Researchers and Administrators of Education as ‘State Intellectuals’ on the Educational Agora

• In Event: International large-scale assessments meeting educational policy-making in a restructuring Nordic welfare state.

Proposal

Scholars have become increasingly interested in how behavior driven by ideas rather than self-interest determines policymaking outcomes. In this, the paper performs interviews with Swedish scholars that have been influential on the educational Agora (cf. Nowotny et. al. 2001) in co-producing (Jasanoff, 2006) educational knowledge in-between science, politics and society. This is a most important task for gaining knowledge on the dynamics, position and strategies that guides and frames the activities taking place on the educational Agora.

The interviews have been performed with scholars and administrators of education which in Sweden can be discussed in terms of given a role of ‘state intellectuals’ (cf. Pettersson & Popkewitz, in press) when it comes to educational thinking and reforms. The paper is influenced by Timothy Mitchell’s (2002) statement on who to consider an expert in asking: “What strategies, structures, and silences transform the expert into a spokesperson for what appear as the forces of development, the rules of law, the progress of modernity, or the rationality of capitalism?” (a.a. p. 15). This is relevant to reflect upon and the paper gives examples on how this can be portrayed based on examples from the Swedish context.

What we ask is how the statements produced by Swedish ‘state intellectuals’ came to be agreed upon as ‘facts’ (cf. Hunter, 2001) and what are the perspectives, positions and practices at work? In this we use the interviews with some of the most important historically and contemporary experts as well as we from our interviews gain knowledge on previous ‘state intellectuals’ and on the policy environment these long-gone intellectuals were active within. This is then coordinated with previous research outlining a periodization of welfare state education, and by performing the task in this way the paper can make some conclusions on displacements on the educational Agora as well as changes in the style of reasoning (Hacking, 2002) dominant on the Agora. In this handling, we are able to show displacements over time on how ‘experts’ as well as educational knowledge is constructed as a co-production (Jasanoff, 2006) between science, politics and society. Conclusively, by asking how educational ideas, educational interests and educational ‘experts’ connect and affect each other on the educational Agora, we can avoid some of the pitfalls of the old idealist versus materialist debate about the nature of public educational policymaking.

References:
Hacking, I. (2002) “Style” for Historians and Philosophers. I. Hacking Historical Ontology. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press.
Hunter, I. (2001) Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jasanoff, S. (2006) States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order. New York: Routledge.
Mitchell, T. (2002) Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Nowotny, H., Scott, P., & Gibbons, M. (2001). Rethinking Science: Power and the public in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pettersson, D. & Popkewitz, T. S. (in press) A Chimera of Quantifications and Comparisons: The Changing of Educational ‘Expertise’. C. Elde Mølstad & D. Pettersson (in press)

Author

• Daniel Pettersson, University of Gävle