Mediation is the Message

Question: Which clues lead you to that impression? Why can we say that we are going into a new period of mediation?

Because I think what becomes very clear with the marketization of education in England is that there are severe limits to how far, for example, business will want to go in running schooling. I think business will probably want to build the buildings and make the profits from leasing out the buildings. So it will manage the buildings possibly in public education. I don´t think it will want to involve itself in the hugely contestive area of education, in the distribution of education. It would be just a too dangerous front line to get into. So my own sense is there will be limits to how far education is actually marketized. And once those limits are realized, the professional groups will have to be brought back in, and allowed back into the room, because after all, they are the ones who know best how to do this. So I think the moment of overreach where such groups thought they could do everything, they could do not just business but culture, that moment of overreach is over. And in terms of culture, much of cultural production, I believe, or some of it anyhow, will be handed back to the professional groups, who will have more degrees of autonomy than they (...). Again, this statement is driven by desire as much as any empirical proof, but I think I sense that happening. Domination doesn´t normally go on, on an everyday basis, that would be very hard to stand. And only works in these moments of triumphalism, and it has clearly been a huge moment of history triumphalism. That´s passing away now. So I think we´re moving into a mediation period, where all of the things I´ve talked about become possible.

Question: Perhaps we can think that each cycle leads to some expected results and some unexpected results. And the unexpected results open the new cycle , let's say, the mediation cycle.

Yes, absolutely right.

Question: And what do you think is the role of curriculum theory and the situation of curriculum theory within this period?

Again, this is my empirical reading and it goes against my desires. My desires are that curriculum theory will remain vivid and vital and vigorous. My reading of it, is that it has becomes marginalized and meaningless. And one of the reasons for that, I think, is that it was a space. The argument of the curriculum as a space where arguments about inclusion or social exclusion could take place, arguments about pedagogy could take place. Where, in a situation of democratic schooling, really important debates could place. If you move from that period of democratic schooling into the period narrowing, vigorously partitioned separated, segmented marketplaces of schooling, where there are some schools for the rich and some for the poor and some for the middle class, the argument of the curriculum is a much less central distributional argument than it was in the 60´s and 70´s. Curriculum theory has been repositioned as a set of marginal arguments about inclusion and exclusion. So the big arguments are arguments about the nature of schooling and the distribution of schooling, not about the nature and distribution of curriculum. I spent 20, 25 years writing in curriculum theory. But most of my last 10 years has been making that move from a specific interest in curriculum into a wider understanding of the new patterns of schooling emerge. So, with regret, I would say the curriculum theory is likely to be less interesting. With the new reforms you've got a lot of writing about implementation. I talked about implementationis my opium, which is implementation is short-sightedness among a lot of English theorists. And that´s just implementing what has been decided as structural readjustment.. That´s not what curriculum theory should be about, but it´s what it´s become. It is no longer a field that deploys major arguments about a nation´s schooling as it once was. So I am disappointed and distressed about the state curriculum theory, but one moves on. It was a central mileu, it is now a marginal mileu.

Question: In our conversations you use the word "battle'. You were speaking about the battle of curriculum, and the battle of democratic education. And since you speak about battle in curriculum, you speak about theory battle...

It´s back to this issue about passion or objectivity. I think that one of the things that most disappoints me the most about intellectuals is the kind of dissected, dispassionate withdraw from the world which is almost a plastic common-sense image of the intellectual, as someone who sits on the computer 14 hours a day and (hits) in his theories, and never goes outside, and fights that battle just in a textual way. And I used the word battle again. I think it´s a much more passionate game, I mean I think what keeps us alive as human beings and afterwards intellectuals, human being first, intellectuals second, is a passionate engagement with the issues. That´s what puts the light in people´s eyes. And you look around at any colleague, and there´s an absence of fire. Is that true or not?

Question: Listening to you I realize that I have thought about "battle" in a different direction and I ask myself about the meaning of what you call the process of refraction...

