Page 29 - Looking_after_school

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

problematisation of power held by experts and professionals. In order
to situate this, it is well worth considering the broader policy context.
From the 19th century onwards, there was an alliance of sorts between
state governments and certain professions that (in)directly served a
general interest. The public standing of so called ‘liberal professions’
such as doctors, lawyers, or architects, expresses this clearly; they were
granted a high level of autonomy and self-regulation in exchange for
serving the public good. To be sure, being a teacher is often not con-
sidered to be a liberal profession. Education is often organised as a
professional bureaucracy, which can be understood as a combination
of professionalism (with autonomy and responsibility) and central
regulation (for instance through curriculum and learning standards)
(Mintzberg, 1979). In this respect, teachers belonged at least partly to
the group of experts and professionals that receive a specific statute
through this alliance. The alliance consisted of the delegation of sev-
eral tasks from the government to these professions, thus giving them
greater autonomy, in exchange for those professions taking respon-
sibility to organise and control themselves, always oriented on the
general or public interest. From the 1980s onwards, and in line with the
earlier mentioned neoliberal restructuring theories, the power of these
professionals is continually questioned from the perspective of the free
market. The main point of contention is that experts and professionals,
especially those that operate in the public sector or other state funded
organisations, are driven by self-interest just like everyone else. It is
thus claimed that professionals will try to use policy or bureaucracy
to safeguard their own interests rather than serve the general interest
or that of the citizen as customer. Several strategies in this context are
being criticised for sabotaging optimal market mechanisms, such as:
forms of provider capture (the interest of the provider prevails instead of
that of the consumer), forms of rent-seeking behaviour (resources which
in fact only benefit experts/professionals instead of a more efficient
and effective service) and related forms of ‘professional’ monopolies
(Buchanan & Tullock, 1962).
In summary, the service perspective problematises the current organisa-
tion of education in economic terms. More specifically, this perspec-
tive problematises the professionalism of teachers in so far as they
take their interests (the supply side) to be first a priority before the

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