ABSTRACT
The organisation of mass education has been a consistent theme of the nation state and a sub-set of recent public sector management discussions, particularly focussed on site or school-based management. These discussions have become more pointed in the current era of fiscal crisis for the state since public education has traditionally taken so much of the available state budget in Australia. When there is research on schools as organisations, however, it normally focuses on the practices of the principal and teaching staff. Yet the object of the significant organisational feat known as schooling is the movement and control of large numbers of young people, in a restricted space, over intense periods of time. In the processes of governing and organising this institution that most of us treat as 'normal', students are the focus of practices which are often unjust, inequitable, arbitrary, and authoritarian. I do not want to suggest that all practices and organisational features of schools are inhumane, nor that all reformist approaches in the past have been doomed to failure. However, the basic power-related features of the secondary school, I argue, are such that schools cannot yet claim to be ethical institutions that promote justice or caring.
