(Re)making the Future Citizen: The Lifelong Learner and Lifelong Learning in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and South Korea

• In Event: Roundtable Session 57
  In Roundtable Session: Systems Governing the Teacher and Child: Fabricating School Communities in the Era of Education Reform

Abstract

This article explores South Korea’s education reforms driven by international comparative assessment-the OECD’s PISA-as double nuances of school improvement and a process of abjection with respect to its increasing conversation around “success/failure” of child, schooling, and the nation. By the notion of abjection, this article directs attention to standardization/categorization/classification through dual practices of measuring and comparing student performance and national effectiveness. These practices, however, simultaneously produce cultural territories of difference (e.g., achievement gap). Korean public schooling, along with other OECD member countries, has been designated as a central entity for the production of the future citizen-in this case of the OECD and its PISA, lifelong learner whose knowledge is practical and useful in real world. Through an analysis of documents from the OECD and Korean Ministry of Education, one can begin to map the lifelong learner embedded in the project of the PISA and which travels to and is assembled and connected to the making up of new citizens (Hacking, 1986).

My study of South Korean conversations about lifelong learning driven by international comparative assessment has three intertwined foci. The first part of this paper considers lifelong learning as a cultural thesis telling about particular modes of life. The inclusive discourse (e.g., “Lifelong Learning for All”) is a language of cultural thesis that links individuality with norms of collective belonging. The second problematizes the lifelong learner as a fabrication of identity in which both present individuality and collective belonging are established as an imagined future. The fabrications of the lifelong learner are performances of disposition work of the nation through social practices and schooling in particular languages. The third section traces the mechanism of inclusion, exclusion, and abjection embedded in the discourses surrounding lifelong learning both at the national and international level.

I use “governmentality” (Foucault, 1991) or “government at a distance” (Miller & Rose, 1993; Rose, 1999) through numbers from political science to consider PISA in the context of lifelong learning as techniques of inscription and accumulation of facts about the population, making visible “a domain with a certain internal homogeneity and external boundaries” (Rose, 1999, p. 212). The governmental qualities of numbers allow for its patterns of qualifying individuals for and disqualifying individuals from inclusion. Lifelong learning in the discourses of positioning and classifying is a cultural thesis of recognizing and managing difference through the dual aspects of recognition and abjection, the latter as a process that produces space of difference within the imaginary of the nation. While lifelong learning is explicitly connected to its process of ‘recognition’, the process of normalizing internal homogeneity and external boundaries is overlooked in much contemporary reform research.

This work gives intelligibility to particular dispositions, practices, ways of being and systems of reasoning connected to the future citizen. In doing so, it also makes visible the incompetent and unsuccessful within South Korea as a “strong performer and successful reformer.”

Author

• Jonghun Kim, University of Wisconsin - Madison