In developed Western and Anglophone societies, the space of education has become subjected to an increasing network of disciplining regulation and control. As in the case of Foucault’s (1977) nineteenth-century prisoners controlled by the gaze from the central panopticon, teachers experience their professional lives as under constant surveillance – a surveillance which has been internalized into external constraints. For, alongside an everincreasing growth in affluence and influence of the Western powers, there has come an accompanying anxiety about the capacity to retain and monopolize that power as governments begin to compete within a global market for their national interest. Globalization begins then to exert its pressures on the youngest members of the community on school entry with the push from policy-makers for a highly educated workforce with developed technical competencies. Education has assumed a neoGradgrindian1 face so that what counts as relevant are work-related skills, which always include some version of literacy. Governments seek to accomplish their educational goals through imposed national curriculum strategies that emphasize central regulation, high-stakes testing and overdetermined pathways to accreditation. In England, these strategies are identified with a complexity of prescribed courses of training and professional development, whose aim is to chivvy teachers along predetermined pathways to agreed systems of values. Imposed national programmes (DFEE, 1998; 1999) have led commentators to remark on the disempowerment of the teaching profession through the intensification and proletarianization of their work (Hargreaves, 1994). Michael Fullan gives expression to many teachers’ perceptions of external

pressures in posing the question: ‘What does the outside look like to schools?’ and responding:

Essentially, it is a sea of excessive, inconsistent, relentless demands. Policies are replaced by new ones before they have had a chance to be fully implemented. One policy works at cross-purposes with another one.