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Education, Modernity and Neo-Conservative School Reform in Canada, Britain and the US Author(s): Brian Elliott and David MacLennan Source: British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1994), pp. 165-185 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1393225 . Accessed: 08/10/2014 12:00

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British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 15, No. 2, 1994 165

Education, Modernity and Neo-conservative School Reform in Canada, Britain and the US

BRIAN ELLIOTT, Department of Anthropology & Sociology, University of British Columbia DAVID MACLENNAN, Department of Social & Environmental Studies, University College of the Cariboo

ABSTRACT Conservative critiques of education and proposals for reform show striking similarities in Canada, Britain and the US. All seem to reflect what Habermas referred to as "the affirmative stance towards social modernity and the denigration of cultural modernity". The paper uses this distinction to describe and ana/yse New Right criticisms of educational progressivism and conservative efforts to promote a new sympathy for business values, market discipline and market relations in schools and colleges.

Introduction

Conservative governments in Britain, Canada and the US have recently made reform of

public education a major part of their political agendas. The pronouncements of Prime Ministers and Presidents and right-wing opinion makers reveal very similar perceptions of the deficiencies of schools, colleges and universities. Conservative governments have set up commissions, inaugurated public debates and embarked on reforms of the content, the organization and the funding of education. In each case the declared purpose is

plain: to harness education more closely to the goal of greater national 'competitiveness'. Ideas about how to achieve this objective seem remarkably similar in all three countries, and though the 1988 Education Reform Act in England and Wales is the first to

implement many of the favoured measures there is little doubt that the process on which it has embarked is about to be followed (or has already been followed in part) in North America. The 1988 Act includes the establishment of a 'common curriculum', 'national testing' of attainment, dismantling of much of the Local Education Authorities' responsi- bility for education, greater 'accountability' of teachers and schools to their clients and increased 'parental choice' in the selection of schools. All these measures have been recommended by conservatives in Canada and the US. The effects of such changes will be to increase central control over education and at the same time to make it a commodity whose consumers, it is said, will be given power and more choice as 'market principles' begin to operate.

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166 B. Elliott & D. MacLennan

In the 1960s, with the US leading the way, western countries reformed their educational systems, greatly increasing the availability of post-secondary education, raising the school leaving age and introducing schemes to promote greater 'equality' in educational provision and (it was hoped) educational outcomes. Now, it seems, those countries-this time with the UK in the vanguard-are restructuring those systems, and

they are doing so on the basis of neo-conservative critiques which, though they differ in

details, make essentially similar appraisals of the social and cultural aspects of modernity. Changes on this scale are sociologically fascinating, and call for examination of the

ideologies and the structural conditions that encourage and make possible alterations in such important agencies of socialization and cultural transmission.

The structural circumstances under which recent reforms have been proposed or enacted show some strong similarities. In all three countries there is sharp awareness that the global restructuring of capitalism poses severe threats to major industries and to whole sectors of the occupational system and that competition from other, more vibrant economies and trading blocs has already undermined some traditional economic strengths or advantages. Appreciation of relative economic decline-

long a feature in Britain-has been growing in Canada and the US over the last 10 or 15 years.

It was primarily out of deep senses of disappointment and disillusionment that new

ideological climates developed in these countries from the mid 1970s. The election of Conservative and Republican governments brought policies shaped by that mix of neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideas to which the label 'New Right' has been given (Bosanquet, 1982; Hall &Jacques, 1983; Peele, 1984; Hall, 1985; Gamble, 1987, 1988; King, 1987; Levitas, 1987). Comparing the contributions of major intellectuals among neo-conservatives in the US and Germany led Habermas (1985) to an analysis which has considerable value for our understanding of recent educational changes. It allows us to set them in the broader context of right-wing critiques of modern society and prescrip- tions for its reconstruction. Habermas introduces a basic distinction when he argues that "The affirmative stance toward social modernity and the denigration of cultural modernity are typical evaluative schema for all neoconservative diagnoses of the contemporary situation" (1985, p. 82).

The distinction between social and cultural modernity needs elaboration and clarification. It was Daniel Bell, of course, who made extensive use of these terms in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), arguing that the rationalizing, secularizing processes that had done so much to stimulate capitalist modernization had produced cultural changes in the form of hedonistic, self-regarding, anarchistic life styles that were

eroding the discipline of bourgeois life. Habermas finds Bell's analysis of cultural changes and threats too simple, but shows that a similar division between the social and the cultural occupies an important place in the writings of German neo-conservatives. To the

neo-conservatives, he claims:

The modern world appears as the world of technical progress and capitalist growth; all social dynamic, which is ultimately based on private investments, is modern and desirable ... (1985, p. 87)

So, there is acceptance of social modernity. Indeed, among the New Right intellectuals in Britain, Canada and the USA there is enthusiasm for all sorts of schemes-privatiza- tion, deregulation, etc.--that will extend market relations to more and more areas of social life. At the same time there is (often) faith in the power of technical innovation to solve problems and to bring growth and prosperity.

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Neo-conservative School Reform 167

But the conservatives do see problems:

... the motivational resources on which this dynamic thrives is in need of

protection. Danger lies in cultural transformations, motivational and attitudinal

changes and shifts in patterns of values and identities, which are attributed to the entry of cultural innovations into more or less traditional forms of life.

Therefore, the legacy of tradition has to be preserved as far as possible. (1985, p. 87)

This provides a starting point for our paper. It leads us to ask "How, exactly, does the

denigration of cultural modernity figure in the neoconservative's critique of education and in their proposed school reforms?"; and "How, simultaneously, is the affirmative stance toward social modernity reflected in their educational initiatives?". These ques- tions are explored in relation to educational debates and reforms in the three nations.

Inevitably, in a single article, we cannot do justice to the unique histories and particular institutional features of educational systems in these countries but we believe that teasing out some of the common ideas that are shaping the efforts at reform is worthwhile. If

nothing else, it serves to identify themes that may become part of a more thorough and

systematic agenda of comparative research.

Educational Progressivism: the target of New Right school reform

In their attacks on education and educators, politicians and activists of the New Right generally draw upon three main strands of argument and broadly similar sympathetic constituencies in each of the countries. The recurrent lines of criticism are that modern

schooling fails in its duty to:

(i) uphold traditional morality; (ii) maintain standards and transmit elements of traditional high culture; and

(iii) instill business values and a respect for enterprise.

The blame for these deficiencies is commonly laid by the New Right on the supposedly pervasive influence of 'progressive' ideas in education and on those teachers, academics and other members of the professional middle class that purvey and support them.

