Click here to view the seminar paper.
PURPOSE: This presentation demonstrates how the conceptual universe of French post-structuralist thinker Jean Baudrillard can be employed to extrapolate current tendencies in digital consumer capitalism. This is done with a focus upon changing conditions for education. The purpose is to suggest strategies to sensitize our everyday thinking, which is caught within the boundaries of a language that lacks sufficient conceptual tools to match a runaway capitalism. The strategy consists is creating concepts that make it possible to think differently.
The presentation thus adds to an increasing body of post-foundational research that explores the effects of school and education policy. This is done by establishing a conceptual framework that differs from the empirical language employed by policy itself. Hereby it becomes possible to think differently about the rationalities employed by policy-makers, practitioners and the school effectiveness research serving them. By re-articulating policy with a Baudrillardian conceptual framework it becomes possible to observe national and transnational policy as the effects of a crisis-producing and competition-motivating simulation. This makes it possible to problematize in a new light a persistent policy trend (Krejsler, 2021).
CASE: Since the 1990s a transnational school policy dream has haunted the globe, moving from the Anglo-American orbit to the Nordic countries, continental Europe, Asia and beyond. It produced an extensive simulation that monitoring, evaluation and documentation can become the engine to systematically manage school policy and practice towards better quality (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010) .
Drawing on Jean Baudrillard's thinking (e.g.Baudrillard, 1998 & 2001), this presentation tests the hypothesis of how far this school policy dream can be understood as a ‘grand simulation’ creating a soft-governance comprehensive matrix of formats and standards that incentivizes nations, municipalities, schools and individuals: Education and learning are translated into quantifiable comparability in a ‘global knowledge-based economy’. A crisis or ‘a fear of falling behind’ is produced, which motivates competition to succeed at local, national and global levels (Krejsler, 2021).
The presentation maps the drive that produces at transnational, national and local levels the idea of students, schools and nations that can be systematically optimized. One detects the symptoms of ‘the Grand Simulation’ (1)in its totalizing search for evidence and What Works solutions; (2)in its reductions of complex learning into taxonomies of competencies, knowledge and skills; (3)in its promises that every student can move systematically towards mastery of necessary competences for 21st century challenges. ‘The Grand Simulation’ expands by integrating national policy into loosely coupled rhizomatic governance networks that extend outward to transnational actors (OECD, IEA and EU) and inward through the ministry to municipalities. The latter extend the simulation to local schools, whereby it re-formats how teachers and students think and act (Krejsler, 2018 & 2021).
With an aura of objectivity, big data, science, AI and machine learning, ‘the Grand Simulation’ suggests that the best available knowledge and methods can be made accessible to all. The presentation argues that this simulation risks decoupling us from the real and enclosing us into a simulatory space of self-reference of such complexity that will be hard to get out of... The question is posed whether we are becoming trapped in a wide-ranging simulacrum!?!?... Or as Baudrillard puts it with reference to the Bulgarian-Swiss writer Elias Canetti (1905-94): "Without realizing it, all of humanity had suddenly left reality".
References:
Baudrillard, J. (1998). Paroxysm. London: Verso.
Baudrillard, J. (2001). Jean Baudrillard - Selected Writings. Stanford University Press.
Krejsler, J.B. (2021). The ’Grand Simulation’ and Dreams of Success by Assessment: Baudrillardian reflections on (trans-)national school policy. Journal of Education Policy.36(1), 24-43. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02680939.2019.1664766
Krejsler, J. B. (2018). EuroVisions in School Policy and the Knowledge Economy. In N.Hobbel & B.Bales
(Eds.), Navigating the Common Good in Teacher Education Policy. NY & London: Routledge.
Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing Education Policy. London & NY: Routledge.
John Benedicto Krejsler is Professor at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, DENMARK. His research on new conditions for (pre-)school and teacher education in a transnational perspective brings together research on education policy, new conditions for producing ’truths’ & social technologies. His work on theory development draws on Baudrillard, Deleuze and Foucault among others. He is President of the Nordic Educational Research Association and council member of the European Educational Research Association (2009-2018). He was a Visiting Professor at Kristianstad University (Sweden) (2009-2010) and at UCLA (2015-2016).