Revolting families: The Catalan 'opt out' movement and practices of resistance against Standard Assessment Test (SAT). Some exploratory research

Neoliberal policy technologies are spreading across the globe. Most go unrecognised and unopposed, but in some cases, they have provoked reactions and movements that reject or resist them. In this article we focus on one such movement of resistance, consisting of a network of families (the ‘opt out’ movement) that is boycotting the Standard Assessment Tests of primary education in Catalonia. We draw on exploratory research based on in-depth interviews with six of these families, as well as a review of articles, websites and documents produced by or about the movement. The participation of these families is examined in the light of Foucault’s notion of resistance in two different respects: resistance as a ‘tactical reversal’ and refusal as an ‘aesthetics of existence’. We begin with an outline of the global ideological context in which the Standard Assessment Tests are set, and then examine the background to the opt out movement’s resistance to the Standard Assessment Tests in Catalonia. This is followed by a Foucauldian analysis of this resistance, and then a description of the methodology used and the families interviewed. We make no significant empirical claims in the paper but rather seek to theorise certain paradoxes and tensions in relation to opting out and end with some remarks on the significance of the movement

Translations of new public management: a decentred approach to school governance in four OECD countries

Despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of New Public Management (NPM) that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule. Adopting a ‘decentred approach’ to governance (Bevir, M. 2010. “Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance.” European Journal of Social Theory 13 (4): 423–441), this paper compares the development of NPM in four OECD countries: Australia, England, Spain, and Switzerland. A focus of the paper is how certain policy instruments are created and sustained within highly differentiated geo-political settings and through different multi-scalar actors and authorities yet modified to reflect established traditions and practices

Against school: an epistemological critique

The paper argues that the modern school is an ‘intolerable’ institution. 1 Contrary to the sensibilities of educational research that look for more and/or better schooling as a way of making education more equal and more inclusive, our position is against the modern European school as an institution of normalisation within which equality and inclusion are impossible. Foucault’s strategy of reversal is used as a means of subversion to argue for an end to schooling. Concretely the paper highlights the epistemic fundamentals of the modern school and in particular the dynamics of normalisation related to the universal and the production of inequalities and isolated individuals. The paper asserts the need to be ‘against’ rather than ‘for’ the school and the abandonment of the ‘redemptive perspective’. Over and against this, we propose the need to think education differently and apart from the school in order to open up other educations, and specifically education as an ethical activity, an exploration of limits, and a politics of the self

Beyond School. The challenge of co-producing and commoning a different episteme for education

This paper develops previous work in which we deployed a form of Foucauldian critique to clear a space in which it might be possible to think education differently. Here, in that space, we are hoping to ‘get lost’ in some unexplored spaces of possibility. We sketch some starting points, some ‘lines of flight’ for such thinking. To do this, we identify a concatenation of three crises and discuss briefly their inter-relationship. But the paper focuses primarily on education. The first of these crises, COVID, offers a moment, a space, in which we might think of ourselves, others, and the world differently. The second, climate, brings to bear a pressing urgency for change in the way that we think of our relation to the world in practical, political and epistemological ways. The third, education in relation to crises, is an opening within which some thinking might be undertaken about what it means to be educated, and in which the relation between education, community and sustainability, in a variety of senses, might be pursued. In the final sections, using concepts from Foucault, Olssen, Lewis and others, we seek to find inspiration from and an accommodation between Foucault’s self-formation and commoning–a practice of collaborating and sharing to meet every day needs and achieve the well-being of individuals, communities, and environments–as a new way to think education beyond modern episteme