Editorial introduction: Education in times of crisis

Education Inquiry Vol. 5, No. 1, March 2014, pp. 1
6 Education in times of crisis Evie Zambeta* The international fiscal crisis that started in the USA in 2007, initially taking the form of housing bubble burst, toxic financial products and bankruptcy of large banks, has been followed by subsequent waves of countries that were confronted with severe economic recession. The crisis was first to be echoed in Iceland, and then to hit the European economies and the Eurozone itself. The impact of the crisis, however, was uneven among the European states. Mostly affected by the economic crisis were the countries of the European South (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Cyprus) that were suffering from high public debt and deficit. These countries were obliged to take severe austerity measures imposing drastic cuts in public spending and welfare policies, a fact that has led to deep recession of their whole economy and explosion of unemployment and poverty. On the other hand, central and northern European states (most notably Germany, but Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands or Finland as well) have managed to maintain high growth rates and withstand the crisis without adopting such socially painful economic measures. Undoubtedly, the aftermath of the crisis has been the growing generalized skepticism towards the foundation stone of the Europeanism ideal, since the most deeply affected values have been proved to be those of European integration and social cohesion. The predominant model for managing internal inequalities and disparities in the European Union (EU) has not been based on solidarity among the member states, but rather on a cynical neoliberal agenda. These new divergences and inequalities, especially in the Eurozone, were mainly imposed by two important driving forces: the international financial markets and the neoliberal EU fiscal policy (Fiscal Compact, New Treaty 2010). Firstly, the financial markets started to assess the level of risk of public debt in each of the Eurozone countries differently, regarding the credibility and confidence to its public finance and economic competitiveness, a process resulting in sharply differentiated national borrowing costs among them. Countries trusted by the rating agents with Triple A, (Germany, Austria, Finland, Netherlands, France, the Czech Republic) could continue borrowing under favourable terms from the financial *University of Athens, Greece. Email: ezambeta@ecd.uoa.gr #Authors. ISSN 2000-4508, pp. 1
6 Education Inquiry (EDUI) 2014. # 2014 Evie Zambeta. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. Citation: Education Inquiry (EDUI) 2014, 5, 24042, http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/edui.v5.24042 1 Evie Zambeta markets, while other countries whose national economies were downgraded by these rating agencies (e.g. Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Ireland, Greece) had to face increased borrowing costs (increase of spreads), or even exclusion from international markets because of extremely high interest rates (e.g. Greece since May 2010). Secondly, the policy response on the part of the EU (under the influence of the German neoliberal dogma) did not follow a Keynesian paradigm (e.g. through Eurobonds, prioritisation of development and growth, public investments), but promoted even further the neo-liberal policy measures all across EU countries: sharp deficit reduction and decrease of public dept through public spending cuts, tax raising and austerity policy measures. It is worth mentioning that this policy has been initiated already in 1992 by the Maastricht Treaty and the Stability and Growth Pact providing for strict criteria regarding the national Debt (60% GDP) and public deficit (3% GDP). The recently agreed New Treaty signed by 26 EU countries (except the UK) prescribes even tougher criteria. The Fiscal Compact determines that each government is obliged to ensure ‘‘a balanced budget’’, that is an annual structural deficit of no more than 0.5% of GDP, the so-called ‘‘golden rule’’. Furthermore, automatic fines for governments are imposed, when they reach the 3% deficit limit, while Brussels is acquiring stronger powers of surveillance and assessment of wayward states. As a matter of fact, far from any of the Jean Monnet ideals, the emerging European space, instead of becoming a space of peace, social integration and solidarity, is increasingly becoming a fragmented space of sharp inequalities that develop the ground for internal social conflict. In the recent years, the cities of the South of Europe have repeatedly become battlegrounds of civil confrontation stemming from the rise of unemployment and impoverishment of large parts of population. The crisis encourages conservative political reflexes, facilitating populism, political extremism and hostility towards immigrants, while the fear of Nazism looms. The most extreme case is the political party of the ‘‘Golden Dawn’’ in Greece which is becoming increasingly popular straightforwardly professing Nazi