Progressive theories of course, have had some effect on modern pedagogy and have influenced school reforms, but the conservative critique typically invests progressivism with a much greater influence than most teachers would acknowledge. 'Progressive' becomes a convenient symbol under which may be grouped many tendencies and trends of which the right-wing critics disapprove. At the risk of some over simplification we can

identify several distinctive features of educational progressivism against which the right has most commonly defined its counter themes.

In some of its versions the progressive model condoned a weakening of ties between education and the economy. Progressivism was also distinguished by a disdain for

formality in a range of contexts: in instructional style; in curriculum and evaluation; and in the organization of space and time in the school. Progressives emphasized democratic values in education and expressed a faith in the judgement and competence of teachers. Above all the progressives placed the child at the center of the educational universe. The

priority for progressives was individualized instruction and the self-actualization of the child, a focus which is captured by the phrase "the child is an agent of his own learning" (Central Advisory Council for Education, 1967, quoted in Morrison, 1989, p. 12; see also Cremin, 1961; Provincial Committee [Ontario], 1968; Bowles & Gintis, 1976, pp. 18-49).

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168 B. Elliott & D. MacLennan

Yet it would be wrong to portray the child as the only active agent in the progressive world-view. The teacher, as suggested, is also active. The teacher must mediate between the logic of an externally defined curriculum, the child's readiness to learn and the child's

preferred style of learning. This places teachers in a profound dilemma: they are accountable to external bureaucratic demands and accountable-in a genuine, pro- fessional sense-to the client. The progressive teacher's role as mediator includes decisions about assessment as well as curriculum and pedagogy. As a result, the

professional responsibilities of teachers are immense and the demands on their capacity to make professional judgements formidable. Some idea of the complexity of this

decision-making process is conveyed in the following statement from a recent progressive document:

Learner-focused curriculum and assessment is developmentally appropriate, allows for continuous learning, provides for self-direction, meets the individual learning needs of students as much as possible, and deals with matters of relevance to learners.

(Ministry of Education, BC, 1990, p. 9)

According to the Right, the defect of educational progressivism is a tendency to allow the needs of the child to control the whole process of education. For the Right, the

progressive teacher is not a mediator between the demands of culture and the inner needs of the child. The teacher elevates the child above all else, favouring impulse and

experience over restraint and reflection. As a result, the progressive teacher becomes a servant of cultural modernity and the concept of the self which goes with it. Here Bell's link between cultural modernity and particular conception of the self is helpful:

... the axial principle of modern culture is the expression and remaking of the "self' in order to achieve self-realization and self-fulfillment. And in its search, there is a denial of any limits or boundaries to experience. It is a reaching out for all experience; nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored. (Bell, 1976,

pp. 13-14)

As will become evident below, the Right links this conception of the self to educational

progressivism. And it is this conception of the self they attempt to combat with a return to traditional morality, high culture and the character structure of the entrepreneur.

Traditional Morality

We can identify three distinct positions characteristic of the New Right in the area of traditional morality. The first is the position that the school has overstepped its

jurisdiction and is engaging in moral instruction that ought to take place in the family. The right-wing sociologist David Marsland provides a British example of this view:

"family responsibility for young people has been substantially eroded by the growth of state secondary education" (Marsland, quoted in Demaine, 1988, p. 250). Marsland is also critical of "increasingly imperialist claims of the schools to oversee the whole range of personal development" (quoted in Demaine, 1988, p. 250). This point is echoed in the American context by McGraw, writing for the right-wing Heritage Foundation. Her

concern is "humanistic self-theory operating within the public schools". She argues that

supporters of this brand of humanism ... are claiming the right to impart to the child the essential framework through which the child will understand the

meaning of human nature, patterns of human conduct, priorities of human

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Neo-conservative School Reform 169

values, what values are, and how value conflicts are to be resolved. (McGraw, 1980, p. 32)

McGraw insists that in claiming this right the schools are claiming authority over topics which belong to other institutions. These institutions are the family and the church, and one possible remedy is to return responsibility for this kind of instruction to the church and the family. In the US there has been a large growth in the number of denomina- tional schools and in Canada and the UK specifically Christian schools have also benefitted from the willingness of New Right governments to provide public money for

private educational institutions. The second position of the Right on traditional morality is not so much concerned

with the issue of encroachment as with the content of the values being taught by the schools. To remedy this problem one may remove the materials which contain the

offending values (censorship) or replace the offensive values with ones more compatible with those of the Right. Another remedy is privatization-to make more options available to parents who wish to choose which values the schools will transmit to their children.

In all three countries attacks on the schools for their failure to impart traditional moral standards has come not only from right-wing intellectuals but also from various groups of concerned parents, from school boards, from religious groups and from politicians. In

Canada, in the late 1970s it was outrage over his daughter being given a John Updike novel to read and the addressing of a school class by members of a gay liberation group that provoked the evangelical preacher Ken Campbell to protest and to form an

organization-Renaissance-committed to restoring traditional values.

When it comes to sex education in the schools ... the government imposes a

completely secular philosophy. It assumes the myths of Darwin and Freud. Darwin says all we are is appetites and Freud says our sin is we repress ourselves. In a pluralistic society like ours, there should be two streams in education from kindergarten to grade twelve at least. One would be the

Progressive Stream, basically what we have now, and one would be the Traditional Stream which would be based on the Judeo-Christian principles. Parents should have a choice. (Campbell, quoted in Haiven, 1984, p. 146)

In British Columbia, Mennonites, Dutch Colonists and other conservative Protestants have been among the first to take advantage of increasing levels of public support for

private schooling and have established such a 'Traditional Stream' (Barman, 1991, pp. 335-336).

In the UK many of the most scathing attacks on the schools have come from senior Conservative politicians. For example, in 1986, Norman Tebbitt, the then Chairman of the Conservative Party, condemned the policies of the Labour-controlled Inner London Education Authority which was, according to him, creating truancy because pupils refused to listen to the "anti-sexist, anti-racist, gay, lesbian, CND rubbish" that was

presented to them (Vulliamy, 1986, p. 4). The third position of the Right on traditional morality is that the schools are

promoting a kind of relativism which threatens the foundation of morality itself. This

third position has much in common with the critique of cultural modernity and the related conception of the self. Again, McGraw states this position most eloquently. In this passage, she uses Hitchcock (1979) to elaborate on the "therapeutic-humanistic view".

