consumer metaphor versus the citizen metaphor
Order ID 53563633773 Type Essay Writer Level Masters Style APA Sources/References 4 Perfect Number of Pages to Order 5-10 Pages Description/Paper Instructions
consumer metaphor versus the citizen metaphor
Chapter 13
The consumer metaphor versus the citizen metaphor: different sets of roles for students
Johan Nordensvärd
Introduction
The dominant metaphor for the student has lately been that of the consumer. This implies that higher education should be considered in market terms, that lecturers provide products comparable to the pizzas of Pizza Hut or the haircut by the hairdresser. Wieleman indicates that ‘the metaphor of “the free market”, implying competition and the freedom of choice for consumers, has a strong normative impact’ on schools and curricula and that ‘economic considerations in particular are taking the lead, both in policy objectives (such as expenditure cuts and efficiency) and in the concepts adopted (such as management, productivity, etc.)’ (2000: 33). This is not an exclusive development for schools, but can also be observed within higher education institutions.
This chapter argues that the consumer metaphor for students prescribes a singular and seemingly uncomplicated role that students can assume. Here I attempt to unpack the consumer metaphor for students to show how this metaphor does not only emancipate students by allowing them to choose, but at the same time such a neo-liberal approach could reconfigure the students as commodities to consume and to invest in. I argue that a citizenship perspective is far more compelling than a consumer perspective since it can open another set of roles which can give us a better understanding of the complexity of education.
The chapter is divided into three parts: the first part will describe and explain the usage of neo-liberal metaphors; the second part will elaborate on this to define the roles of students within a consumer framework; the third part of the chapter will discuss how citizenship contrasts with a neo-liberal consumer framework and open a new understanding for the roles of students and the potential for a radical democratic higher education.
Neo-liberal metaphors
When we describe students as consumers or citizens we are using metaphors to create understanding of a certain phenomena. Metaphors could in this sense be considered as ‘a way of comparing two different concepts’ (Jones and Peccei
The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student As Consumer : The Student as Consumer, edited by Mike Molesworth, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=592917. Created from sjsu on 2021-06-03 16:22:46.
C o p yr
ig h t ©
2 0 1 0 . T
a yl
o r
& F
ra n ci
s G
ro u p . A
ll ri g h ts
r e se
rv e d .
2004: 46) helping in our creation of social reality. Both the strength and the weakness of metaphors are that they attempt to understand one experience in terms of another experience. In one sense all theories and models are metaphorical in their nature (Morgan 1999: 10) and since every metaphor is at its core normative, it promotes one point of view over another. Often metaphors are hard to avoid and become a sort of ‘prison of mind’. Still by seeing theories and models as metaphors, we become aware that one theory is not enough to describe reality (Morgan 1999:11–12).
The neo-liberal framework could be seen as rooted in liberalism which puts faith in individuals and the economy over the community and the state. Liberalism ‘puts a strong emphasis on the individual, and most rights involve liberties that adhere to each and every person’ (Isin and Turner 2002: 3) A liberal governance and rationality implies a certain order of organisation. Such governance is focused around terms like competition, market, freedom, choice, customer orientation, efficiency and flexibility and the market is seen as ideal for governance orientation (Fougner 2006: 175). It is assumed that markets can only exist and prosper under specific political, legal and institutional conditions. These have to be actively established by authorities (Fougner 2006: 176).
Harvey sees neo-liberalism as a political project, a process of neo-liberalisation that aims to ‘re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and . . . restore the power of economic elites’ (Harvey 2005: 19), and specifically to disembed capital from the constraints of the ‘embedded liberalism’ of social democracy and the Keynesian welfare state (Harvey 2005: 11). Davies and Bransel mention that neo-liberalism emphasises the choice of individuals to ‘further their own interests and those of their family’ (2007: 249–50) where the welfare state is often seen as an obstacle for economical growth.
When the market is playing a larger role in our social life, a consequence is that the citizen becomes understood, even by her or himself, through market logic as an individual ability to maximise lifestyle through choice (Stevenson 2006: 485–500). As such, the neo-liberal state should then empower the ‘entrepreneurial subjects in their quest for self-expression, freedom and prosperity’ (Davies and Bransel 2007: 249–250).