Refraction really, it´s in a sense another word talking about mediation, isn´t it?. So let´s give an example of refraction, a global example. Perhaps we can give a concrete example. So, the big global force is coming to Argentina. And they legislate a number of changes that Argentinean education must adopt, a number of reforms in the new government, promises through the new minister that the new reforms will be put in place in Argentina. That´s the beginning of the promise, the beginning of structural readjustment. The promise is made, the deal is made. The money comes forward. That´s only the beginning though. The process of refraction or mediation led by. At some point the agreed structural readjustment has to be handed over to ministries, and professionals and intellectuals to be negotiated and battled over. And in that battle, what was an initial intention will be refracted into a so called policy parameters and activities. And in that refraction, there will be a displacement between the original agreed structural readjustment and intentions and the actual policies and activities and parameters that are defined, and in that moment of refraction, in that moment of mediation, in that moment of battle, if you will, between particular forces, that is the moment of understanding. Not the moment of structure intention. And not the moment of final activity, but the battle over interpretation mediation refraction of the original intention. That´s how, that´s the process -in my view- which power goes through when it issues a dominating embark for structural adjustment. That´s the intention, but that´s not what comes out in the end. What comes out in the end changes in each national situation or in each context. For example, if the headmaster of the school drives the same kind of structural readjustment, and he will abolish subjects (or what turns up?), that will be played out differently within each department of the school, each subject, each micro-world inside the school will refract the headmaster´s dominant intervention. And it will be a mediated battled over and it will come out differently. So social life and social activity is always a process of refraction. Not just from one to the other, but through a number of levels. You can go from macro structural adjustment announcements, through to the most minute habitus. And the refraction (…) continue through the various levels. So that the actual habitus which comes out, as you said, you may have a very unintended habitus coming out from a dominant proclamation. Very likely anyway. So the task of the analyst is to understand the process of refraction. If you will, the series of battles and micropolitics that go on after a structural intervention. That´s our task. Not to understand the structural intervention only, but to really understand processes of social refraction.

Question: I guess that the use of an idea like "refraction" can be apreciated only if you ground it in a certain context.

It´s about the difference between curriculum as I understand it in spanish speaking countries and in England. The reason for the celebration of curriculum in anglo american world I think is that it´s most powerfully a celebration of the substantial professional authority. Teachers in the 60´s and 70´s in England and America had a very substantial power of refraction, if you will, of mediation. Because they could control large aspects of the curriculum. So, to go back to the macro, mezzo and micro thing on the role of the intellectual, the intellectual was excited by that because here was an example of substantial movement into the areas of policy and structural renegotiations. The teachers were involved and so the theories were celebrated in a sense (of agency). Now that´s different from spanish speaking notions of curriculum, that´s a much more specific definition as a course of study.

Question: Now speaking about curriculum theory is the celebration of, probably, the state …

That´s entirely true, and that´s a crucial point of that. But you see, we talked about coming back and you´ll go out to the circle and you´ll come back to the same point. The anglo american world has now returned to the same point as the spanish world again, which is that now the curriculum is simply a course of study. But, to talk about curriculum is nearly to think about power. And to theorize over curriculum is to theorize on the refraction of power. So we move into a situation of convergence between the spanish speaking and the english speaking world. It´s interesting to think, to see the convergence, the global convergence in spanish speaking and english speaking understandings of curriculum. For a little while anglo american escapes for a wider space which made this a very interesting curriculum theory. Now curriculum returns to one small part of the area. What we´ve got to try and find is an understanding of the world matrix of schooling. Have the bits put together of the patterns of distribution. So we need a theory of school distribution. We need a new distributional theory, a new theory of regulation. Because the game has changed we need to understand the new patterns of regulation and mediation. Putting in place the new marketized matrix of education requires a new kind of analysis to understand these new patterns of regulation and mediation.