In the therapeutic-humanist view, there can be no objective standards, rules or moral truths, but only the "ability of the self to manipulate a sense of well

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170 B. Elliott & D. MacLennan

being." Striving for moral improvement is replaced by "personal growth." All moral choices becomes legitimate through self-validation. Objective moral

reality is dissolved in the semantics of "openness," "caring," the "celebration of life" and the utmost necessity of the self to feel "comfortable". (McGraw, 1980, p. 28)

McGraw claims that as a result of the pervasive influence of the therapeutic humanist view in the public schools, the possibly for a moral discourse, especially one deriving from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, has been eroded. At its most extreme this reaction to progressivism is dogmatic and tends towards the assertion of moral truths in an authoritarian manner.

For the New Right, a favourite example of how the schools have been used to undermine cultural tradition and common sense is found in the teaching about gender roles. Feminists have urged educators to reject a curriculum which merely reflects the conventional wisdom that what exists in the area of gender relations and roles is right. Through the 1970s they enjoyed some success in driving a wedge between the two basic

categories-what exists and what is right-thereby expanding the universe of discourse about what is possible in gender relations (Gaskell & McLaren, 1987; Gaskell et al., 1989).

Right-wing responses to this feminist initiative illustrate the traditional approach to

morality. Some members of the Right call for a return to views which equate what

traditionally existed in gender relations with what is right. This is illustrated by the

Family Protection Bill in the US which was being reviewed by Congress in 1981. Miriam David describes the intent of the proposed act as follows:

It aims both to rescind much of the recent equal opportunities legislation for race and sex and to replace it with traditional moral and familial education.

Thus, Federal aid, which is now considerable, will be withheld from schools which prohibit either voluntary school prayer or sex segregation "in sports or school-related activities" on affirmative action grounds; or which provide any program which produces or promotes courses of instruction or curriculum

seeking to "inculcate values or modes of behavior which contradict the demonstrated beliefs and values of community," or any program which

supports "educational materials or studies ... [which] would tend to denigrate, diminish or deny role differences between the sexes as it [sic.] has been

historically understood in the United States". (David, 1983, p. 154)

The goal here is not so much to transform 'common sense' as to defend or reassert a set of common sense taken-for-granted views. Instructional methods designed to subject common sense to critical reflection are rejected in favor of traditional approaches to right and wrong which include an uncritical acceptance of gender and family relations. This is surely what the authors of Unpopular Education are highlighting when they describe the New Right's efforts to

construct a social reality which is then naturalized. We constantly find 'laws' of economics and of human nature, 'differences' of race, gender and ability, and

'impulses' of competitiveness or acquisitiveness which are clearly defined and

rendered natural. This is 'the way things are' (as every 'housewife knows') and this is the way they must be. (Baron et al., 1981, p. 250)

It is thus not surprising that New Right ideologues sometimes talk of their own

project--smiling at the irony of it-as the 'Gramscism du Droite.' The Right is interested in being the "primary determinant of consciousness, character and customs" in society

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Neo-conservative School Reform 171

and in establishing a "profound cultural supremacy", to use phrases coined by Perry Anderson (1965, 1976) in his discussion of hegemony. Against the changes wrought by the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the neo-conservatives are seeking to re-form common sense in ways that will simultaneously challenge cultural modernity and

legitimate the processes of social modernization. To appreciate the role of common sense in the Right's version of hegemony fully it

is necessary to move beyond the recognition that the New Right is claiming that certain

topics-for example, sex, morality, politics-belong to the private sphere. The reason these matters are controversial is not just that they belong to the family but also that they articulate with 'deeper' aspects of culture and the self, with those sedimented, taken-for-

granted aspects of experience which are not identified in the narrowly-defined expres- sions of educational objectives (the 3Rs, for example). The New Right seeks to prevent public agencies-like schools-from meddling with these deeper aspects. Sometimes it does this through legislative moves to restrict 'psychological probing' of students about their attitudes and beliefs concerning sex, family relations, etc.-as in the amendment

sponsored by Senator Orrin G. Hatch in the US (McGraw, 1980, p. 31), or through public protest-as in the recent reaction to a proposed survey of British Columbia high schoolers that contained questions about the sexual behaviour of young people. In this latter case we find neo-conservatives mobilizing commonsensical scepticism about those sciences that depend on what Habermas (1985, p. 89) called "hermeneutic access to their

object domain" and orchestrating opposition to the intrusion of 'experts' into those realms where moral judgement is shaped.

But the New Right itself also tries to shape and re-shape common sense and use it

positively. Its appreciation of the fundamental importance of primary socialization leads it to the recognition that the deeper aspects of culture and self are transmitted by models of conduct "on the hither side of words or concepts" as Bourdieu (1977a, p. 2) puts it.

Thus, the task is to mould common sense in ways that shape conduct and build respect for traditional values regarding family life and sexuality and gender relations and, at the same time, generate commitment to individual striving, material ambition, competitive- ness and what (in the UK at least) has become known as the 'enterprise culture' (Keat & Abercrombie, 1991; Heelas & Morris, 1992).

In the political struggle to overcome the left and liberal influences on the character of modern societies, this level of 'the taken-for-granted' has strategic advantages. It helps the New Right submerge moral and factual judgements in a pre-reflexive dimension of common sense.

The Reaffirmation of High Culture

The educational initiatives of the New Right have to be seen as reflecting a political ideology that was constructed, in a very deliberate way, to challenge ideas and ideals that were central to the so-called post-war consensus. The new conservatism was especially dismissive of the notions of both 'equality' and 'social justice', two concepts that had been

deeply implicated in the reforms and expansions of education in the 1960s and 70s. Some of the most explicit rejections of these ideas came from the British New Right. For

instance, in 1975 when Mrs Thatcher paid her first visit to the US as leader of the Conservative Party (then still in opposition) she denounced the pursuit of equality in

Britain, attributing the efforts in this direction to "bourgeois guilt" and stating that

"Opportunity means nothing unless it includes the right to be unequal" (Aitken, 1975). A little earlier her mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, made a tape for the Open University

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172 B. Elliott & D. MacLennan

entitled 'Down with Equality' in which he argued that for many years British policy-mak- ing had been obsessed with the quest for greater equality and that "more equality is the

enemy of more and most people want more". In other words, egalitarianism stifles initiative and enterprise and leads to economic decline. He also dismissed the notion of

'social justice', and efforts to promote it, using arguments that were clearly based on

Hayek's philosophy. Few Canadian, and even fewer American conservatives were as

openly contemptuous of these ideas-particularly, of 'equality'-as the UK right-wing, but in all three countries the call for a change of direction in education and the enthusiasm for a restoration of elements of high culture must be seen in this context.

