This is the thirteenth in a series of notes to lectures for my class ITSF4010 "Cultural & Social Bases of Education" ( )

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• Koyama, Jill "Assembling and Dissembling: Policy as Productive Play." Educational Researcher 41, 5:157-162. 2012 (with Hervé Varenne)

'Policy' as culture rather than 'policy'

When I kick a stone, I give energy to the stone, and it moves with that energy; and when I kick a dog, it is true that my kick has a partly Newtonian effect. If it is hard enough, my kick might put the dog into Newtonian orbit, but that is not the essence of the matter. When I kick a dog, it responds with energy got from metabolism. In the ‘control’ of action by information, the energy is already available in the respondent, in the advance of the impact of the events.”
Gregory Bateson (Mind and Nature 1979: 101)

  1. Beyond thinking of policy as the province of governmental administrators and the academics which may inform the administrators decisions
    1. policies are drawn by human beings under the same constraints as any other human beings
    2. policies are about human beings who will always respond as Bateson writes about kicking dogs.

      Thus the work of assembling an educational reform is not akin to that of engineers reducing play in the fitting of various parts of a machine they are designing and thereby improving its efficiency. Engineers do not have to deal with parts that themselves play, for example, in pretending that they are doing something that they are not doing in such a way that they are not caught.

  2. and finding "policy" imagining, designing, implementing, reforming, etc. everywhere
  3. Power at work: establishing what is to be done (and the consequences of it not getting done)
    1. by the evolving global power (indirect ideological hegemony)
      1. United Nations
      2. Unicef and Unesco
      3. the examples of other policies more or less successful elsewhere (Steiner-Khamsi)
    2. by the State
      1. establishing or disestablishing exams
      2. controlling schools and apprenticeships
    3. by local populations (in the US: school boards and their limited but very real authorities on taxation, curriculum, administration)
    4. by families (from distributing chores, to controls of schooling, marriage, taking care of the disabled and old, etc.)
  4. Discourses and strategies in educational policy
    1. Dewey vs. Thorndike, humanism vs. human capital
    2. State strategies for education
      1. Public schools
      2. Charter schools
      3. private schools
      4. home schooling (as a state policy)
    3. local strategies
      1. low fee schools
      2. cram schools
      3. "social media" (YouTube and Tik Tok as educators)
  5. Devising procedures and consequences ("policy"):
    1. by the State:
      1. political campaigns
      2. legislations
      3. regulations
        1. the NY State board of regents
    2. by localities
    3. by families
      1. religion
      2. ideology
      3. "supplemental education" (museums, travel, working in the family business)
  6. Careers ("projets")
    1. by the State
      1. competing political campaigns
    2. by families and individuals
      1. college choice
      2. "what will I do when I graduate?" and "what should I do to get there?:

 

Some questions in the context of this course.