Introduction

The research reported in this book has been prompted by Arendt's (1958, p5) call to do ‘nothing more than to think about what we are doing’. In doing so I have used her thinking to help to think about the catastrophe that is unfolding in plain sight in public services education and the wider political culture in which it is located. The investigation into education policy reveals what Fraser (2004, p254), quoted in chapter one, identifies as the ‘new modes of negating the human’ through the disposability of children and the professionals committed to educating them. The trenchancy of eugenics within a lucrative elite restoration project underpins this refusal of a common humanity, or ‘the active conditions that nourish oblivion on the part of those who benefit and the radical enclaving of those who do not’ (Curtis 1999, p3). The argument has been made and evidenced that the segregation of children on the basis of their ‘inherited talents’, means that wealth, biology and capabilities, race and/or faith are power structures that create social and political voids for those who ‘profit’, while the ‘others’ who are ‘othered’ have to accept their lot based on having a basic education that ‘meets their needs’. It seems that: ‘such are the conditions in which human beings are made superfluous’ (Curtis 1999, p3).

In examining knowledge production regarding the dynamics of the state, people, practices, ideologies and networks, I have used Arendtian scholarship to think about and present a standpoint regarding biopolitical distinctiveness, where authorised inaction disciplines the body, where colonisation denies plurality for all and personalisation equates natality with the few. Contractualism regulates exchange relationships, where promising is reduced to consumption, and where fabricated responsibility and judging are enabled through calculation. Public services common education in England (and internationally, see Adamson et al 2016) is now a shatter zone where militant neoliberalism and neoconservativism have set out to infiltrate and ultimately destroy the vital idea that all children learn together in their local common school. Privatism underpins reforms that are about self-profit through winning a good school place and making strategic support alliances (including with those who will not gain) in order to legitimise and sustain the importance of superiority (I win!).