As in their response to the breakdown of traditional morality, neo-conservatives

frequently portray the problem of "too much equality" as a cultural crisis. There is a fear

among neo-conservatives that both moral and intellectual standards are threatened by progressivism. It might appear at first glance this general emphasis on culture and the

specific efforts to restore the cultural hierarchies of the past would be incompatible with the needs of an industrial or post-industrial economy: a modern economy is based on

sophisticated technical knowledge and such knowledge is not necessarily reflected in high culture. Moreover, all workers do not require sophisticated technical knowledge, as the neo-conservative slogan "back to the basics" suggests. But the reaffirmation of high culture is compatible with one aspect of a modern economy: it provides a means of

sorting and selecting-by purportedly objective and universalistic criteria-individuals who can then take their place in a highly stratified social structure. To the extent that this process is apparently grounded in universalistic criteria, state intervention designed to minimize inequality can be discouraged.

The weakness of this claim to universality is demonstrated by the sociology of education which, in the last two decades, has documented the role of the school in cultural politics. In exploring the relation between inequality and schooling, sociologists did not just document the empirical facts of inequality (of access or results); they also

pointed to the underlying dynamics of inequality. Thanks to the work of Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) and others it became clear that the culture transmitted by the school in the form of the curriculum did not derive from some national heritage-it did not 'belong' to everyone equally. In fact, a primary purpose of schooling was to

mystify what was essentially a political process. According to Bourdieu the school transforms particular standards into universal standards; judges the cultural products and

practices of all groups by those standards; encourages all groups to judge themselves by those standards; and restricts access to highly prized cultural products and practices to those who meet the aforementioned standards. The goal of his work on education was to assert this view against those who "proclaim[ed] the demise of class [and] held that

ascription was finally and forever giving way to 'achievement' " (ibid., p. ix). Reproduction, he writes

sought to propose a model of the social mediations and processes which tend, behind the backs of the agents engaged in the school system-teachers, students and their parents-and often against their will, to ensure the trans- mission of cultural capital across generations and to stamp pre-existing differ-

ences in inherited cultural capital with a meritocratic seal of academic consecration by virtue of the special symbolic potency of the title (credential). (ibid., pp. ix-x)

We are more conscious of these processes now, of the various forms of cultural capital and of the role played by credentials in distinctly modern strategies of social closure. But

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Neo-conservative School Reform 173

by linking the issue of equality to a cultural crisis, and in some cases to economic decline, the Right creates a kind of moral panic which obscures and stalls progressive reforms.

The success of the New Right's efforts to reaffirm the standards of high culture and traditional forms of cultural capital turned on a denial of the political and historical forces which shaped the school's curriculum. As Aronowitz & Giroux (1985) argue, such a denial was essential to the work of the two leading American exponents of the return to high culture, A. Bloom and E. D. Hirsch. Aronowitz and Giroux characterize the work of Bloom (1987) and Hirsch (1987) in the following terms:

Learning for both Hirsch and Bloom, has little to do with dialogue and struggle over the meanings and practices of a historical tradition. On the contrary, learning is defined primarily through a pedagogy of transmission, and knowl-

edge is reduced to a culture of great books or unrelated catalogues of shared

information, (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1988, p. 183)

They quote Robert Scholes' analysis of the "Conservative agenda underlying the differences and commonalities of the Bloom and Hirsch books":

Hirsch will make sure that everyone knows what the classics are and respects them, while Bloom will see to it that an elite can be defined by actually knowing these classics. In this way, the masses will be sufficiently educated to

respect the superior knowledge of their betters, who have studied in a few

major universities. (Scholes, quoted in Aronowitz & Giroux, 1988, p. 182)

In Britain, conservative criticisms of educational reforms and expansions had been evident for many years before the 'new' conservatives appeared. In the early 1960s there were those who claimed that opening up higher education to a broader population would

simply ensure that "more means worse", while in the 1970s the authors of the Black

Papers were urging the restoration of the traditional grammar schools because, along with the independent schools, these would uphold the moral and cultural values of

European civilization (Cox & Dyson, 1969; Cox & Boyson, 1975). They specifically called for a reversal of the egalitarian moves of the 1960s and argued that there was a need to select a small elite (between 5 and 8% of the age group) to whom the high culture would be transmitted and entrusted. The arguments of the 'cultural restora-

tionists', as Ball (1990) calls them, were well-rehearsed long before the neo-conservatives came to power.

Since 1979, successive Conservative governments in the UK have sought to create a market in education, with autonomous consumers (parents and pupils) exercising choice in an increasingly diversified system. Having failed to introduce educational vouchers, the New Right is pursuing the privatization of education in more piecemeal ways. However, in the creation of more choice the continued privileging of 'high culture' is evident. It is there in the assumption that the independent schools with their traditional

curricula, are superior. It is there in the creation of the 1980 Assisted Places Scheme, designed to give some poor but bright youngsters the opportunity to attend such schools

(Whitty et aL, 1989). In the state sector, schools have been encouraged to 'opt out' of local

authority control and to assume the status of Grant Maintained institutions, funded

directly (and at higher levels) by the Department of Education and Science. Most Grant

Maintained schools place heavy emphasis on traditional academic programmes of the

grammar school type. Further differentiation of the Local Education Authority institu- tions is being encouraged by giving parents the rights to choose. 'Star' schools, whose

popularity owes much to their ability to transmit the high culture and ensure college places for their students are emerging, but at the other end of the distribution we find

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174 B. Elliott & D. MacLennan

'sink' schools-those with declining rolls, poor examination results and high drop-out rates. However, it is the creation of a National Curriculum that offers the most substantial opportunity to re-shape the actual content of education, and in the making of this policy we know that the traditional programmes of the 'lite private schools were taken as bench-marks when it came to deciding on the numbers and kinds of subjects that would be required (Ball, 1990, p. 208). From all this it appears that the effort to re-instate traditional standards and to preserve or restore elements of the high culture

entails, in England, the reconstruction of inequalities and hierarchies, similar in many ways to those that existed prior to the educational expansions and reforms of the 1960s.

In Canada, support for high culture is best illustrated by the Great Brain Robbey. Written by three historians, the Great Brain Robbey argues that "Canadian universities no

longer take on the best students and no longer give their best students the best education" (Bercuson et al., 1984, p. 7). At the root of the problem, suggest Bercuson and his colleagues, is too much democracy ("students vote and have influence on university governing bodies at all levels", p. 84) and too much equality ("Canadian universities let almost everyone in who wants to get in" p. 64). The negative effects of too much

democracy and too much equality are allegedly reflected in the curriculum which is characterized on the one hand by too much specialization and on the other hand by too much freedom in the range of subjects from which students are allowed to choose. Students choose the easiest courses and standards decline.

