The Implications of Theory for Early Years Settings:

Marx, Weber, Foucault

The Subjects of Marxist critique of Early Years education ‘bundles’ or ‘packages’ of knowledge FSP points Children themselves Teachers This process of investing commodities (material or abstract) with an independent existence/reality means that we forget that they are human creations and therefore an expression of ourselves.  Consequently, the relationship between creator and created is reversed: objects become our masters, and not vice versa.  When this happens, we misperceive the commodities as ‘natural’ and organise our lives to relate to objects: they have precedence over us, and we become alienated. 

Education as Alienation ‘Alienation’ is the term Marx uses to refer to the estrangement which he believes the members of capitalist societies have from themselves and other human beings.  He states that the objects which labour produces confront the labourer (producer) as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him … (Marx, 1844 cited in Tucker, 1978; p. 72). 

Marx proposes the following reasons for this alienation:- First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.  He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home.  His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour.  It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it (Marx, 1844 cited in Tucker, 1978: p. 72).

The worker’s alienation has four aspects:- • Alienation from objects he makes because they are not for his use• Alienation from his peers because he is pitched in competition with them• Alienation from his own work as an activity because it does not contribute to his self-understanding• Alienation his species because his work does not require him to reflect upon the nature and/or purpose of human existence  

Alienated labour in education The bourgeoisie… has resolved personal worth into exchange value… The bourgeoisie has stripped its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers (Marx, in Tucker, 1978: pp. 475-6). Once education becomes institutionalised and standardised, the teacher can be perceived as an anonymous and powerless ‘technician’ in the process. Thus, if the product of his labour, his labour objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful and independent of him.  If his own activity is to him an unfree activity, then he is treating it as activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion and the yoke of another man (Marx, in Tucker, 1978: p. 79).

Alienation in education In this neo-Marxist interpretation of education the teacher is alienated in four ways:

from his/her pupils because they become commodities that the teacher produces;from other teachers because they are his/her competitors for jobs;from himself/herself because the learning interactions are externally imposed and therefore have no personal significance;from his/her species because the content of school learning is not concerned with learning about the self. 

In addition, these four forms of alienation also affect the student who is alienated:

from the work s/he undertakes because it is a commodity produced for, and at the request of, the teacher;

from other students because they are his/her competitors;

from himself/herself as a learner, because the learning that is undertaken is contrived and therefore not spontaneous, ‘natural’ or immediately useful; from his/her species because the content of his/her school learning is not concerned with learning about the self 

Weber: The ‘Rationalization’ of Education and Training 

Education and training are central to the production and maintenance of the administrators of the bureaucratic order – people like teachers and educational officers of various kinds: the two sources of officials’ power identified by Weber are specialist training and privileged knowledge.

 

A problem arising from this for Marxist interpretations of educational change is that even those forms of Marxism which are based in the immediacy of workers struggle and foreground trade unions and works councils must fail in their efforts to gain control: workers’ power must be an illusion, because it is a delusion to suppose that even the most experienced workers understand the running of factories, schools and such like. Modern management is “based entirely on calculation, knowledge of demand and technical schooling – all things which need to be practiced increasingly by specialists, and which the trade unionists, the real workers, have absolutely no opportunity to learn about. Therefore, whether they like it or not, they too will rely on non-workers, on ideologues from the intellectual strata.” (ibid., p. 298) 

“[N]aturally, bureaucracy promotes a ‘rationalist’ way of life, but the concept of rationalism allows for widely differing contents. Quite generally one can say that the bureaucratization of all domination very strongly furthers the development of ‘rational matter-of-factness’ and the personality type of the professional expert. This has far-reaching ramifications [including]… its effect upon the nature of training and education.” (ibid., p.240)  

All educational institutions, says Weber, are increasingly dominated by the special examinations of ‘trained expertness’ essential for the specialisation of bureaucracy. “The modern development of full bureacratization brings the system of rational, specialized, and expert examinations to the fore.” (ibid., p.241) Weber has in mind examinations for entry into professional specialisations, but the principle is extended downwards, and was taken up by Foucault and applied more generally as examination for everyday educational practice.

Weber tracks the rise of the ‘qualification’, the “certificate of education [which] becomes what the test for ancestors has been in the past… a prerequisite for equality of birth, a qualification for a canonship, and for state office.” (ibid., p.241) That is, the holding of educational certificates creates a bureaucratic caste or status-group who will tend to intermarry with others with similar status to reproduce the bureaucratic order: “When we hear from all sides the demand for an introduction of regular curricula and special examinations, the reason behind it is, of course, not a suddenly awakened ‘thirst for education’ but the desire for restricting the supply of these positions and the monopolization by the owners of educational certificates”. (ibid., p,241).

