ABSTRACT
Despite its ideological saturation, recent neo-liberal education policy has been deeply depoliticizing in the sense of reducing properly political concerns to matters of technical efficiency. This depoliticization is reflected in the hegemony of a managerial discourse and the decontestation of terms like “quality” and “effectiveness”, as well as in the apparent consensus around the necessity of particular practices, such as the adoption of “standards” and the implementation of high-stakes testing regimes. The reduction of the political to the technical is not only anti-political but also anti-democratic, with violence often unrecognized behind appeals to consensus, commonsense and “rationality”. This study draws on the work of political theorists like Mouffe and Rancière to critique the depoliticization reflected in recent Australian federal government recent education policy, particularly its notion of an “education revolution” that pre-empts politics through a utopian harmonization of difference and a reduction of the political to the merely technical and instrumental. This chapter concludes with some potential starting points for crossing, or traversing, fantasies in education which, along with a recognition of the inescapability of social and political antagonisms, could serve as a basis for a renewed emphasis on the importance of the political in education policy.
