Page 27 - Looking_after_school

1. Today's discourse: why should the student be at the center of education?

ing education and numerous other institutions, went hand in hand.
While the organisation of the private sector is based on the principles
of the free market (ownership, competition, choice…), the public sector
is mostly based on a bureaucratic model of organisation. This means
that public service, in view of equal service for all citizens, is organised
by uniform rules and procedures, and is structured hierarchically with
vertical relations of accountability.
From the middle of the 1980s, and especially during the 1990s, this
bureaucratic organisation of the public sector was no longer taken
for granted and became a matter of serious debate. Fuelled by the
economic crisis and inspired by neoliberal restructuring theories such
as Public Choice Theory and Transactional Cost Theory, policy makers
began to problematise the fundamental premises of bureaucratic
organisation (see also Olssen et al., 2004). The debate closes in on
the financing of the public sector in so far as it would take up too
much of the private sector. Public service is also criticised for barely
attending to the needs of citizens (and even serving mostly itself). The
criticism towards an absence of mechanisms to control the effects and
the efficiency of public services, and of the way that time and money
are spent, should also be viewed in this light. Next to this economic
criticism, the strongly developed public sector and welfare state are
criticised out of worry for an all-too paternalistic government. There is,
for instance, the question of whether the offered services (especially in
health care and poverty prevention) actually succeed in helping those
that need them the most (e.g., the Matthew effect), and the observation
that a system with extensive social security may create citizens that
become too dependent on those services.
This problematisation is at work all over the world. For many coun-
tries this has caused a thorough reform of the public sector, including
education and the central administration of higher and lower govern-
ments. We must situate the umbrella term New Public Management
in this context. This concerns the reform of the public sector and its
administration, starting from the premise that models, principles, and
forms of organisation from the private sector are well-suited to organ-
ise the efficient and effective provision of public services (Hood, 1989).
Of course, this reform movement reaches quite far: from privatisation
of numerous services (such as public transport or mail delivery), to

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