Unsustainable education
by Dr Helen Raduntz, Adjunct Research Fellow, UniSA
The
Blair Government’s education policy is not sustainable in terms of
social justice for taxpayers or public schooling, according to education
expert Professor Dave Hill from the University of Northampton.
Prof Hill, a passionate advocate of social justice in schooling, shared his experiences as a teacher in inner city London and a social, political and union activist with an enthusiastic audience at UniSA’s Magill campus in June as a guest of UniSA’s Hawke Institute and the School of Education and Social Justice Research Collective at Flinders University.
In Blair, New Labour, and Education Policy: Sustainability for Social Justice in Public Schooling, Prof Hill talked about the Blair Government’s restructuring of schools and teacher education to conform with the neo-liberal and neo-conservative agenda for the privatisation of education.
On the open market, privatised public education facilities and services are potentially worth millions of pounds. In the advanced Western economies awash with investment capital, the lure of capitalising on this potential bonanza is irresistible to private entrepreneurs, Prof Hill said. This has implications for Australian education, too.
Prof Hill said the Blair Government’s recent education legislation, based on the US charter school scheme, completed what some critics have called the pre-privatisation of state schools in England.
One of the aims of the legislation is to introduce new types of schools, academies, specialist schools and independent state or trust schools, organised and operated as businesses. For example, the legislation allows for the private purchase and control of an academy at the between £2 and £2.5 million as a going concern including its buildings, teachers and students for which taxpayers have paid £25 million in building and start up costs. Prof Hill cited the case in which a millionaire evangelical Christian creationist second-hand car salesman has bought and controls academies in Gateshead and Middlesbrough.
As part of his visit, Prof Hill also spoke at the seminar Schooling and Teachers’ Work: Efficiency, Equity and Social Change at Flinders University School of Education where he concentrated on how education and other cultural workers might engage in resisting "the worldwide neo-liberal onslaught".
The key characteristics of this onslaught, he said, are the obscene and widening economic, social and educational inequalities both within states and globally, and a disregard for theorising about education and the regulation of critical thought and activism through ideological and repressive state apparatuses. Prof Hill concluded by asking what role critical transformative education and cultural/media workers might play in replacing the class-based capitalist system with a more economically and socially just and environmentally sustainable society other than state capitalist, social democratic and traditionalist alternatives.
Copies of Prof Hill’s presentations are available from helen.raduntz@unisa.edu.au. He can be contacted directed at dave.hill35@btopenworld.com and at the websites of the e-institute, the Institute for Education Policy Studies (http://www.ieps.org.uk) and the international refereed academic journal, the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (http://www.jceps.com), of which Prof Hill is respectively director and chief editor.