Chapter 12: The Paradox and Politics of Disadvantage: Narrativizing Critical Moments of Discourse and Pedagogy

Amartya Sen (1999), winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote in Development as Freedom that “focusing on human freedoms contrasts with narrower views of development, such as identifying development with the growth of gross national product, or with the rise of personal incomes, or with industrialization, or with technological advance, or with social modernization” (p. 3). In attempting to refocus the intent and purpose of social development away from how it has been characterized in contemporary times, Sen holds us to account, ethically, for our participation in a globalizing project in which we are all implicated, and yet whose effects we do not fully appreciate. Such “effects” are ideological, in that they operate at the level of structures and interstices, and are encoded within complicities of normative systems of human relations. They are, consequently, inherently moral. What are the implications for education, in general, and mathematics education, in particular, when industrialization and economic growth are the foremost policy objectives of a nation state? I will explore that issue in this chapter from a philosophical standpoint and apply the issue to the development of mathematics curriculum in a setting within South Africa.

For Sen, human rights and freedoms of all kinds should lead technological, scientific, and economic “progress,” rather than become pleasant side effects of these “development instruments.” In his view, human rights and social and political freedoms (and I would include ecological rights) are the necessary constituent components of development. As Sen would maintain, capitalism’s rapid spread has been at the expense of much, as well as many who are often left marginalized and voiceless in the process. Capitalism has failed to provide the alluring “rewards” for millions of people living in abject poverty who have little agency in relation to the hierarchy of access it has produced and which it serves to reproduce.

The assumption that scientific and economic advancement will necessarily achieve the objectives of liberty and justice “freely” or “naturally” is necessarily “dangerous.” However, our most widely shared understandings about what constitutes the “common good” for all humanity are constructed on the basis of this assumption. Importantly, the political complexity of the association between modern scientific industrialization and that of human and environmental wellbeing is often lost. Troubling the ideological underpinnings of the large-scale development model leads us to question what this “advancement” is towards, how it is “better” (and for whom), what is lost, what is gained, at what price, and what the ends are. From a pedagogical perspective, some important questions follow: What implications does the global model of development have for the design of curricula, for the creation of educational structures and environments, for ways of choosing to engage with and construct participants within learning communities, and to what ends? Is justice a nicety to or necessity of education? Does it have an intrinsic or extrinsic relationship to it?

Economic development has become the ongoing hegemonic mechanism that sustains the neo-colonial project on a global(izing) scale. Ideological assumptions underwriting the global project of development operate to monitor, inform, and normalize accepted progressive discourses on education (Skovsmose & Valero, 2001). They measure and control meanings on how success and failure is constituted, on what is valued as knowledge, on who has access, on who “they” are, on what constitutes good educational practice, on what the aims are for educational practice locally and globally. I argue that the way in which “success” and “disadvantage” in educational contexts is constituted is critically related to the social identities through which participants are differentially positioned (Swanson, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006). This critical relationship is most dominantly informed by specific assumptions about what is “good” for “a learner.” This “learner,” within the educational stream of our progressive modernization project, is someone who most likely has been demographied and psychologized, but also, ironically, has been dehistoricized and decontextualized from community and environment.

Conceptualizations of “the learner” are most often driven by dominant Western educational discourses that normalize competition and draw on individualistic ideological investments globally. These prevailing discourses enable life opportunities for individuals within certain valued groups, while delimiting opportunities for others. In so doing, they reify dominant cultural formations over localized ones, and these dominant discourses become the master print for entry or denial of access. Life opportunities are, however, beyond a question, of mere “access.” Normalized assumptions inhabit questions of what is valued, what is conserved, and what is foreclosed, in terms of being and imagining within other frames of reference. The ways in which these ideological assumptions impact on the recognition and validation of indigenous, generational, or localized ways of knowing and being, and how they permit or enclose imaginative possibilities for communities to be otherwise, are all interconnected and relate directly to the (false) promise of the ends of freedom and (misconception of) wellbeing through the instrumental and material means of techno-scientific and economic “progress.”

The promise of greater “wealth” and national strength through participation in global competition is thwarted by endemic power differentials between nations and populations, situated within hierarchical “social divisions of labor.” Thus, capitalism could be seen to reveal a “paradoxical and schizophrenic” nature (see Deleuze and Guattari, 2005) in its reliance on the “winner and loser” game-playing that is recontextualized (Bernstein, 2000; Dowling, 1998) at the level of community. It is in that sense that capitalism is said to perform a “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) on racialized, gendered and socio-psychologically pathologized bodies (such as socially constructed learners) within various educational contexts (such as classrooms), discourses, and practices (of, for example, school mathematics) in diverse locations across the world. Increasing neo-liberalization of institutions and the global modernization agenda has set the terms of global economic and social participation by increasing the monitoring and regulation of individuals, groups, and targeted communities. Such measures serve to perpetuate the global neo-colonial project. The current conception of development, framed, as it is, as “economic progress” within the neo-colonial project, has become a “Truth” that tolerates little resistance, that excludes a range of other possible meanings and ways of engagement, and that attempts to silence alternative voices. The more discourses on development become increasingly foreclosed, in these terms, the greater freedom and the possibilities of freedom become enclosed.