Abstract
This paper discusses the current radical changes in the Australian education policy. Central to the argument is the claim that the radical restructuring of the public sector hastened the loss of the possibility of any critical evaluation of national policy.
The paper argues that this shift has been forced on the Australian state by the objective conditions expressed in a new realignment of the dominant transnational capital with the subordinate domestic capital, and in the shifts in a global capacity for consumption. The argument is underpinned by the claim that a new, post-Fordist (or flexible specialization) regime of capital accumulation is at present replacing the Fordist regime of mass production and consumption.
The paper further argues that in order to achieve the system-preferred changes in the Australian education policy, the Australian government introduced radical changes in the production rules of policy formation. This involved a narrowing of policy making context and, crucially, an exclusion of voices critical of the shift towards economic reductionism.
This loss of a critical sensibility constitutes the central concern of this paper. To advance the argument, in Part One, the paper discusses the relationship between the Australian state and the post-Fordist objective conditions of capital accumulation. Part Two argues that the lack of intellectual tradition in Australian public life was at least partially responsible for the easy passage given to neoclassical economics1 perspective in becoming a dominant public policy paradigm. Part Three locates the role of education within the context of the European philosophical tradition. It provides the link between critical sensibility, the project of Western civilization (which clearly extends beyond the modern vs. postmodern dichotomy), and the role of public discourse. Finally, the paper argues that education policy needs to take the issue of critical sensibility seriously. For this reason, it needs to be informed by a desire to go beyond the mere technical fit between graduates and the workplace, and allow itself to be inspired by new ideas, and new ways of seeing.
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Parts One and Two of this Article appeared in INTERCHANGE, Vol. 26, #2, 1995.
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Soucek, V. Public education and the post-fordist accumulation regime: A case study of Australia. Interchange 26, 241–255 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01435509
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01435509