Auditorías e Inspecciones

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equality and intellectual emancipation enables further exploration of what Foucault (1991) [L3] described as rules of ‘management, ethos, ethics and practice of self' that are preferable to ideological positioning. Rancière’s work questions educational assumptions. These, I suggest impact on the conceptual design of Widening Participation. These include the notions of cultural capital and habitus of Bourdieu for example, whereby Widening Participation serves to disrupt or investigate the habitus of groups of society. This approach was argued for by Minter (2006) [WPJA20] to fill an apparent a gap in Widening Participation theory and this idea resurfaces within the work of Burke (2012) [WPSB03]. However, the approach taken within this chapter is to identify the neoliberalising of Widening Participation as an educational principle through these critical lenses. It also complements Alvesson’s (2013) [L2] critique of Educational Fundamentalism in that Rancière does not start from an

assumption of the innate “good” of Higher Education. Utilising what Rancière described as Stultification, three particularly interesting characteristics of

Educational Fundamentalism are further understood: 1.) ‘Human beings can be formed - education and institutions create the right kind of people.’ 2) ‘Certain people may be defined as poorly educated. We should ensure that they can benefit from initiatives to remedy this negative situation’ (Alvesson, 2013, p.75) [L2]. Finally, 3) ‘Education is the solution to a great many problems, from unemployment to international competitive capability’ (p. 76).

Rancière (1991) [L3] presents the idea of Stultification as his identification of how learning is conceptualised and facilitated. This idea is exemplified by Rancière in the conceptual educator who is ‘the more efficacious because he is knowledgeable, enlightened, and of good faith. The more he knows, the more evident to him is the distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignorant ones’ (p.7). Like Alvesson (2013), Rancière highlights this action of performing in ‘good faith’ linking potentially well meaning but misinformed actions that are serving some other purpose. This construction of a teacher is also part of what Rancière links to a more traditional understanding of how learning is facilitated and describes it as a myth. This is the myth of pedagogy, one that is ‘the parable of a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones...’ (p. 6) and that stultification arrives from ‘the principle of explication’ (p. 7). Rancière challenges the traditional constructions of the teacher who is

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committed to providing a journey from novice, without knowledge, skill or

understanding to competent, emancipated intellectuals. Rancière suggests that the Master-Apprentice model of teaching that was disavowed in much

educational practice has been replaced by a practice that further reinforces a power dynamic, albeit in a different form, between student and teacher rather than equalise it. Importantly, this power dynamic is concealed within practices of superficial equality.

The reinforcing of power dynamics is suggested through the use of the word stultify as a translation of abrutir. According to the original translators note (Rancière 1991, p.7), it evokes the idea of ‘numbing and deadening’ and is rooted in the ‘mediating intelligence of the master that relays the printed intelligence of written words to the apprentice’s’ (p. 9). Rancière suggests that this mediating act in teaching is ‘pedagogical stultification’, that which imposes ‘imaginary distance’ between the teacher and the student that is never

bridgeable. Stultification will occur ‘whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another’ (p. 13). This imaginary distance occurs when learning is understood to take place between those that know and those that do not and it then places emancipation as something to be worked towards, over time. Rancière

proposes approaches that do not try to bridge an intellectual distance. Instead, the focus should be on engaging with the Will to intellectual emancipation not techniques that give the appearance of emancipation. Simply put, this focuses on how much an individual wishes to learn rather than how to make them learn better.

Rancière's position here is interesting because of the way in which it

emphasises the motivation and interest of the individual and how a teacher engages with that rather than the teacher attempting to 'fill in' through

pedagogical techniques the gaps in an individual's knowledge. This notion of distance between intellects also reflects the work of Watts (2006) [WPJA35]. Watts utilised Ricouer’s golden rule of justice to identify a utilitarianism present in approaches to Widening Participation practice, research and

conceptualisation and that to become an emancipated intellectual requires the individuals’ sacrifice of their own milieu. This was described sociologically by Alheit (1999, p. 71 quoted in Minter, 2006, p. 255) [WPJA02, WPJA20] who suggested ‘[T]hey come to realise that distinction is something beyond mere

142 titles’.

