as vouchers. The practices involved in offering and responding to the exercise of a preference for a ‘good’ school place is enabled through a form of depoliticisation by colonisation of globally networked market ideologies. Instinctively it seems that vouchers are enabling of plurality, but I identify how parental choice mechanisms are primarily rhetorical, by facilitating and strengthening segregation as a form of biopolitical distinctiveness.

Common purposes?

Debates about the purposes of public services education are historically located. The idea of free universal education for all children is based on the standpoint that all children are actually and necessarily educable as integral to their humanity (Dewey 2011).