12/08/2017
Policy starts with people, not top-down mandates, and people are diverse and changing. Here is a nice expression from Andrew Stables on the need to transcend right wing left wing pulls when designing and thinking about educational policy:
"If we can put aside for a moment what is 'conscious', we can see that all action is a form of interpretation: we re-interpret and re-present a little bit of the world each moment we are alive. It follows that no political or leader can absolutely determine how anyone, or any group, will respond to any policy at any time.
This implies a general policy move towards diversification. However, such a move has more to it than is commonly acknowledged. It is certainly not, for example, simply a matter of replacing right wing politics with left wing politics, of substituting socialism for global capitalism, for it can be argued that there is both a dominant Left and a dominant Right standardizing view in countries such as the UK and the US. In education and related areas, the Right may focus attention on standards, excellence and accountability, the Left on equality, fairness and social justice. In promoting any of these things, it is easy to fall prey to two fallacious assumptions, from a semiotic perspective, the first being that social leaders can bring about what they would like to see, in the form they would like to see it, and the second that social progress is quantifiable. A semiotic perspective runs counter to both these assumptions. Politicians, teachers and others are not able to make whole populations either meet or even aspire to the same standards; there is no argument so to do that will be evenly and uniformly accepted over time, however much a tyrannical regime might appear to be able to effect short-term changes.
Notions of excellence and accountability are, therefore, subject to individual and group variation and cannot be imposed from above. Similarly, equality is not measurable and so, in many forms or senses, is not achievable either. terms such as 'standards' and 'equality' can have considerable explanatory power, but this is always context-dependent"
-'Semiosis and the Myth of Learning'