In Rancière’s work [L3], the relationship between the Will (to learn, to become emancipated) and intellectual domination is highlighted through the

identification that the only way out of an oppressive structure is through what is provided by the oppressive structure itself. This, I suggest is that which

Alvesson (2013, p. 18) [L2] articulates as Illusion Tricks, i.e. ‘conveying images and ideas that give the impression of something positive: progress, politically correct values, general rationality, and adaptive ability’. It emerges in Rancière’s [L3] idea, where ‘”the dominated” posited as unable of themselves to emerge from their own modes of thinking and being which the system of domination has assigned to them. It ‘works’ by being transmitted from those who possess it to those who do not’ (Pelletier, 2009, p. 3) [L3]. This could be further understood as the generation of Human Capital, i.e. that which has an exchange-value within a market model. This is reiterated in Pelletier’s (2009) [L3] analysis of Rancière’s educational philosophy. In particular, Pelletier identifies traditional concepts of intellectual emancipation as knowledge transfer from the teacher to the student, which is the antithesis of Rancière’s position. Rancière's position promotes an assumption of students' ability to learn, rather than pedagogical practices that are constructed on an assumption of students' difficulty in learning. In addition the 'myth of pedagogy' that Rancière identifies can be linked with a neoliberal context. Pelletier describes this as ‘Emancipation, within such a scenario, is a question of knowledge: it is constituted by knowing the world in a way which transcends a subjective perspective rooted in the system of domination’ (Pelletier, 2009, p. 3) [L3]. In other words, intellectual

emancipation is constructed through the power of the prevailing political paradigm. Rancière promotes subverting this through a greater understanding of the basis of social relations between learner and teacher rather than a

transaction of knowledge via various pedagogical techniques that are generated through the wants of (in this case) a neoliberal ideology. This could have

particular influence on understanding Widening Participation, in particular reiterating the social relations as a foundation within interventional activity rather than the types of knowledge needed to progress.

143 (2009, p. 7) [L3] as Rancière’s identification of

‘[A] temporal issue; the end-point of a process of gradual reduction in present inequality, as people become aware of how things really are. This therefore can present illusions of equality when an individual undergoes the correct form of knowledge acquisition to contribute to the Knowledge Economy. In opposition to this, Rancière’s argument is that there is no other means of achieving equality than to assume it, to affirm it, to have it as one’s

epistemological starting point, and to then systematically verify it’ (Ibid). Here, Pelletier articulates that Rancière is repositioning equality of intellectual emancipation as the equality needing to be assumed. The dominance of intellect that Rancière suggests is not necessarily a conscious act yet it is one of disciplinary power. Intellectual emancipation, for Rancière is maintained through the relationship between will and intelligence – emancipation occurs when intelligence obeys ‘only itself even while the will obeys another will...’ (1991, p. 13) [L3]. This, he later explains, is not an issue of ‘proving that all intelligence is equal. It’s seeing what can be done under that supposition’ (p. 46). Likewise, ‘equality is not given, nor is it claimed; it is practiced, it is verified’ (p. 137). Some of the normative assumptions made regarding Higher Education and Widening Participation position those participants by their identification as Widening Participation subjects through characteristics such as ethnicity, class or postcode.