There is no denying that there are some convergences between being a consumer and being a neo-liberal citizen. Neo-liberal citizenship is a very narrow aspect of citizenship theory; it does not take into account other ideological understandings of being a citizen. A more expansive and multiple understanding of citizenship will be discussed below and used to compare with the consumer framework of students.
Neo-liberal consumer framework
A neo-liberal consumer framework could mean two different alternatives for higher education: first, the education system would be transformed into a Higher Education Corporation on a free market basis where students would consume
158 Johan Nordensvärd
The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student As Consumer : The Student as Consumer, edited by Mike Molesworth, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=592917. Created from sjsu on 2021-06-03 16:22:46.
C o p yr
ig h t ©
2 0 1 0 . T
a yl
o r
& F
ra n ci
s G
ro u p . A
ll ri g h ts
r e se
rv e d .
to their ability and purse. This would mean a university funded by the logic of the market and run by the market. Alternatively, the higher education system would be run like a Higher Education Corporation where students would be regarded as consumers but could be completely or partly funded by the state. This could fit into New Public Management reforms. In this part of the chapter, I will try to discern the diverging roles of students within a neo-liberal consumer framework. For clarity, I have divided this framework for students into three different sets of roles: students as consumers, students as managers and students as commodities.
The student as a consumer
The first metaphor seems to be the most unproblematic one since it starts with the student and seems to expand the possibilities and the position of the student. Here, universities could be seen as providers of products (programmes of study and support in participating in those programmes). The student takes on the role as a consumer when she or he consumes educational products and services connected to these products (compare McCulloch 2009: 171). Such a perspective opens up the question of the consumer motive. Such a motive could be to further the students’ own human capital in the form of degree programmes that boost
Consumer metaphor versus citizen metaphor 159
Table 13.1 Different sets of roles for students
Role Students
Consumer 1 The student consumes educational services for her/his own pleasure and interest.
2 The student buys educational diplomas for improving her/his position on the labour market (boosting the CV).
3 The student buys techniques, skills and knowledge for becoming a knowledge worker and a self-regulated learner.
Manager 1 The student invests into her/his own human capital through education as her/his body and mind will be like a company supplying services to the market.
2 To increase her/his value the student updates her/his ‘software’ according to the principles of demand and supply.
3 The student uses education to achieve an employable and reasonable CV and hereby conduct studies and life in an accountable way.
Commodity 1 The Social Investment State ensures that education is wisely invested into human capital and that the educational outputs produce real economical growth.
2 The state manages its human capital in an accountable, transparent, competitive and efficient way.
3 The state has to provide corporations with highly skilled human capital for being able to compete with other countries in the knowledge economy.
The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student As Consumer : The Student as Consumer, edited by Mike Molesworth, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=592917. Created from sjsu on 2021-06-03 16:22:46.
C o p yr
ig h t ©
2 0 1 0 . T
a yl
o r
& F
ra n ci
s G
ro u p . A
ll ri g h ts
r e se
rv e d .
their CV and/or give them skills to make them more employable on the market. Wellen discusses how this consumer perspective is becoming more inherent in the relationship between academia and the student body:
More students view themselves as active purchasers of academic services, and are calling for stronger quality assurance standards and ‘valued’ credentials. Institutions are faced with more market pressures to differentiate/specialize in order to succeed as competition for students and faculty grows.
(Wellen 2005: 25)
When we look at employability as the main consumer motive we can have two different approaches: students buy skills or students buy degrees. The first motive focuses more on what students can do with their knowledge; it is a form of employability of knowledge. Heyneman illustrates this perspective with clarity: an ‘economistic’ standpoint could mean that an educational system in a market economy should ‘prepare students for changing careers and flexibility in the labour market’ and an excellent school system ‘emphasizes those skills which maximize adaptability’ (Heyneman 2004: 447). Similarly, others say education needs to be more fitted to the needs of the students in preparing them to succeed in a culturally diverse and globally interdependent world. The goal would be to help the students to develop knowledge, awareness and skills to be effective in society. Education has to supply students with transferable skills (Carroll and Reichelt 2008: 391–2). Skills are seen as something that the universities are supposed to supply to students. This line of argument sees the main goal of education as making students more able to compete with other educated people from other countries. Leithwood, Edge and Jantzi mention that globalisation ‘has given rise to the fear that students may not be getting the foundation they need to be competitive in the international markets’ (Leithwood et al. 1999: 162).