ideas. Its political discourse draws upon the recent economic crisis, blaming the whole political spectrum for being corrupted and submissive to Brussels, while it is manifesting national purity and racial hostility, in words and on the streets. The ‘‘asymmetric development of the Europeanisation process’’ has deployed different technologies for governing the complex European formation: a rigid monetary and financial policy on one hand, and a more sophisticated mode of governance on the other, such as the ‘‘Open Method of Coordination’’ (OMC), which is based on soft laws, benchmarking, policy learning through information exchange and ‘‘naming and shaming of those who lag’’ (Davoudi, 2005: 438). Interestingly, the OMC has been implemented in the areas where the EU has no formal competence and are regulated under the subsidiarity principle, notably in the areas of employment and social policy. Indeed, the European model of welfare has been distinct and 2 Education in times of crisis much more extensive, compared to its American counterpart. Despite its internal social discrepancies the health care system, for example, covers the entirety of population in most of the European countries, while in the USA public health care covers 25% of the population (Pestieau, 133). However, the asymmetries among European states regarding welfare state policies are immense. The states of the South present remarkably lower levels of welfare provision, compared to the Scandinavian countries or the central European ones. The softness, if not absence, of an EU social policy is reflected in the irresolution regarding the implementation of the European ‘‘Social Charter’’ (Falkner, 2005) and the reluctance in setting EU minimum standards in the social policies of the member states in the postMaastricht era. The lack of a European social safety net is widely acknowledged (Ferrera, 2005). The deficit in social policies, especially in the European South, has become even more critical under the recent economic crisis, since the politics of austerity predominantly affect the welfare state, hitting drastically social rights, a fact with explosive effect in social cohesion. The contributions of this thematic issue reflect the multiple ways in which crisis is understood and experienced across different European education systems and the various perspectives in the spatialisation of crisis. Ken Jones, from the Old Albion, the motherland of liberal thought, gives us a breathtaking narration of the trajectory of Conservatism in England since Thatcherism and Baker’s education reform (Simon, 1988). He traces the building of the conservative educational programme of the Cameron coalition government back to its ideological ancestors expressed in the ‘‘Black Papers’’ of the late 1960s. While the economic crisis is expressed in the UK slow growth rates, austerity measures unreservedly endorsed by the Coalition government are deepening the economic recession and at the same time attack the welfare state. In the field of education policy Conservatism has been promoted in the guise of the redefinition of ‘‘equal opportunities’’ as meritocratic individualism, supposedly intending to serve the interests of the poor and the working classes. The conservative political discourse is flattering and fomenting ‘‘popular insecurities’’ and ‘‘de-collectivising’’ the workforce professing ‘‘elitism for all’’. In practice though, sharp social divisions are developed which in the long run might put the hegemony of the conservative thought into question. Iceland was the first country to be affected by the global financial crisis in 2008. Guðrún Ragnarsdóttir and Ingólfur Ásgeir Jóhannesson explore the effects of the crisis in the professional lives of teachers. Economic recession in Iceland has been followed by extended restructuring of the working conditions of teachers, especially in the underfunded level of upper secondary education. The authors rightly observe, however, that genuine structural change of work life has been promoted even before the outbreak of the recent economic crisis, a fact that has been extensively discussed in relevant studies (Goodson & Lindblad, 2010). In this respect, crisis is part of a 3 Evie Zambeta political economy of restructuring of work-life that is the relationship between the social organization of work, professional knowledge and the working subject. Nordic experiences of crisis are those discussed by Kristina Brunila, who examines ‘‘therapisation’’ in Foucault’s terms as a form of power and a regulatory technology of the subject. In the neoliberal competitive context, unemployed young people considered to anticipate the risk of social exclusion are constructed as ‘‘victims’’ on which education exercises a therapeutic intervention. ‘‘Survival’’ in this context is constructed as an individual endeavour and responsibility assumed by the subject which is obliged to incorporate and discipline itself into the authoritative expertise of the therapeutic discourse. This sophisticated internalization of social problems, such as unemployment, poverty, or lack of education, is