This has further currency when linked back to the normative assumptions

identified within a critique of Educational Fundamentalism. Alvesson (2013) [L2] invokes a Foucauldian approach in identifying the process of education

‘indicates normality...individuals adopt and subordinate themselves to the predominant standards for how people should be, think, and feel’ (p. 110). The importance of this, for Alvesson, is when Higher Education ‘functions as a broad norm’ with the result that an Educational Fundamentalism closes ‘major parts of the labour market...to people who do not have at least 12-15 years of school education...Formal education has monopolized what is regarded as legitimate entry to many, if not most, jobs apart from those with the lowest status’ (p. 111). This, for Alvesson, produces an inherent marginalization of the individual who is not ‘adapted to the school system...Hence, education fundamentalism is a

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source of the problem that is defined as inadequate education, and

simultaneously promises a solution for virtually all kinds of problems’ (p. 112). Combining both Alvesson (2013) [L2] and Rancière (1991) [L3] would suggest then that alternative learning would not be demonstrated through the

accumulation of skills, but through the emerging intellect that was able to exhibit the Will of their own intellectual growth. In other words, it is how the Will to intellectual growth is facilitated within a learning context not what is being learnt that becomes the focus of the teacher and the idea of intellectual growth as perpetuated through one intellects’ imposition on another is removed. This does not suggest that educators should ignore difference, but difference is a starting assumption. Intellectual emancipation that is focused on the Will to intellectual emancipation could produce a different environment through which individual’s engage with learning. It is here that I believe that future applications of this concept could look to notions of informal learning. This idea, importantly, does not signal a regression whereby discourse around deprivation or other political identifiers is removed. Instead, equality relating to these identifiers is not worked towards through a temporal journey of intellectual emancipation.

Through the lens of Stultification [L3] the concept of Widening Participation can be seen as a mode of production that reinforces a temporal notion of a

continuing distance between those that know and those that do not. It impacts on the way in which we understand pedagogical activity that responds to the needs of a cohort demographic that is supposed to be 'widened'. In reality, how much this cohort demographic has been widened is questionable. This can be applied in another way that also suggests that Widening Participation can be an act of Stultification. Lazzarato (2011) [L3] describes a temporal distance in the form of debt, which is promoted by the Debt Economy. If Widening Participation is promoting progression into a commodified Higher Education, it is also

promoting the taking on of a debt that the individual must take on. This is generally rationalised through the argument of graduate premium, i.e. a graduate has higher earning potential through their Higher Education. This temporal power, however, is significant for a discussion on intellectual

emancipation for, following Nietzsche, Lazzarato suggests that the taking on of a debt ‘allow capitalism to bridge the gap between present and future’ (p. 46). This enables the power relations to obtain the ‘future by objectivising it’.

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Somewhat self-evidently, this is performed in current contexts through the burden of tuition fees a student must take on to achieve a Higher Education, and would be, according to Lazaretto’s idea, at the same time, succumbing to the burden of a temporal debt, the future. The rationale is that the loan

‘represents a generative process...money that generates money’ (p. 47). In this case, the money being generated is not on interest from the loan but from the apparent benefit or graduate premium. This is what Maskell and Robinson (2002, p. 8) [HESB15] describe as the Dearing effect:

‘Dearing says...graduates benefit society as a whole, by earning more after tax and by paying more tax. But economists also suppose that graduates are not only more productive themselves but make the non-graduates around them...more productive too: in the phraseology of economics, there are

beneficial ‘externalities’ or ‘spillovers’ to higher education, what a non- economist might think of as ‘crumbs’ (as in ‘from a rich man’s table’)’.

Here, Maskell and Robinson (2002) [HESB15] establish that the burden of debt is socially compounded by a moral imperative to benefit not only the individual but also more generally the individual’s context. An individual within neoliberal ideology can be persuaded that it is their right to take on this debt of Higher Education because the benefit to society outweighs the financial debt itself. It secures the future debt of the individual both financially and temporally within the Debt Economy that Lazzarato (2011) [L3] describes. Therefore, Widening Participation can be perceived in this way as an act of Stultification in that it promotes debt in exchange for social justice. The Stultification occurs through the distance between debt and social justice that is disguised within Neoliberal ideology through a promotion of an alternative being a drain on the state. I now develop the notion of how Stultification can occur in both temporal and physical examples taken from concepts of Widening Participation. This is to draw out examples of how a seemingly positive act can be functioning as a form of oppression guised as intellectual emancipation.