A more cynical view would be that the students just desire the degree itself and not the skills. The students then have a rather instrumental relationship to joining the university and this leads to a commodification of education where plagiarism, apathy and customer orientation takes place (compare with Wellen 2005: 25). In many ways the education produces a degree which often gets confused with the academic service of teaching. The students aspire for what Molesworth et al. discuss as a mode of existence where students seek to ‘have a degree’ rather than ‘be learners’ (2009: 278). This would mean that students buy a fetish form of education where the degree itself is a strong signifier or commodity that can be owned but not traded or shared. The sales of degree qualifications on the internet have driven this aspect of consumerism to perfection.
The third form of consumer considers education more as fun and does not have to have any economic interest other than enjoyment: having a nice phase of life with interesting subjects, friends and some partying. The student buys an educational service just as she or he buys a DVD or a CD. These students buy education for their own pleasure. Such a perspective would foster an education
160 Johan Nordensvärd
The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student As Consumer : The Student as Consumer, edited by Mike Molesworth, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=592917. Created from sjsu on 2021-06-03 16:22:46.
C o p yr
ig h t ©
2 0 1 0 . T
a yl
o r
& F
ra n ci
s G
ro u p . A
ll ri g h ts
r e se
rv e d .
that caters to what a large or small group of paying students find amusing or scientifically interesting. Blake et al. argue that education has been degraded to any kind of commodity available for consumption claiming, ‘the triumph of the market has declared individual subjective choice sovereign and deliberation, by corollary pointless’ (Blake et al. 2000: xi). Furthermore, Blake et al. argue that ‘educational values are simply what the consumer happens to want, and it makes no more sense to undertake any great inquiry into those values than into preferences in the matter of cars or brands of chicken tikka’ (2000: xi). This part of the chapter made a distinction between three different consumer attitudes to education. In reality these boundaries are often blurred and all three types of consumer attitudes at the same time can be reasons for pursuing HE.
The student as a manager
The first metaphor focuses on the consumption act of the students; the second metaphor elaborates on the utility of education. When the purchase of education is not just for fun or leisure the first metaphor cannot really explain the roles of the students. The consumption of skills and degrees are not just consumer goods but one could argue that from a neo-liberal perspective education is an investment into the career of the students. The students are therefore not just consumers, but also managers of their life, future and their CV. Education could therefore be seen as an investment in students’ personal and individualised capital (compare Robertson (2000) in Wellen 2005: 27). Simons and Masschelein consider this as a transformation where learners should become managers of their own learning. They should develop their own learning strategy, monitor the process and evaluate the result. ‘Thus what is at stake is the emergence of a kind of “managerial” attitude toward learning: learning appears as a process of construc- tion that could and should be managed and this first and foremost by learners themselves’ (Simons and Masschelein 2008: 401).
Employability is important as part of active labour policies where competencies and competence management become important. ‘Policy is no longer about “functions” but about “competencies”, that is, knowledge, capacities and attitudes that are employable with regard to an efficient, flexible (and learning-based) adaptation to changing conditions’ (Simons and Masschelein, 2008: 401). From this view, the student needs to consider higher education as a way to increase his/her employability.
As mentioned in the last metaphor there has been a focus on skills and one of those skills that students should learn is self-management. An example is the skill to learn. One learns the skill to learn instead of learning a certain knowledge that would become easily outdated in the knowledge economy. Learning is therefore neither limited to schools nor other institutions of education nor to a particular time in people’s lives (compare Simons and Masschelein 2008: 397–8). The main aspect of life-long learning is its expansive scope: one could consider every person as a learner who participates not just by classes of learning but also by informally and self-directed learning.
Consumer metaphor versus citizen metaphor 161
The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student As Consumer : The Student as Consumer, edited by Mike Molesworth, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=592917. Created from sjsu on 2021-06-03 16:22:46.
