The elevated role of knowledge and technology in the present-day economies has led to the conceptualisation of certain economies as knowledge-based where ‘production, distribution and use of knowledge and information’ (OECD 1996, 7) are central to their functioning. According to an OECD 1996 publication ‘[k]nowledge is now recognised as the driver of productivity and economic growth, leading to a new focus on the role of information, technology and learning in economic performance’ (OECD 1996, 3) and the term knowledge-based economy ‘stems from this fuller recognition of the place of knowledge and technology in modern OECD economies’ (OECD 1996, 3). According to the World Bank, the knowledge-based economy ‘relies primarily on the use of ideas rather than physical abilities and on the application of technology rather than the transformation of raw materials or the exploitation of cheap labor’ (World Bank 2003, xvii). It is not my intention to interrogate this concept here, merely to point to its existence, some salient features and its influence on what is expected of education.
The OECD and the World Bank have been described by Robertson as ‘the self appointed “midwives” giving birth to this bright new future’ (Robertson 2009, 235) of the knowledge economy. The framework for the project as created by the OECD, she says, was picked up by
the World Bank in its Knowledge for Development Program and the whole concept has been influenced by human capital theory and new growth theory. Both organisations agree on the centrality of education but they differ on how education systems should develop (Robertson 2005, 151). For the OECD ‘[e]ducation will be the centre of the knowledge-based economy, and learning the tool of individual and organisational advancement’ (OECD 1996, 14). For the World Bank, sustaining economic growth and competing in the global economy requires a well- educated workforce with opportunities for lifelong learning, where ‘limited government resources’ can be stretched by tapping the private sector (World Bank 1998, 101). The presumption here is that governments will take the political decision to ‘limit’ the resources they are prepared to expend on education in order to facilitate the marketisation of those educational products from which profit can be extracted. The decision to limit any government resources is always political and is really a decision to allocate such resources in a particular way – lower taxes, for example, rather than spending on education. Thus it is a market-led approach to education with the emphasis on individualism that is favoured by the World Bank.
In a conference paper on the OECD work on knowledge and the knowledge economy (Ásgeirsdóttir 2005, 2) the OECD Deputy Secretary-General, Berglind Ásgeirsdóttir, selected innovation, new technologies, human capital and enterprise dynamics as the pillars upon which the knowledge economy depended. Globalisation, she said, was the ‘driver’ (sic) that influenced these ‘pillars’ and she identified a further four factors ‘research and development’, ‘Internet’, ‘highly skilled’ and ‘multi-national companies’. In a bizarre set of mixed metaphors, she chose the image of a Greek temple to illustrate her remarks, the pillars being those that support the knowledge economy. It may be a step too far to conclude that Ásgeirsdóttir believes the knowledge economy is a sacred institution, but the imagery has certainly achieved the status of a liturgical language for adherents of the knowledge economy concept. All of the above terms, together with others from her speech, are the stock-in-trade of politicians, businesspeople, expert groups and commentators in Ireland where, since the 1990s a move has been afoot to shift away from industrial methods of production and towards that of a knowledge-based economy.
In this context, in 1996, Forfás2, the Irish government think-tank, identified the move from
‘natural resource endowment’ to ‘knowledge and skills’ as a prerequisite for future competitive advantage and it recommended that a strategy be put in place in Ireland to support the development of an information society (Forfás 1996, 2.13). Subsequently, in language redolent of the OECD knowledge-based economy publications, the Forfás annual report 1998 outlined the details of a Technology Foresight exercise which dealt with the matching of technology development to national needs. This exercise was prompted by the belief that ‘global competition and economic development will be driven by unprecedented growth in knowledge in many areas of technology’ (Forfás 1998, n.p). Thus, in line with ‘modern OECD economies’ and conscious of the place of knowledge and technology in the economy, Forfás recommended that Ireland should reposition itself as an internationally acknowledged knowledge-based economy (Forfás 1998, n.p.) and with this move a new relationship between education, human capital, the economy and the social partners was established. An examination of the Forfás documents reveals the genetic code of OECD policies, and this thesis will argue that much of Irish government education policy is founded upon principles laid down by the OECD.