depoliticizing their understanding on the part of young people. As Nikolas Rose (1999) suggests, it is a process of ‘‘governing the soul’’ and construction of the private self through psycho-therapeutic techniques, in other words, a process of regulation of personal conduct in accordance with the dominant political rationales. Therefore, Brunila argues that therapeutic discourses, by affirming individualization are in tandem with the neoliberal dogma and its dismantling effects on collective commitment to social welfare. If the governance of the private self involves powerful technologies for the internalization of social norms, institutional governance presupposes technologies of legitimacy and isomorphism. Andreas Nordin and Paolo Landri examine the discursive strategies deployed for governing education institutions in Sweden and Italy. In the case of Sweden, Nordin argues that crisis has been constructed as a legitimation strategy in policy making by the powerful policy actors in order to perform drastic restructuring in educational institutions since the 2000 decade. Auditing, measurement, standardization and testing have been used as the basic techniques for the production of uniformity, crucial for the ‘‘persuasion’’ of social actors and monitoring education. Italy, on the other hand, has dealt with the recent economic crisis related to public debt and low economic growth by adopting a policy of austerity. Landri, examining what he perceives as a ‘‘fabrication of austerity’’ in the Italian educational system, argues that standardization has been the new technology of control imposing institutional isomorphism. Governing education by standards is a trend of globalization that in times of crisis acts as a ‘‘regulatory objectivity’’ for legitimizing recession. Reduction of staff and syllabi, merge of school units, increase in student/teacher ratio are constructed as rationalization stemming from standardization. In Greece, the country that experienced the most aggressive impact of the international economic crisis and was obliged to undergo an extremely rigid and socially burdensome Memorandum involving austerity measures imposed by the ‘Troika’ (European Commission, IMF and the European Central Bank), Assimina Kolofousi and I explore the social implications of the recent economic crisis in the 4 Education in times of crisis construction of social solidarity. The outbreak of the crisis coupled with austerity measures had explosive effects in unemployment and poverty and deteriorate the already weak institutional solidarity constructed in welfare state policies. On the other hand, traditional forms of solidarity based on individualism and traditional social networks, such as the family, are confronted with their limits under the influence of recession. In this context we explore the emergence of new forms of social solidarity in current education practices that seem to overcome the embedded individualism of Greek society and are based on social activism and volunteerism. The contributions of this thematic issue indicate that the international economic crisis, in spite of the variations in the ways it is manifested and enacted across different national contexts, is performed as dissolution of social rights, welfare provision and collective commitment to social goods. Crisis threatens the welfare state per se, undermining any sense of a common social heritage worth maintaining. Neoliberal dogmas are hegemonic in the policies of the national and international agencies (e.g. IMF, EU) which allegedly attempt to monitor the crisis. Contestation of this process could only flourish within the creative forces of the civil society. Evie Zambeta is an Associate Professor at the University of Athens. Her main research field is on Education Policy and Comparative Educaion. She has published books and articles in Greek and English. Some of her publications are School and Religion (2003), Athens, Themelio and (with David Coulby) the 2005 WYB of Education, Globalisation and Nationalism in Education, London, Routledge-Falmer. 5 Evie Zambeta References Davoudi, Simin (2005). Understanding territorial cohesion. Planning Practice and Research, 20(4), 433
441. Falkner, Gerda (2005). European social policy. Towards multi-level and multi-actor governance. In The transformation of governance in the European Union, Beate Kohler-Koch and Reiner Eising (eds.), 81
95. London: Springer. Ferrera, Maurizio (ed.), (2005). Welfare state reform in southern Europe. Fighting poverty and social exclusion in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. London: Routledge. Goodson, Ivor & Lindblad, Sverker (eds.), 2010. Professional knowledge and educational restructuring: European perspectives. Rotterdam and Taipei. Sense Publishers. Pestieau, Pierre (2006). The welfare state in the European Union. Economic and social perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose, Nikolas (1999). Governing the soul. The shaping of the private self. London: Free Association Books. Simon, Brian (1988). Bending the rules. The Baker ‘reform’ of education. London: Lawrence & Wishart. 6