Week 4 Thoughts

I found myself most drawn to Hall’s description of what happened in education during the swing to the right. He describes how, in essence, the dominant strategy in schools was to prepare students for the workforce. As Hall puts it, “success in education = requirements of the industry.” Through this strategy there arose “educational competition”: who has the most training. Hall kind of gets at what we see happening in our present times (and within our own sphere of academia); the race to get the most accolades or the highest degrees in a field to be competitive in the job market. How can we tackle this competition which sends the signal that awards/medals/degrees might serve one better than learning for learning’s sake?

With Hall’s “The great moving nowhere show” article, I kept going back to his conclusion that “the Blair project, in its overall analysis and key assumptions, is still essentially framed by and moving on terrain defined by Thatcherism.” This made me think about how it is possible to discursively frame something old as something new. Obviously, the New Labour Party and their “Third Way” approach managed to appear “new” and “exciting” for at least some, so my question is, how do we get past these false labels to be able to see what is the essence of a thing?