Because of the financial implications of working over long periods towards the attainment of educational certificates, this system will favour ‘property’ over ‘charisma’. The question is not one of ‘intellect’, but of economic power over talent. Specialisation does not involve a great deal of ‘intellectual cost’, only financial cost. Weber contrasts this educational end with the historical mission of education to produce ‘cultured men’, e.g. “the goal of education consists in the quality of a man’s bearing in life which was considered ‘cultivated’, rather than in a specialised training for expertness.” (ibid., p.243)

For Weber, the university (and perhaps by extension - the school) only has a real value when it sets itself to the sole task of promoting ‘intellectual integrity’. Discipline and self-limitation are the hallmarks of the modern vocation of teaching. “The charismatic properties of professorial personalities should be excluded as far as possible from influencing their teaching.” (Giddens, 1972, p.49). Weber favoured the completion of the process of rationalisation of the university (and perhaps of the school) because of his belief that the only platform upon which competing values might be fought over is the political platform, not the academic.  

The promotion of value positions results in the promotion or retardation of careers on the basis of non strictly intellectual considerations. Marcuse and other Marxists argue that Weber’s rationality is capitalist through and through, and, because of this workers are bound to rebel against it. Given the exigencies of the capitalist mode of production, it is in evitable that political power, its planning and executive aspects fall to specialists – Weber regards such a state of affairs as permanent – the ‘iron cage’ – Marxists regard this as contingent, arising from the conflating of formal rationality with capitalist rationality.

A Foucauldian account of Early Years education:-

To characterise the FSP as an examination in Foucault’s sense would be to stretch its definition somewhat. However, it could certainly be argued that the FSP represents an apparatus in the disciplinary technology of schooling. The FSP attempts to balance hierarchical & non-hierarchical criteria in a ‘disciplinary system’ which, in practice serves to effectively classify, rank, order and normalize. It’s 117 descriptors per pupil act as a regulatory framework, imposing an order on the learning and development of children. One might argue that this generates a different understanding of what children are, what their learning consists in.

Performance management fulfils Foucault’s picture of a disciplinary technology beautifully. This ongoing process of target-setting, monitoring and reviewing casts the teacher in terms of criteria required to cross ‘thresholds’ which define their professional identity. Teachers are represented by their evidence-bases, objectified and recorded against scales and performance indicators.

Inspection regimes.

In de-stabilising professional identities and re-casting teachers and learners as supplicants before inspectors, teachers have again become subject to a discipline which strikes at the very heart of their sense of themselves. EY Ofsted frameworks have not historically been as strict as KS1-2 inspections, but the practice has usually been similar, generating the same bizarre and artificial modes of practice and relationships among teachers and pupils. The inspectoral ‘gaze’ not only coerces and regulates externally, but is internalised in the teachers’ and learners’ own fracturing and disruption. Interesting in this regard is the move to the self-assessing school. A reprieve or a final triumph of ‘visibility’?

Within this new mode of regulation, the organisation of power within definite forms of time-space … is now less important. It is the data-base, the appraisal meeting, the annual review, report writing and promotion applications, inspections, peer-reviews that are to the fore... it is the uncertainty and instability of being judged in different ways, by different means, by different agents; the ‘bringing off’ of performances – the flow of changing demands, expectations and indicators that make us continually accountable and constantly recorded .. (Ball, 1999, p.3).

Along with these other systems of visibility, management regimes codify and enforce on behalf of Ofsted in and through the application of targets, incentives, etc. systems of monitoring ones colleagues are common-place, elements of peer-review exist in performance management systems. Management teams vary in their balance between control and discipline – the later will probably become still more prevalent with the growth of self-assessment. The FSP is an invaluable tool in the regulatory technologies of management systems.

Children’s performance. There are often instances in schools when one hears teachers referring to children as if they were defined in terms of NC levels, or at least their place within rankings or orders of attainment. EY practitioners have often been more resistant to this practice than others. In terms of the micro-management of day to day classroom life, the disciplinary pressures of meeting targets and ticking boxes is variable, but these technologies certainly have an impact on the ways in which teachers interpret children’s performance.

Children’s behaviour. This is obviously an area Foucault was more consciously concerned with in his account of the effect of power in forming the individual. His understanding of how discipline in this sense is enacted in the school environment is fairly explicit in Discipline & Punish. The question to consider is how applicable Foucault’s model is to the EY setting. This is a point for your consideration and discussion.