ABSTRACT
In my concluding chapter I discuss how this research sought to question ways in which education and literacy have been strategically deployed by government in their policies for the nation-state. I build on analysis from the previous chapters, which focus on the development of whole-of-government security strategies that mobilise the intersection of security, development and education from implied to direct commitments to policies. I begin by using Platonic conceptions about the relationship between the state and the child as a way of reading the historical present. I then draw on evidence of policy work in international contexts, from the United Kingdom and the United States, which represent the emergence of a relation between government and civil society to the logics of security and the formation of literate, economic subjects. My aim is to examine how (a) these policy statements cohere, relate and assemble as intelligible proposals for governing and (b) in what combination the modalities of power are exercised in which the security (dispositif) apparatus constructs the virtues of literacy as security.
My concluding comments introduce the notion that literacy is a multiscalar device for securing civil society. My discussion takes into account the relationship between conceptual logics entailed in the political discourse examined, scales of governance, and the technologies of government employed (Valverde, 2011).
