Monetarization, Risk, and Education in the Contemporary United States

• In Event: Interrogating Governing Discourses in Early Childhood and Childhood Studies and Policies Through a Foucauldian Lens

Abstract

. In everyday language the term 'risk' is understood as a synonym for danger or peril, for some unhappy event which may happen to someone; it designates an objective threat. In insurance the term designates neither an event nor a general kind of event occurring in reality… but a specific mode of treatment of certain events capable of happening to a group of individuals .. Nothing is a risk in itself; there is no risk in reality. But on the other hand, anything can be a risk; it all depends on how one analyzes the danger, considers the event. (Ewald, 1991, p. 199)
This paper looks at the convergence of the concepts of schooling and risk in the last half of the 20th and first decades of the 21st century. As Ewald states above, nothing in itself constitutes a risk, unless it is monetarized, and calculated in terms of potential financial damage (in itself a very abstract concept) it can do to an individual or a population. This calculus is particularly fraught, as Rose (1996)points out, when it involves the even more abstract process of translating services into monetary terms. Despite the abstract nature, and indeed indirectness of the link between schooling and risk, the two have become increasingly conflated in the decades since WWII, to the point where a particular activity, or service—educating children—becomes an “investment,” with the concomitant potential of financial gain, but also the potential risk of loss on the “investment.” This concept of a service becoming an investment, on which there is a potentially calculable “risk” of loss involves new activities of “writing down,” things associated with that activity in a certain, prescribed way, and then auditing the activity in a manner intertwined with that which is written down and recorded. This paper explores the increasing influence the concepts of monetarization, risk, and the “writing down” or recording what goes on in that activity to make the risk involved appear calculable and even manipulable, using the context of the United States as a framework. The study uses techniques drawing on the concept of Foucauldian genealogy. It involves a historical discourse analysis of two types of documents from the past seven decades—academic papers in macroeconomics and statistics, and public policy statements and documents from the United States, to explore the growth and trajectory of current understandings, or “framings,” of education, from the perception of education as a service prior to WWII, to the now rarely questioned monetary terms of gain, loss and risk, through the means of a discursive history

Author

• Theodora A. Lightfoot, IISSE