Getting the Numbers right in the Making of Education and Society

• This presentation is based reflections from the making a book about knowledge on and in education to be published in early Spring 2018 (Lindblad, S., Pettersson, D. and Popkewitz, T: Education by the Numbers and the Making of Society. Routledge (in print).). From a curriculum theory perspective current reasoning on education by means of international statistics is of vital importance – the ways of understanding education, teachers, and students and how to govern education by means of large scale assessments. The focus is on numbers, on how numbers shape our understandings of education, its dynamics, practices, operations, goals and missions. Important are the comparative powers of numbers – how differences and similarities between kinds of people and performances are constructed by numbers, over time and over places. Numbers appear to be neutral and precise, but as all symbols (such as letters, flags etc.,) the relations between numbers and what they represent are to be socially produced and learned and the techniques to translate the one to the other (the symbol to its representation), such as statistics, are built on specific systems of reasoning’s. Numbers say little as such, but as they have come to be powerful representations of the modern world, shown in tables, diagrams or percentages, they are today also highly embedded with what is, and is not, of value and importance. Numbers are not only tools for analyses, they are also highly performative as they are framing our thoughts and conceptions of things. If there was a modern purgatory it would be a spectacle of numbers which translated into such things as diagrams and regression lines makes us read the world in taken for granted terms of progress and crises, ups and downs, differences and similarities. From where, and how, do these powers of numbers come about – and what are their premises and preconditions as they have come to play a key role in large-scale assessments and other forms of science-based policies and governance?

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Pedagogik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Pedagogy (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Curiculum theory

Politics of knowledge

Style of reasoning

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