Post-political governing of welfare state education in Sweden

• Seen solely in terms of educational governance the “odd” and extraordinary way of educational governance demonstrated in our introduction by the interaction between OECD expertise and the Swedish government may not appear odd at all. It may, just, be seen as different, being just another regime of governance with differences as well as similarities with other such regimes. Even though this conclusion makes sense, it makes sense only if we deny ourselves the opportunity of reflecting about what is “not so evident” when it comes to education and educational policy (and it is for example evident that both education and educational policy change over time, and that the changes themselves has something to do with changes in society as well as politics). In this text this “not so evident” has turned into a concern about the educated, understood at once as the target and outcome of education as well as of educational policy, understood as an abstraction referring to a wide range of possibilities of educational organizations, offers and subjectivities allowed for within the realms of “the educated”. It is, we will claim, also with regard to the educated that the present regime of governance seems grave in its consequences. When education and the educated as social phenomenon are normatively turned into statistical universals, we are not only confronted with reductionism of a sort that make us wish for more robust understandings and explanations. Even more seriously, these seemingly neutral and unmarked figures are highly policical as well as performative and very effective in hiding the political character of education as well as the educated as emergent phenomena (Bellmann, 2013) – therefore also effective in hindering the making of alternative educational and political subjectivities. The curriculum code of a self-regulative performer acting within the frames of soft governance and international assessment is a signifier of an instrumental and technified education system of governmental subjectivation (Simons & Masschelein, 2010) much in need to be analyzed and compared to other ways of curriculum designs and education governance with other kinds of political subjectivation.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

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

Keyword

education policy

governance

postpolitical subjectivity

curriculum condes

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)