ABSTRACT
During the 1980s, Sir Keith Joseph was the UK’s Secretary of State for Education. Known as the ‘mad monk’, 1 Joseph played a central role in the neoliberal transformation of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher, to whom he introduced the works of F.A. Hayek, and was considered to be ‘a Saint or Satan’, 2 depending on one’s political outlook. Joseph’s philosophy of education was informed by his fascination with entrepreneurialism, which he shared with other notable figures of the day such as John Kao of Harvard Business School and the US writer Ayn Rand. Joseph’s biographers, Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett, record Joseph’s admiration for the man or woman who ‘begins with nothing’ and achieves apparently magical success; a ‘mystery’ explored in one of his last speeches where he mused, ‘They do not come because of good education and they do not come of good birth. They do not come because of happy homes or unhappy homes. We do not know how they come . . .’ 3 Joseph’s anticultural theory of entrepreneurialism was curiously at odds with his hatred for Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of ‘natural’ education, which he believed had encouraged twentieth-century teachers ‘to dispense with the structured systems of learning which have been so successful in the past’ and promoted the belief ‘that a permissive society is a civilised society’. 4 In Chapter 2 of this book I discuss the attempt to eradicate progressive education in the UK and North America, and as a prelude to that discussion this current chapter considers the impulse towards that endeavour by asking, ‘Who is this ‘entrepreneur’ so beloved of neoliberals? How is her power non-attributable to her genes, her upbringing or her education, yet potentially nullified by the “permissive society”?’