Overall, the reaffirmation of high culture reinforces the denial of the political foundations of the curriculum. An understanding of the ideological work involved in

creating and institutionalizing a body of knowledge is replaced by dutiful reverence towards a curriculum the value of which is said to be timeless. As a result, the gap between teachers and students is potentially widened and student alienation is increased.

Legitimate criticisms of the curriculum are marginalized and arguments against the allocation of resources to groups whose cultural heritage is outside of the mainstream are reinforced.

The educational policies of the New Right may be shaped in part by neo-conservative efforts at cultural restoration, but these are by no means the only influences. The new and allegedly 'radical' conservatism of the last decade or so rests on a somewhat uneasy coalition of disparate class fractions and interests and a broad spectrum of libertarian, neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideas. Keeping this alliance together, maintaining the electoral loyalty of several constituencies and accommodating some of the ideas of educational bureaucracies has meant that educational discussions and reforms have

necessarily incorporated different strands of ideology and diverse critiques of current

schooling. One reaction to the claimed 'decline in standards' was to restore elements of an older bourgeois culture, a goal pursued most assiduously in the UK.

A rather different response was heard in the phrase 'back to the basics', which figured prominently in many North American debates about the supposed malaise of education

today. The phrase covered a confusing array of practices and undoubtedly appealed to a wide variety of audiences. There is little doubt that for many working class parents and some employers the phrase indicated a retreat from the vague promises of progressive education to more useful skills and more concrete forms of knowledge. This emphasis on

utility, acknowledged by Hall & Carlton (1977), stands out most sharply in the concept of functional literacy discussed by de Castell and her colleague. Put simply, it refers to "how well a person can read materials associated with survival activities" (Kirsch & Guthrie, quoted in de Castell et al., 1986, p. 8).

In some contexts the concept of functional literacy was linked quite explicitly to issues

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Neo-conservative School Reform 175

of job performance. How does one reconcile thik emphasis on utility with the call for a return to high culture? It is not difficult to see how these ideas could co-exist in a conservative vision of education. As Bourdieu (1977b) and Bourdieu & Passeron (1990) insist, even those students who are condemned to 'the basics' must have some appreci- ation of the cultural and linguistic forms. (All students in Britain, for instance, should have some exposure to Shakespeare according to the Minister of Education responsible for the creation of the new common curriculum.) Moreover, as Shor (1986) suggests, by shifting attention away from restrictions on opportunity based in the economy and

focusing attention on teachers and students, a major ideological advantage is achieved. For some students and some parents the emphasis on the basics will be part of an

exchange which includes the promise of a job, but which requires the job-seeker to settle for less. The emphasis on basics thus helps avert the problems caused by rising expectations and an economy which is increasingly unable to meet those expectations (Shor, 1986; Quarter & Mathews, 1987).

A particularly nuanced account of the tension between a curriculum based on high culture and a curriculum organized to reflect vocational values is provided in Bowe &

Whitty (1989). In examining the compromises that lie behind the English school

curriculum, they, like Ball (1990), attempt to refine the distinctions made by Williams

(1975) between old humanists, industrial trainers and public educators (to which has been added a new group, the state bureaucrats). What becomes clear, from their account, are "tensions within the New Right itself' (p. 411), specifically between neo-liberal and neo-conservative elements of the New Right. For many neo-conservatives in Britain, the school curriculum must not just serve the needs of the economy; it must also respond to a crisis of authority in society at large. It is in response to this general crisis of authority that the restoration of traditional morality and high culture become priorities in curriculum reform. Bowe & Whitty characterize this neo-conservative element of the New Right in Britain as follows:

It is concerned with the preservation of national culture and is deeply suspicious of the new vocationalism and pre-vocational education, whether

espoused by state bureaucrats, the 'modernising' element of the industrial

training lobby or by progressive forces amongst the public educators. (p. 412)

While acknowledging how difficult it is to link developments in British education to "coherent lobbies or interest groups" (p. 413), Bowe & Whitty make it plairi that the British educational system, like those of other countries, is the product of contending interests and philosophies.

New Right reforms in all three countries illustrate these conflicts, but they do so with

particular clarity in Britain where the ideological battles have been sharper than in either Canada or the US. In the mid 1980s, when Sir Keith Joseph was the Minister of

Education, the White Paper Better Schools contained proposals that, as Johnson (1991) observed, linked tradition and modernity, that spoke to the importance of religion and

morality while giving prominence to science and technology. Simultaneously, they reflected the neo-conservative suspicion of cultural modernity and the quest for social

modernity by means of a renewal of the capitalist spirit. The reforms of schooling made

under Labour governments in the 1960s and 70s modified, but they could not entirely remove the clear imprint of the ideals of the gentry that had for so long been a feature of British education. In particular, they did not remove the old disdain for 'commerce' and 'philistine profit seeking' that writers like Martin Wiener (1981) and many others had seen as distinguishing marks of education in the UK. Indeed, those reforms of the 1960s

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176 B. Elliott & D. MacLennan

and 1970s served to re-work the old commitment to 'service' as students sought jobs in the burgeoning public sector as teachers, researchers, health-care workers, social workers, etc. The Thatcherites sought to change that. And one way in which they did it was to insert ideas and resources into the schools programs that they hoped would promote a new appreciation of the importance of business values and what became known as the 'enterprise culture'.

The Promotion of Business Values

In all three countries the New Right has been fierce in its denunciation of schools as institutions that fail to teach respect and understanding of 'business', which they represent as the source of our wealth and the bedrock of our socio-political system. In fact, the conservatives of the 1980s claimed teachers have actively encouraged criticism of the free market and sympathy for 'collectivist' values. If, in the early 1980s our economies were in trouble, part of the responsibility, they argued, lay in the lack of 'entrepreneurialism'-and the schools shared the blame for that.

Some of the earliest efforts to promote 'entrepreneurialism' came from the business groups-chiefly small and independent business groups that sprang up in the 1970s and which lobbied and pressured governments to attend to their specific plights and grievances. In Canada and in Britain very similar organizations (The Canadian Feder- ation of Independent Business and the UK's Forum For Independent Business, for example) pointed to the decline in small business and to the economic and social consequences of the increasing concentration of economic power in the hands of giant corporations. They demanded much more support and assistance from governments and from banks, but also more deliberate efforts to promote entrepreneurial skills in schools and colleges and many more programs of education and training for those who wished to start up a business of their own. The organized petite bourgeoisie, was in the late 1970s, an important constituency for the New Right and there can be no doubt that they listened and responded to these demands and they have continued to do so. Evidence of this is found in the enormous increase in the range of advice and counselling provided by all levels of government and by the great expansion in business courses available in colleges and universities. On the campuses, Business Schools flourished through the 1980s while most other areas of teaching and research experienced substantial erosion of their funds.

