ABSTRACT
This final chapter highlights the contributions of the philosophical-analytical methodology with a commitment to a systematic interdisciplinary investigation of educational discourse in interpreting empirical material. The specific aim of the research was to examine how an ability-driven system can function as a major mechanism through which inequality of educational opportunities is transmitted and maintained. To go beyond commentary and critique in examining educational inequality, and more importantly, to challenge the ‘ideological’ premises of government policies, a critique of the language of policy was necessary. This analytic framework is also developed to examine the way metaphors are put to work as part of the neo-liberal economic discourse and which legitimate inequality and differential access to resources. The social function of the education policy analysed is to transmit a neo-liberal system of principles by which different categories of learners are produced, and the kind of knowledge and structural access they are permitted.