C o p yr
ig h t ©
2 0 1 0 . T
a yl
o r
& F
ra n ci
s G
ro u p . A
ll ri g h ts
r e se
rv e d .
Since the stability of knowledge itself has been undermined, the knowledge and skills learned can easily become outdated. OECD indicates that students need to re-think the value of knowledge rather as skills than as a collection of knowledge. OECD argues that the modern world does not need people that know something; it needs people that have acquired ‘prerequisites for successful learning in future life’ (OECD 1999: 9). The student manager must therefore be able to manage the skills that she or he learns and value skills and knowledge that are employable in the student’s career and in the global economy. In this perspective the student needs to offer products and services that corporations can consume. In this sense; the student does not achieve these goals due to personal interest, but rather as a way to offer something that the market needs and can consume.
The student as a commodity
The second metaphor touched upon the self-management of learning, in order to participate in and to become viable on the market. As such, discussion focuses on the direct strategies to create knowledge and skills that are consumable on the market. One aspect of the knowledge economy is not just the interest of the students to fit the market but also the interest of the state and the market. When the students become reconfigured as consumers and managers the same thing could be said about the state. The state could be seen first and foremost as a manager (of human capital) and as an investor (into human capital) and consumer (of educational investments in Higher Education and research). This metaphor turns the table and dis-empowers the students: the students go from being consumer queens to investment pawns.
One could see a relationship with Paul Romer’s analysis of education in the New Growth Theory (Romer 1986), where the importance of education is to produce tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is then defined as the technical knowledge that people obtain by experience and by applying scientific theories in real life. This represents the knowledge manifested in a human body which turns the body into human capital. These bodies are a knowledge economy’s greatest assets. When a country wants to be successful, it will need to invest in technology (applied science) and human capital (the bodies that carry the applied science). According to the OECD, it is the purpose of education in post-modern time to generate prosperity: ‘The prosperity of countries now derives to a large extent from their human capital, and to succeed in a rapidly changing world, individuals need to advance their knowledge and skills throughout their lives’ (2004: 3).
Students are no longer subjects under coercive and cohesive powers of the state – they do not have to be forced to become citizens or workers – they are now products of the global market. The renewal itself is a way to renew the human capital within the human body. The learning process and the result of learning (knowledge) could be seen as capital where learning produces added
162 Johan Nordensvärd
The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student As Consumer : The Student as Consumer, edited by Mike Molesworth, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=592917. Created from sjsu on 2021-06-03 16:22:46.
C o p yr
ig h t ©
2 0 1 0 . T
a yl
o r
& F
ra n ci
s G
ro u p . A
ll ri g h ts
r e se
rv e d .
value. Fromm would put it this way: ‘Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions’ (1957: 67). When the state invests in students, it also expects that these investments will be fruitful. When the state strives for solving social problems it will measure whether social problems are diminishing. When the state strives for economic growth and employability it will measure these in economic terms. The state could be seen as a Social Investment State which invests into its country’s human capital, the universities become both service providers for the consumers but also for the state as a risk manager. These service providers need to audit the human capital and assure that they live up to the achieved degrees.
Roles of students from a citizenship perspective
The chosen metaphors are examples to illustrate how a neo-liberal framework of students can be complex and contradictory. Being a consumer, manager and commodity at the same time casts some doubt that consumer frameworks could really empower students. It is therefore hard to consider the neo-liberal framework of consuming as a magical trick of turning a pawn into a queen. I would argue that a citizenship perspective will be able to connect the roles of students to a larger perspective. A broad citizenship perspective could therefore include a neo- liberal definition but it could also include other ideological starting points for understanding the roles of the students. This chapter will focus on two main aspects of citizenship:
1 Citizenship as a set of political rights granted to citizens which means rights to participate in political processes of self-governance. ‘These includes rights to vote; to hold elective and appointive governmental offices; to serve on various sorts of juries; and generally to participate in political debates as Equal community members’ (Smith 2002: 105).
2 Citizenship as a ‘full membership in society’ (Holston and Appadurai 1996: 187). Citizenship could be defined as a legal status in a political community connected with rights (political, civil and social) and to some degree duties (pay taxes and obey the law) (Smith 2002: 105).