The new theory recognises that ‘the diffusion of knowledge is just as significant as its creation’ (OECD 1996, 24). Education therefore, is crucial to an economy’s ability to diffuse innovations throughout society and maximise the import of technology in people’s lives. The Irish think- tank absorbed this lesson well. Forfás argued that:
It is of key importance that the increased emphasis on such development is reflected by the education system in the development of effective, modern and meaningful STM education provision in schools. (Forfás/ICSTI 1999a, 2.3)
Ball observes that the discourse of knowledge economy has privileged innovation as the ‘only comparative advantage…a nation can attain’ (Ball 2008, 19). Foucault made a similar observation in 1979, adding that neoliberals see innovation as the income of human capital, a return on the set of investments at the level of man himself (Foucault 2008b, 231). Forfás marked out innovation as the key to international competitiveness and throughout the 1990s stressed the need for Irish-owned industry to reposition, innovate and compete, to adapt itself to a changing competitive environment (Forfás 1996a; b; Forfás/ICSTI 1999a). Ironic then that
2 Forfás is the policy advisory board for enterprise, trade, science, technology and innovation. It was
the so-called ‘boom’ between 2000 and 2008 was really an old-style bricks-and-mortar housing bubble predicated upon over-production of housing units and ultimately ‘ghost estates’.
The perception of Forfás, based on international trends, was that major changes in education and training were needed in order to create a skilled and innovative workforce that would meet the requirements of a successful, knowledge-driven enterprise sector (Forfás 1996, 5.12). The understanding was that demand for new skills was increasing, that the nature of these skills was changing rapidly, that new patterns of employment would mean that people would be required to re-skill many times during their working lives, and consequently that lifelong access to education and training would be necessary for all workers.
In contrast to the World Bank’s vision of future education which favoured ‘the market and individualism’ (Robertson 2005, 135) as the means for developing knowledge and skills, the proposed Irish model was more in line with that of the OECD and concerned itself with human capital formation. Present state investment in primary, secondary and tertiary education was to continue. However, it was recommended that the State should invest in education and training in consultation with other agencies, the partners in education. Industry was to become a major partner in the process and in this capacity it was to have ‘a role to play in supporting change in education through giving practical help and advice to second and third-level institutions’ (Forfás 1996, 5.18). The State was to have ‘an important enabling role’ in this undertaking by ‘removing obstacles and preferentially directing resources towards institutions that are seen to be responsive’ (Forfás 1996, 5.18). The conception of government as having an ‘enabling role’, rather than an active or constructive one, is central to neoliberalism. The involvement of industry in education was to become a prominent feature in the discourse surrounding mathematics, in particular its influence would be felt at second level where the Institution of Engineers of Ireland (IEI) positioned itself as the giver of ‘practical help and advice’, and the government, in its ‘enabling role’ granted it significant influence. Engineers of all persuasions permeate both the straight manufacturing sector and the ‘knowledge-based’ sector in a striking way. However before analysing the involvement of IEI in the discourse (chapter 6) I will look a little further at how Irish education policy became focused on science, technology and mathematics and how its course was directed by the ambition to become a successful knowledge-based economy and how in the process it fell under the influence of the global field of education policy.
2.8 Benchmarking
The question of how Ireland should focus its education system in order to facilitate the development of a national science and technology infrastructure was addressed by the Irish Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (ICSTI), a sub-board of Forfás. In 1998 ICSTI initiated an international benchmarking study of science, technology and mathematics (STM) education in Ireland, Scotland, Finland, Malaysia and New Zealand. Benchmarking in the study was defined as ‘the use of systematic methods to compare yourself with others and find better ways to do your work’ (Forfás/ICSTI 1999a, 4). To this end, ICSTI contracted the multi- national ‘audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory service’ Deloitte & Touche (Deloitte 2011, website) who, under the direction of the steering group, developed and administered an extensive questionnaire from a list of benchmarking parameters.
Based on the presupposition that the evolution of countries into knowledge-based economies and societies is critically dependent on their education systems (Forfás/ICSTI 1999a, Foreward), from the outset the survey unsurprisingly focused on countries where this presupposition appeared to be demonstrably true. It choose, for example, countries where STM education was moving from ‘talk and chalk’ to experiential methods with an emphasis on developing problem-solving skills and learning-by-doing (Forfás/ICSTI 1999a, 3). It attempted to formulate a systematic way of describing the qualities that made up the education system of a knowledge-based economy. Its assumptions about ‘knowledge’ and what the qualities were that created it were not interrogated. If the ICSTI engaged in a prolonged meditation on the nature of ‘knowledge’, ‘economy’, ‘society’ or ‘education’ it is nowhere evident in the survey. It appears to have adopted a standard set of assumptions and procedures which trivialise psychological and philosophical explorations of knowledge. Its purpose was to describe the education system in Ireland and that of ‘other successful knowledge-based economies’ under a common set of benchmarking parameters, to raise awareness of STM education and to provide an evidential basis for advice to the education establishment (Forfás/ICSTI 1999a, 29). The decision to develop Ireland as a knowledge-based economy had been made and thus ICSTI compiled its policy-based evidence. The fundamental assumption is that STM education is ‘for’ the economy.
