Introduction

Let me begin with a quotation:

I intend claiming solidarity with these dangers by thinking politically about politics. I locate my analysis within thirty years of primary and scholarly research about and for education policy, where evidence demonstrates that the gains accumulated by public services common education are being demolished and defeated through the deployment of governing strategies that are restricting thinking politically. By examining fundamental changes to the supply of school places, the status and contribution of teachers, and the role of parents and children in exercising ‘choice’, I consider how classrooms, offices, homes and communities are sites where we are drawn into and participate in everyday practices that promote totalitarian thinking and doing. I argue that seemingly benign and popular changes are in effect generating an unfolding catastrophe in public services education, and that the reform of schools is a site where democratic political cultures are being rapidly degraded. People are learning to fear rather than depend on each other, to win rather than collaborate, and to claim distinction rather than give recognition to shared humanity.

I confront these trends by engaging with Hannah Arendt as my ‘discussion partner’ (Biesta 2013b, p7), where I think out loud ‘with’ and ‘against’ Arendt (see Benhabib 1988), using her insights developed through deploying a network of concepts: action, plurality, natality, promising, forgiving, responsibility and judgement. Using Arendtian scholarship leads me to argue that a human who is enveloped in ‘possessive individualism’ (Macpherson 2011) is the object of animated empowerment, where we are each told that ‘I’ have new freedoms, opportunities and aspirations but in effect such claims originate with elites in the interest of elites. By thinking politically I antagonise the pernicious durability of alliances between education, eugenics and elite interests located in corporate, faith and philanthropic power structures and cultures.