On one hand, one could understand citizenship as the rights and duties to participate actively in a political community and on the other, the membership to a political community. To use citizenship as a contrasting set of roles we need to use the different ideological interpretations of the concept. The Handbook of Citizenship Studies edited by Isin and Turner uses four different ideological starting points: liberalism, communitarianism, radical-democratic theory and republicanism (see Isin and Turner 2002). I would argue that citizenship is always
Consumer metaphor versus citizen metaphor 163
The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student As Consumer : The Student as Consumer, edited by Mike Molesworth, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=592917. Created from sjsu on 2021-06-03 16:22:46.
C o p yr
ig h t ©
2 0 1 0 . T
a yl
o r
& F
ra n ci
s G
ro u p . A
ll ri g h ts
r e se
rv e d .
linked with membership on one side depending on the level and nature of participation that is expected from its members and non-members. The first starting point would fittingly be a communitarian citizenship.
A communitarian view focuses on ‘the community (or the society or the nation), whose primary concern is the cohesive and just functioning of society’ (Isin and Turner 2002: 4). The communitarian individual is an individual who emerges from a historical and dense social context. A community defines who belongs and who does not belong to it and suggests a ‘strong sense of place, proximity and totality’, while society could be said to symbolise ‘fragmentation, alienation and distance’ (Delanty 2002: 161).
Such a view of education would fit more with the traditional view of education or science where being a student or graduate would mean to enter into an elite community. Education could be seen as a rite of passage more than just gaining knowledge and skills. Another interpretation could consider students as entering a scientific and scholar community and therefore a pledge towards certain values to knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge. In the first example the students go through a rite of passage to become a member of an elite where HE could be seen as a way to reproduce ruling values. The same could happen for a scientific elite community where the students should be at the top of the educational ladder. Education has not just reproduced elite communities; education has also been a source for creating communities.
An example is the role of education within nation states. The modern Western city is defined by Thompson as a ‘representative democracy, institutionalized primarily at the level of the nation-state and coupled with a relatively autonomous market economy over which democracy has assumed some degree of regulatory control’ (1995: 251). The earlier function of education was according to Green, to be a ‘valuable source of national cohesion and a key tool for economic development’ (1997: 1). National education was a tool in ‘the formation of ideologies and collective beliefs which legitimate state power and underpin concepts of nationhood and national “character” ’ (Green 1990: 77). MacLaren analyses schooling as ritual performances and highlights two important phases of identities: rituals of becoming a citizen (1986: 226) and the rituals of becoming a good worker (1986: 135). Education could in the case of the state be considered to create members of what Benedict Andersen (1991) would call an imagined community but also to foster people to be useful and obedient in an economic system. For most people this would mean an equal membership and limited participation within the nation state and an extensive participation and unequal membership within the market. From this perspective students could be seen as nation state citizens on one side but also as future members of the economy. There is here a dual role of the students that is also reflected within education.
Liberalism provides a different perspective. Liberalism ‘puts a strong emphasis on the individual, and most rights involve liberties that adhere to each and every person’ (Isin and Turner 2002: 3). This liberalism does not just have to mean the neo-liberal notion of self-relying actors that have much in common with
164 Johan Nordensvärd
The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student As Consumer : The Student as Consumer, edited by Mike Molesworth, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=592917. Created from sjsu on 2021-06-03 16:22:46.
C o p yr
ig h t ©
2 0 1 0 . T
a yl
o r
& F
ra n ci
s G
ro u p . A
ll ri g h ts
r e se
rv e d .
classical liberalism. The first part of this chapter elaborated in detail what the role of students would be within a framework where ‘education is linked with economic productivity and growth in personal income’ (Heyneman 2004: 441) and where students are members and participants within a global economy. Within liberalism there could also be a social liberalism much closer to Marshall and Keynes rather than Milton Friedman and John Stuart Mill. Such a social liberal citizenship would focus on positive rights which could mean that the state needs the welfare state to live a dignified life (Schuck 2002: 131–2). Marshall considered the social rights such as the freedom to participate in society as the right to education and health care (Matten and Crane 2005: 170). A social liberal citizenship could therefore argue as a contrast to neo-liberal citizenship: it is the right for the students as citizens to enjoy education and therefore such service should be provided to some degree by the state. To diminish the harmful effects of human competition at the free market, social welfare states have, according to Esping-Andersen, tried to de-commodify work and workers, opening up options for the labour forces to chose between different jobs, to get educated, and to decrease the negative effects of losing employment (Esping-Andersen 1990: 36–7). Education could therefore be seen as one of the foundations of citizenship that empowers the citizen vis-à-vis the market. This does once again highlight the dual and unequal relationship between membership in the state and the market. From such a perspective education is considered to increase the capabilities of students to participate in social and economic communities.
