ABSTRACT
The first chapter posited a kind of global nexus, linking economic futures with educational outcomes, and establishing a kind of parallel, educational, global equivalent of a currently universal capitalism, constructed via international testing, and country-by-country comparisons portrayed in league tables. But such a framing also provides new ways of defining other, more specific educational discourses and practices, such as the exemplar of sex education viewed through the prism of the ‘pregnant teenager’, herself a similarly arraigned global figure as the UK or US ‘dunce’. The purpose is to unpick a lot more specifically the processes that go into constructing that central figure of the ‘pregnant teenager’ as a creature of blame, and clothing her in statistics, whether expressive of deficiencies or remedies. This time the nexus is more moral than economic, although there are flashes of the latter in various invocations of ‘young mums’, and cycles of deprivation and unemployment. It is an irony that social class is never very far away in these accounts, although it is usually the Great Unmentionable. The other great unmentionable is in some ways sex itself, as a matter of desire and pleasure. We name the government’s discourses on these topics ‘Official Sex’. The ‘pregnant teenager’ is not alone in the sexual nightmare and is connected with a contradictory obsession with sex in the media. As we have discussed elsewhere (Piper and Stronach 2008), the themes are often in bizarre adjacency, and to some extent each occasions the other. To give recurrent examples, the Sun slavered, ‘Here are GIRLS ALOUD fulfilling every man’s St Trinian’s fantasy – in saucy school uniforms’, and elsewhere in the same edition reported that, ‘A gang of internet perverts […] plotted to rape two young sisters [and] were yesterday jailed for a total of 27 years’ (reported in Private Eye, 16 February 2007). Similarly, the Eamon Holmes column (The People, 25 June 2006) disports a scantily-clad girl in a bikini, with the heading ‘Special DDs’. Underneath Holmes offers a diatribe: ‘Expose sex fiends … and other scum.’ Job done.