The role of neo-liberal 'think-tanks' in the shaping of educational policy has been of some significance. In Britain the Institute of Economic Affairs through its Education Unit supplied ideas about how to create an education market and at least one former staff member became part of the Ministry team shaping the Education Reform Act of 1988. In Canada, the Fraser Institute (whose early development owed much to the founders of the IEA) established an Economic Resource Centre which bid, successfully, for a contract to re-write part of the British Columbia high school Consumer Education program. In this and in its efforts to provide a kind of 'remedial' economic education for school teachers and for clergymen, many of whom were critical of the social consequences of neo-liberal economic policies, the Institute stressed the fallacies of Keynesianism and the superiority of the 'free market' approaches of Hayek and Friedman and others. In addressing BC's youth, the aim was very clear, "The long-term game-plan is to change the ideas of those who will be businessmen in 10-15 years", declared Walter Block, deputy director of the Institute in an interview in 1986. Thus, the New Right took careful aim at the content of education, seeking to influence both the curriculum and the

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Neo-conservative School Reform 177

educators. Here one can see most clearly the attempt to construct a new, taken-for-

granted view of the economy and the role of government. One issue to which New Right governments addressed themselves in the last decade

was the provision of education for less academically inclined students, many of whom left school at the earliest opportunity, frequently with no qualifications. There can be little doubt that, despite the earlier educational reforms of left and liberal governments, education systems in Britain, Canada and the US had many "flung aside, forgotten children" (Gow & MacPherson, 1980). Recession, soaring youth unemployment (and urban riots in Britain) encouraged renewed efforts to create 'relevant' forms of education and in particular to develop vocationally-oriented instruction that might help teenagers, or indeed, older unemployed persons to find a job.

In Britain the issues were addressed most directly by the Manpower Services Commission which began to play a larger and larger part in the provision of vocational Further Education. Its influence was felt in schools, colleges and local authorities and it was not long before critics began to complain that this agency was usurping the role of the educationists, undermining local institutional autonomy and being used by the Thatcher government to impose central direction on a decentralized education system (Raffe, 1985, p. 29). In Scotland, the Scottish Education Department's 'Sixteen Plus Action Plan' announced in 1983 offered a new, flexible, modular programme of vocational education, which was enthusiastically received in Scottish educational circles, not least because it assuaged fears of further incursions by the MSC and a threatened

English take-over of much post-16 education. But though it was not crafted by neo-conservative ideologues (indeed, it was designed in a climate of substantial Scottish

opposition to Thatcherism), the new programme can be seen as congruent with some of the neo-conservative's objectives. The Action Plan works with fragmented, 40-hour modules and despite the declared objectives of balancing 'education' and 'training' there is a real prospect that such a parceling of knowledge into small discrete packages will

encourage in both employers and students a tendency to select only those elements that are evidently relevant to narrow job-related purpose.

Raffe also points out that the atomization of knowledge will increase the individualiza- tion of education, and possibly begin to shift the ideology of education in the UK, which, particularly in England, has lain at the 'sponsored' pole of Turner's (1960) famous

'sponsored' and 'contest' modes of mobility. A move to a more individuated, market-re-

lated, 'contest'-oriented form of education would seem to sit quite well with neo-con- servative interests in fostering the rational, calculative, instrumental qualities of social

modernity. The fact is that those designing educational innovations are sharply aware of the ideological climate in which they operate and their proposals are inevitably influenced by prevailing political values. Thomas Fleming, who played a major part in the 1988 Royal Commission on Education in British Columbia commented that the Commission tried to find a balance at a time when "Governments at national and

provincial levels are attempting to reconcile long-held conservative and liberal ideological dispositions" (1990).

For some time now, right-wing governments have made concerted efforts to link education more closely to the needs of business. Curricula have been changed to give space for instruction on how the 'free market' works, on its principal institutions and on the neo-liberal economic theories central to New Right policies. In the name of greater community involvement, local business people have been encouraged to become gover- nors of schools and to sit on other governing bodies. Forms of 'co-op' education have been devised to enable high-school, college and university students to link their academic

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178 B. Elliott & D. MacLennan

efforts to the 'real' world of business. The promotion of business values is no longer something to be looked for in the hidden curriculum; it is now inscribed in education in

very obvious ways.

Privatization, Centralization and the Reorganization of Schooling

The New Right did not come to power armed with comprehensive plans for educational reform. Rather, it came with a critique which, together with the precise economic and

political circumstances of its electoral success, largely determined the particular policies pursued. One policy instrument used in other areas soon became popular: privatization became an important lever of change. Privatization ranges from relatively modest schemes to raise money for supplies and equipment from parents and community to ambitious programs aimed at providing hundreds of thousands of pounds (and even

larger numbers of dollars) from the corporate sector. High school principals are

appointed on the basis of their entrepreneurial skills and liken themselves to managing directors rather than teachers, and in their turn they are beginning to recruit professional fund-raisers and salaried 'business managers' (Beckett & Plommer, 1992). Privatization also means the sub-contracting of school services-like janitorial ones, for instance, or the

partial contracting-out of student counselling services, as is happening in British Colum- bia. In Britain, the conservatives have attempted to set up a system of City Technology Colleges, hoping for an enthusiastic response from business, whose financial contribu- tions would underpin this educational innovation. The scheme has not been well-received

by the corporations and government has had to supply almost all the funding (Ball, 1990, pp. 113-119). At the broadest level, of course, privatization means setting up or fostering institutions run totally independently of the state: private schools, private colleges, private universities. So far, Japan and Australia are the leaders in this kind of development and most of the independent institutions are post-secondary colleges of various kinds (Geiger, 1986, 1988), but there is no doubt that the neo-liberal elements of the New Right would like to extend privatization at all levels.