A radical democratic citizenship perspective would be to ‘generate an anti- essentialist politics that continually attempts to redefine itself in order to resist the exclusion of individuals and groups in the formation of social order’ (Rasmussen and Brown 2000: 176–7). The theory hails democracy and a commitment to equality and participation. The radical aspect is the focus on social change and the political struggle by marginalised groups. It is mainly seen as a post-Marxist perspective that tries to redefine politics and the activity of political subjects. It stresses the link between practice and theory as the motor for social change and empowerment. Isin regards citizenship as a generalised problem of otherness, especially concerning the formation of groups of otherness. The formation of groups is a fundamental and dynamic process that is being oriented towards taking positions. Citizenship is responding to positions rather than to identities where one could be a stranger, a citizen and an alien and it is therefore important to see citizenship as a ‘specific figuration of orientations, strategies and technologies that are available for deployment in producing solidarity, agonistic and alienating multiplicities’ (Isin 2005: 374 –5).
One could see that an alternative goal of education should not just be to create citizens and workers but it should enable the emancipation of the citizens. Among some scholars there is the perception that education should make it possible for the individual learner to work independently on the political dimension of society. This would mean a democratic education that acknowledges the freedom of the citizen and that promotes individual political judgments and
Consumer metaphor versus citizen metaphor 165
The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student As Consumer : The Student as Consumer, edited by Mike Molesworth, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=592917. Created from sjsu on 2021-06-03 16:22:46.
C o p yr
ig h t ©
2 0 1 0 . T
a yl
o r
& F
ra n ci
s G
ro u p . A
ll ri g h ts
r e se
rv e d .
evaluation (compare Sander 2005: 15–17). A critical aspect could therefore be to create a critical awareness among students which ‘make evident the multiplicity and complexity of history, as a narrative to enter into critical dialogue with rather than accept unquestioningly’ and that this pedagogy should ‘cultivate a healthy scepticism about power and a willingness to temper any reverence for authority with a sense of critical awareness’ (Said 2001: 501, in Giroux 2006: 32). In this sense there is a challenging aspect to being a student. Students should learn how to challenge both the relative position of themselves and challenge the structures of scholarship, science, education, history and other aspects of the self and society.
The fourth ideological perspective is the republican perspective where there is an emphasis ‘on both individual and group rights’ (Isin and Turner 2002: 4). A republican belief is that public life enriches people’s life since it draws people out of privacy and draws them together. It also extracts the talents and capacities of the citizen. It creates a community with connection and solidarity, but also conflicts between the citizens. For a republican, individualism or family will not be enough (Dagger 2002: 146–8). Two aspects that come from publicity are the rule of law and civic virtue. Politics should be public to avoid corruption or nepotism. As a member of a community, people must be prepared to set aside their private interests to do what is the best for the public as a whole. The one who does this displays civic virtues. The rule of law is the frame and rules of the practical politics: it sets the limits of with whom and when debates take place and how decisions are made. Publicity needs rule of law for being a practical solution. ‘Citizenship has an ethical dimension, in short, because there are standards built into the concept of citizenship, just as there are standards built into the concepts of mayor, teacher, plumber and physician’ (Dagger 2002: 146–8).
From such a perspective a student is positioned with values for the common good of society. This perspective is therefore rather far away from being a consumer isolated within a gigantic market for the economy. In the republican perspective, a student could be seen as someone abiding to democracy and its struggle; abide to a common good beyond the individual pursuit for profit. In this way, education should create citizens who set their own interests aside for the greater good and who are willing to offer their knowledge and minds in the service of others. This is the opposite to the neo-liberal perspective of students and citizens pursuing their own self-interest.