Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Theses

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    Re-engineering education in the shadow of the future: Examining national policy frameworks in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore
    Crome, Jennifer Susan ( 2022)
    Abstract As a comparative policy study, the thesis explores how practices in education policy making in Australia, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ((HKSAR) – referred to throughout the thesis as Hong Kong) and Singapore, three advanced regional economies, work to re-engineer education in the shadow of the future. A policy sociology approach is taken to examine how education policy is used discursively and influenced by power, regimes of truth, acts of governmentality and biopolitics to administer and shape individuals and societies. Additionally, the thesis investigates the ways in which policy making for education is influenced by a country’s culture and history, globalisation, economic needs, and neoliberal agendas in order to construct the contributing subject-citizen. The sites chosen for analysis, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore, were part of a broader study of education landscapes in the Asia Pacific region in a global childhood’s project (see Lee et al., 2023; Yelland et al., 2020). All three sites, subject to regional and global flows, have undertaken schooling reform in order to address wider societal and political needs. Moreover, the improvement and restructuring of schooling in the three sites has been in response to notions of crises or radically shifting times, and these presses have been used as an opportunity for policy reform. The thesis begins with an interrogation of the key policy documents, political speeches and authoritative statements that provided explicit direction to the education sector and launched education policy reform in the three locations. The analysis of policy texts also includes insights from social semiotics as education policy makers around the world increasingly employ a range of modalities and make use of options for dynamic and visually appealing presentation of information and ideas to represent education and its attendant goals. Additionally, the thesis examines the responses of the Singaporean and Australian media to the 2018 PISA results, along with the commentary by policy makers that made its way into newspaper articles and discourse. Finally, the thesis investigates the ways in which policy makers and politicians used the COVID 19 pandemic crisis as an opportunity to reinforce political agendas and to justify new technologies of governance. In particular, the thesis provides new insights into the ways in which policy making functions in the service of broader goals that idealise learner-citizens in ways that align with policy agendas, cultural values and the best interest of national futures to ensure the current and future economy is perpetuated and protected. The three key findings of the thesis are: a) the policies in all three locations reflect the national imaginaries of what the youngest citizens should look like including their capacities, attitudes, beliefs, and capabilities, b) education policy in the high performing education systems of Hong Kong and Singapore have shifted towards constructing more multidimensional learner-citizens than previous policy iterations have allowed for, and c) differently configured education systems in the Asia Pacific region discursively employed policy rhetoric to rationalise and justify national reform agendas with varying levels of success. The findings of this work underscore that reform tacitly reiterates ideological narratives concerned with education’s purposes and potential to primarily produce workers with the skills needed for global economic success and the pursuit of nationalist agendas. However, it is recommended that these ideological narratives must be challenged, and that policy makers should instead look to the intrinsic purposes of education and the opportunity education offers for genuine transformation. Indeed, returning to Foucault’s (1980) theorisations of power and its capillary nature, the prospect for citizens to collectively reject their subject positions and push back on the neoliberal discourses that dominate is entirely possible.