With its findings ICSTI aimed to ‘assist government and its agencies, teaching professionals and representatives of parents in making the difficult decisions required to ensure effective STM education provision in Ireland’ (Forfás/ICSTI 1999a, 4). Yet there is no discussion regarding what these ‘difficult decisions’ might be or indeed why they are perceived as being difficult, but the concentration on ‘effective’ STM education is an agreed prerequisite for the future direction of education here. The transformation of a country into a knowledge-based economy or knowledge-based society (no distinction is made between the terms) depends, the report claims, on the provision by its education system of adequate levels of scientific, technological and mathematical literacy. Proficiency in these literacies will prepare individuals ‘to fulfil active and critical roles as citizens and to make well-founded decisions on issues affected by science and technology’ (Forfás/ICSTI 1999a, 28), contributing to the success of the knowledge-based economy/society in global terms.
Thus, I contend that the conditions, under which the new discourse in Ireland relating to mathematics education was constructed were of an economic nature, focusing on the shift towards a certain kind of economic development and the expected role of citizens in pursuit of national economic goals. Under these conditions a number of issues were introduced by the ICSTI survey which were subsequently taken up by other agents in the discourse and used as tools or evidence in the construction of the problem of mathematics in Irish education or, in some cases, studiously overlooked. The way in which the issues were used varied and depended to a large extent on the objectives of the agents involved.
Ultimately the survey represents a point of inflection in the development of STM education in Ireland with a recommended shift from the philosophical pedagogical position of ‘teaching for learning’ to ‘teaching for doing’, a move from ‘fact-based teaching’ to ‘problem-based learning’.
On foot of its concerns that Ireland may not be in a position to take a full part in the emerging knowledge-based society the ICSTI made its recommendations to Government, the education sector, the business sector and others on improving science technology and mathematics education, in second level schools. Its produced a statement on Science in Second Level Schools (Forfás/ICSTI 1999b) in which it highlighted three key issues identified by the benchmarking survey: how to develop and implement STM education policy on a relevant time-scale; how to recruit, train and retain high quality STM teachers, particularly in the physical sciences and
mathematics; and how best to teach and assess STM (Forfás/ICSTI 1999b). The latter two issues of teacher training and teaching and assessment of STM are very much in evidence in my analysis of the official and legitimate voices relating to the development of the mathematics curriculum and are strong features of the discourse. However, the development and implementation of policy ‘on a relevant time-scale’ is more subtly applied. It is probable that the application of a ‘relevant’ time-scale may help to explain why concerns raised by the Irish Maths Teachers Association (IMTA) (examined in detail in Chapter 7) relating to the time-scale under which Project Maths3 was being implemented were dismissed by the Department of
Education in the Spring of 2010 (DES 2010a; IMTA 2010).
2.9 Conclusion
In this chapter we have considered education as a political act and seen that the neoliberal discourse in relation to education policies must be read as part of a complex of political and economic relations. The spread of new technologies and the development of knowledge-based economies have resulted in a re-examination of the role of education in preparing young people for working life. We have seen how the purpose of schooling has been altered, schools have become the producers of human capital where demands for new skills are affecting the type of human capital that schools are expected to produce. We have considered how the pressure from the concept of the knowledge-based economy is dictating the type of knowledge that should be taught. We considered the labour market for which students are being prepared where the ‘reserve army of the unemployed’ is always in evidence and lifelong learning is really self- funded retraining for the precariat. We briefly looked at the language of neoliberalism with its subversion of common words which aids the downward percolation of subjection together with its establishment of the common sense.
The concept of ‘knowledge economy’ appears in the vast majority of documents that will be examined in this thesis and permeates the narrative of mathematics education policy, yet it is rarely if ever interrogated in Ireland. Consequently, it was necessary to examine the concept as
3 Project Maths is an NCCA designed mathematics syllabus for junior cycle and senior cycle in second
level schools. A pilot scheme involving 24 schools which commenced in 2008 runs until 2013. The main project was rolled out nationwide in 2010 and will involve a phased introduction of 5 strands of mathematics which will be completed in 2015.
it was localised. This chapter traced the imprint of the OECD in the Irish approach and tracked its use in a government-commissioned ‘benchmarking’ exercise. Finally it identified some issues from these early documents that will reappear in later chapters and assume greater importance. In the next chapter we will examine the role of what Ball calls ‘legitimate voices’ in the shaping of educational discourse where many of the themes raised in this chapter will reappear.