In Canada some of the first steps in the implementation of a New Right educational

agenda occurred in British Columbia in the 1970s. The Social Credit government reintroduced province-wide testing of secondary students in 1977 (a safeguard against 'falling standards', it proclaimed) and in that same year it also passed the Independent Schools Act. Fisher (1991) sees this as an important turning point. The only province in Canada with a completely secular public school system could now divert public funding to private schools, including denominational ones. By 1988, with the 'Socreds' still in

power, the Royal Commission on Education in the province offered strong support for

increasing state funding of private education and for the rights of consumers to substitute

private for state provision of educational services. In their educational policies and in other policies the BC government drew on the neo-liberal ideology, the debates and the

experiments in privatization being carried on in Britain. Politicians, deputy ministers and members of the local neo-liberal think-tank had direct contacts with the key ideologues and agencies in London. But the moves to provide public funding for the private sector

also reflected the disposition of electoral support in BC. As Fisher observes, the Social Credit government had received

... support from the Roman Catholic and evangelical religious communities at the ballot box ... and from the power-elite in BC who tend to send their sons

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Neo-conservative School Reform 179

and daughters to the ISA (Independent Schools Association) schools. (Fisher, 1991, p. 53)

Privatization is one way in which education is subjected to the 'discipline' of the market

place but there are other, related techniques which have impact on the internal

organization of institutions. Thus, in Britain, the US and Canada we find deliberate

attempts to run educational establishments on overtly 'business-like' lines. In Britain 'Local Management of Schools' was introduced; in the US and Canada 'School-Based

Budgeting' is the preferred term to describe essentially the same phenomenon (Calvert, 1989). Principals or Heads are to have much more control over their schools' budgets and to act like Chief Executive Officers reporting to Boards made up of parents, local

community and business representatives and a few educators and educational bureau- crats. This can be given a 'populist' cast, represented as a way of handing schools back to the people, to the parents and the local community. Schools will be encouraged to

develop written mandates and to enter into more explicit contracts with their 'customers'. In Britain the government has actively promoted the idea of schools 'opting out' of local

authority control. This achieves both the goal of weakening local authorities (important bases for opposition to conservative policies) and of allowing schools to enjoy greater 'freedom' to tailor their programmes to their market and shape their recruitment

strategies. In this way, without the use of the voucher scheme initially proposed by Milton Friedman, schools will compete with one another and have a strong inducement to specialize. Consumers can 'shop' for and purchase the education they like and can afford. The upshot of this and similar schemes in other countries, is to open "the door to much wider variations in programs and educational standards among schools within the same school district" (Calvert, 1989, p. 35).

But these policies also have other implications. They alter the everyday social relations in schools and colleges as new divisions are introduced between teachers and those with

any managerial role. Deans turn into 'Directors', Heads into 'Managers' and promotion to any post of real responsibility is deemed, in North America, at least, incompatible with continued membership in the union or professional association. The financial squeeze, the deliberate use of short-term budgeting, the reduction in monies for permanent positions and the corresponding casualization of much work in schools, colleges and universities-all contribute to a significant weakening of the professional autonomy of educators.

That autonomy is threatened even more substantially by the simultaneous, and at first, seemingly paradoxical centralization of control over education that the 'free marketeers' have encouraged. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the imposition of a common curriculum. The English reforms go furthest in this direction, but in Canadian provinces and American states and in both countries at the Federal level, we find conservatives enthusiastic about a unitary programme of education that can be shaped and monitored at the centre. The ability of teachers to influence the content of education is to be

substantially reduced. A further erosion of their autonomy comes in the form of 'national

testing' systems, presented by governments as a kind of 'quality assurance' which they alone can implement. And the re-vamped and more powerful Boards of Governors that

all schools in the UK must now have are seen as another means of surveillance, as they are invited by governments to assess how well their school is doing against a series of

government-devised 'performance indicators'. Here we can see one of the ways in which privatization and centralization overlap and

re-enforce each other. Populist rhetoric about decentralization, about returning control

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180 B. Elliott & D. MacLennan

to the community or to the consumers barely conceals the actual extension of state control. Power has been lost by local authorities and Canadian school boards: most

importantly, perhaps, power has been lost by the teachers. The neo-conservatives have used popular misgivings about 'bureaucracy', criticisms of a 'bureaucratized intelli-

gentsia' and easily excited antipathy towards 'progressive' teachers to legitimate actions that undermine the freedom of educators, that de-professionalize them.

According to Johnson (1972) and many others, the essence of professional status is the attainment by workers of a high level of control over their occupation, its work processes and the services or products it provides. New Right policies intensify the challenges to

professional autonomy many teachers have already faced. They do this in two obvious

ways: centralization strengthens the hand of the state, allowing prescription and monitor-

ing of teachers' actions: privatization gives greater power to educational 'consumers'. Both contribute to the proletarianization of teaching described by Apple (1985, 1989) for the US and Ozga & Lawn (1989) for the UK. Teachers can, of course, resist, and we have seen examples of this-most recently in their opposition in England to the centrally imposed national curriculum tests (Grice & Hymas, 1993). Teachers (and students) can also undermine reforms, as Cohen observes in the UK:

Both have developed quite sophisticated strategies for reworking what is

imposed upon them ... subverting or neutralizing the more extreme effects, while adapting others to their own, often conflicting purposes. (Cohen, 1990, p. 85)

The New Right may have tried to purge the core curriculum of its critical elements, but within the classrooms questioning of conservative policies, and appreciation of their

inegalitarian and repressive effects goes on. The extent and character of this resistance almost certainly varies across the three countries we have been considering. Precisely how it varies is an interesting research question. How is it affected by different levels of

professionalization, different levels of unionization and different histories of organized conflict? How do teachers understand their role in the struggle over cultural and social

modernity and in what contexts are teachers' efforts to defend their own autonomy linked to broader emancipatory strategies? Some systematic comparative analysis is needed.

Conclusion

Habermas, in his analysis of neo-conservatism, set up the issues in what seems to us an

interesting and provocative way. Neo-conservatives in several countries do seem to have been grappling with the problems he identified, namely, how to resist changes associated with cultural modernity and at the same time embrace the changes-social, technological, economic-associated with social modernity? However, Habermas does not explore, in

any detail, the means whereby New Right regimes might seek to implement these general objectives, and he certainly does not provide any close description and analysis of actual

policies and their consequences. That has been left to others, and in the decade that has

elapsed since he wrote about this matter a great many studies of neo-conservative

regimes and policies have appeared. From these we can see just how comprehensively the New Right has sought to change

society. Gramscian analyses, like those provided initially by Stuart Hall and his col- leagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies represented the New Right as a new alliance of class forces intent on trying to create a new hegemony. Inevitably, in

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Neo-conservative School Reform 181

this view, much of the struggle would take place on the cultural terrain and that in turn meant that certain institutions would assume critical importance. The education system is surely one of the key institutions that must be reshaped if neo-liberal and neo-conserva- tive ideas are to be assimilated as 'common sense'.

