Governmentality - Neoliberalism - Education: the Risk Perspective

This paper understands the basic elements of neoliberalism in education and governmentality to be the technologies for the neoliberal government of education. It outlines Foucault's methodology for analysing governmentality and shows how neoliberalism is a discursive formation which homogenises apparently unrelated language games and discourses. It places particular emphasis on the rhizomatic dispersion of neoliberal discursive and non-discursive practices, which in the end create a mosaic of thinking and acting with its own existing internal logic. This paper provides a cross-sectional perspective on how neoliberalism has implanted itself as a universal phenomenon along the horizontal and vertical lines of the education sphere and shows how, particularly through the policy of lifelong learning for a knowledge society, it is transforming first of all the education of adults and how subsequently it has become a fundamental blueprint for the complex revision of higher education and regional schooling, including pre-school education. This paper prefaces this single-issue edition of the Journal of Pedagogy and therefore presents and summarises the articles published in this issue, and suggests how they are thematic examples of a single and more general theoretical framework.