Neo-conservative governments are everywhere made up of disparate elements-of neo-liberals for whom the 'free market' is the supreme good, and more or less radical conservatives who seek a return to order and authority and a variety of traditional values, institutions and practices. Reforms in education, reflect that fact. They are the result of

struggles and compromises not only between ideological factions in a governing party but also between politicians and bureaucrats, between different sections and levels of the

public service, between politicians and officialdom, professional educators and parents. In all three countries considered here we find equivalents of old humanists, industrial

trainers, public educators and state bureaucrats. But the constellation of these elements varies somewhat from one country to another. Thus, any comparative analysis-even one as preliminary as this-must acknowledge the main factors that account for some differences in what are, in most respects, strikingly similar patterns of change. In the UK, particularly in England, the voices of an authoritarian conservatism have been especially powerful, both before the Conservative Party won power in 1979 and during many of the debates about educational reforms in the 1980s. The National Curriculum seems to owe much to the years of campaigning against social science, peace studies, sex

education, anti-racist and multi-cultural education. Johnson (1991) characterizes the curriculum as "exclusive, nostalgic and frequently racist" (p. 69). It seems extraordinarily detached from the real social and cultural diversity of contemporary English society.

It is hard to imagine such a curriculum being introduced in either Canada or the US. Both are irrefutably and proudly multi-cultural societies and in Canada a federal policy of 'multiculturalism' celebrates and supports diversity and finds expression in the educational systems of all provinces.

The English educational reform is a product of a government deliberately seeking the restoration of class superiority (the re-establishment of 'bourgeois values' and 'bourgeois society' was openly discussed by Sir Keith Joseph), and of a society in which the power of a ruling class has authorized and legitimated a singular, superior culture. In North

America, no such 'authorized', class-based, cultural system exists-certainly not in the US and not even in Canada.

And differences in political arrangements and traditions also affect the character of New Right educational reforms. Federal politicians may express a desire to see a national curriculum but they are powerless to implement such a thing so long as education remains a provincial or a state responsibility. Unlike their Conservative counterparts in the UK they cannot simply abolish a tier of government or emasculate local authorities

just because they offer inconvenient opposition. Thus, there are significant structural and cultural differences which 'filter' the effects of similar political ideologies and educational

changes which they encourage. In much the same way we can see that the implementation of educational reforms that

are the product of the specifically neo-liberal elements of the New Right ideological mix, also varies from country to country. In the UK, open discussion of turning education into

a commodity to be distributed through an open market was politically impossible in the 1970s, and in Canada too with its relatively highly developed welfare state, with substantial social democratic and communitarian elements in its political culture it was

similarly difficult. In the US, however, with its many private colleges and schools and with a political culture that admits little criticism of the all-pervasive liberal ideology, the

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182 B. Elliott & D. MacLennan

ideas of Friedman and Hayek on education (as on other matters) were more sympathet- ically received. There were experiments with voucher systems, moves to increase parental power, the creation of 'magnet' schools and distinctive curricula-all of which have created more 'choice' for 'consumers'.

However, as Ball (1993, p. 15) points out, the neo-liberal agenda in education is

tempered in the US by a commitment to the social goals of equality or justice. In a

society that takes from its revolutionary history the idea of itself as 'egalitarian' (however contradicted by the facts that may be) it is very difficult to accept, with equanimity, the kind of class advantage, the kind of stratified schooling that is now being restored in Britain. And in Canada too, though the rhetoric of 'excellence rather than equity' (Fisher, 1991) is commonplace, there remains broad support for a common, state-pro- vided and 'fair' system of neighbourhood schools to which the overwhelming majority of students will go.

The neo-conservative agenda in the three countries is then, realized in slightly different

ways. In all three countries though, we could argue that the general consequences are similar. First, the introduction of market principles constitutes, as Ball calls it, a 'class

strategy' (1993, p. 3) which will reproduce and amplify class advantage. The market in education will lead to manifestly more unequal and unjust societies (Jonathan, 1990; Ball, 1993). Secondly, the educational changes will contribute to the construction of a

specifically neo-conservative model of civil society, one in which the public and associational aspects are minimised and the private and individual ones are given priority.

The nature of this neoconservative model of civil society may be clarified with reference to some elements of cultural modernity. Cohen & Arato in their recent work on civil society draw our attention to aspects of cultural modernity that typically are not much discussed by neo-conservatives but which are certainly implicated in their re-

forms-including their school reforms. About cultural modernity they write

its universal thrust is the reflexive, non-authoritarian relation toward tradition. Traditions that have become problematic can be preserved only on the terrain of cultural modernity, i.e. through arguments that invoke principles, (Cohen &

Arato, 1992, p. 25)

In their view cultural modernity also involves a notion of universality which is defined, in part, with reference to a particular kind of social interaction:

... universality is a regulative principle of a discursive process in and through which participants reason together about which values, principles, need-inter-

pretations merit being institutionalized in common norms. (ibid., p. 21)

One can see these features of cultural modernity taking shape in the 1960s and being carried forward in the new social movements over the last 30 years. The project of the 1960 movements was not merely hedonistic self-realization. It represented too the

development of democracy's historic project-the extension of rights, the quest for equity and justice. Cultural modernity leads to claims for positive freedom--the rights of individ-

uals, associating with one another, communicating with one another, debating, criticiz-

ing, and claiming new rights. The New Right, in its retreat from the culture of

modernity--and its schooling strategies are important in this-turns back toward a world constituted in the image of

the autonomous, but egoistic and exclusively self-regarding, competitive, pos-

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Neo-conservative School Reform 183

sessive individuals whose negative liberty it is the polity's task to protect. (Cohen & Arato, 1992, p. 22)

For more than a decade now neo-conservatives have pursued the reform of education in large part out of a conviction that at the heart of the problems that afflict modem societies there lie cultural assumptions and practices that inhibit capitalist modernization and distort its potentially beneficent effects. These same cultural assumptions are believed to engender a moral/spiritual crisis which carries with it the loss of traditional lifeworlds, of established, pre-conscious moral imperatives.

Habermas argues that the neo-conservatives are quite wrong to see "an expansive and subversive culture" (Habermas, 1985, p. 93) as the cause of our difficulties. In so doing, they "confuse cause and effect" (p. 93). We should focus instead on "the economic and administrative imperatives, the so-called objective exigencies, which monetarize and bureaucratize growing dimensions of life and increasingly transform relationships into commodities and objects of administration" (p. 93). The modernizing thrust of neo-con- servative educational reforms serves these economic and administrative 'imperatives' while compromising the positive features of cultural modernity identified by Arato & Cohen. At stake are two very different visions of the social world: one populated by 'self-regarding, competitive, possessive individuals' and one where diversity is welcomed and celebrated, in which a multiplicity of voices contribute to the reshaping both of civil

society and the state.

Correspondence: Brian Elliott, Department of Anthropology & Sociology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z1, Canada.

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