I’m writing the first draft of this review on December 18th 2014, the evening before academics across Britain learn their fate at the hands of the latest ‘research excellence framework’ (REF) which is run by the Higher Education Funding Council. This 20 year old, 5-yearly assessment audit of universities’ research outputs has become a constantly ratcheting, increasingly oppressive Hydra. It is an especially stark outcome of the intertwined rise of examination, its illusions of meritocracy and liberal attempts to ameliorate their inequalities, that, as this book shows so compellingly, drives the entire British education system, the bodies in it, and those who examine, assess, select, stratify, filter out and fail those bodies.
* * * *
The next day. So, it turns out that we did well and those of us who are critical of its pernicious effects found ourselves pleased at succeeding, caught up in congratulations about how good we are. Believing, or perhaps performing our meritocratic belief, that we had ‘deserved’ our good results, we suspended our reservations about both the flawed assessment process and the ways in which the REF outcomes can be spun every which way to suit particular readings of its league tables.
* * * *
Like all performative systems, REF gets into the body, mind and heart. It has turned some of its participants and advocates into enthusiastic evangelists. For many, it has become a moral imperative because its league table rankings affect jobs, promotion prospects and the intensifying competition for ever-diminishing research grants. Others are cynical compliers, including many of us drawn into administering and managing the many-headed monster. Allen’s book illuminates a long liberal-progressive educational tradition of delusion about meritocracy. Following his argument, attempts to wrest some authenticity and decency from the insane game that the REF has become are just another useless manifestation of delusion.
* * * *
For Allen, the celebrations belie something more malign. “Worse than the carnival, perhaps, is a form of malevolent simplicity that pervades institutional life. Principles and procedures designed ostensibly to protect us are dogmatically followed. This happy simplicity allows one’s co-workers and superiors to rest content and ignore the complex violence of the workplace. Educators and other professionals are particularly vulnerable, as this violence most often feeds on and manipulates the educational conscience they have been forced to internalise” (p246, original emphasis).
According to this book, all meritocratic systems are violent. The REF is no exception: it ruins careers, turning increasing numbers of academics into REFugees excluded from selection because their research is allegedly not high quality enough. Some are made redundant. Many of us have become anxious and passive, even, to use one of Allen’s hard hitting observations, ‘bovine’.
* * * *
As he waits in an airport departure lounge, Allen wonders “where is it that we learn to behave as cattle, to submit ourselves to this social ritual[standing in line early to make sure we board] as we collectively respond to its externally set, internally processed demands? We are all anxious, of course. There are no allocated seats on board” (pxvii).
* * * *
I’m writing this review in the style of the book.
* * * *
Discrete sections alternate between flowing and disjointed, short and long, with detailed historical accounts of examination and meritocracy in the British education system interrupted by examples from our times. Allen’s acute interruptions aim to unsettle the reader, stopping her from being lulled along in lazy or complacent agreement or disagreement in the way that, he argues, conventional academic writing encourages. Sometimes he challenges or questions the reader directly. There are few references: Allen is dismissive of academic conventions that demand the bolstering of argument with endless reference to others’ work; a demand that, he argues cleverly, creates ‘academic thickness’. His Foucauldian analysis does not lead, as it seems often in academic writing, to meandering, dense text that makes sense only to fellow Foucauldians. Instead, his prose is well crafted, sparing and provocative.
* * * *
So the book proceeds in its forensic, imaginative, relentlessly gloomy genealogy. It charts the intertwining of examination and meritocracy and attempts by some educators to appropriate them for progressive ends. It reveals the ways in which the British education system has evolved to justify and manage the fact that, for the vast majority of the population in it, there are no allocated seats on board. Or, at least, not in the much-prized courses and institutions that, for a minority, are a passport to a better future.
* * * *
In the week after the REF, I’m returning from abroad. Allen’s airport observation comes to mind as I wait in line for the ritual humiliation of security and its random and ridiculous searchings. Meritocracies don’t just have to manage exclusion and selection. They must also instil a constant fear of being found lacking, perhaps of being exposed as a chancer or a fraud; someone who doesn’t really deserve her or his place. Or simply as a threat to security.
* * * *
Allen connects the ways in which different bodies, as well as whole populations, have been subjected to various forms of examination, particularly the scrutiny and harder edged assessments of late 19th/early 20th century eugenicists. Here ideas and practices associated with meritocracy have produced ever-finer grained selection methods for jobs, armed service and education. They cannot be divorced from eugenics. Yet unlike educators who deem themselves to be ‘progressive’, Allen does not regard eugenics as some past horror that can never be allowed to return. Instead, in its ‘direct coercive intervention into the sphere of human existence’ (p135), he makes a wider point, namely that ‘in the analysis of power we must not overlook the mundane by focusing on the extreme, for it is in the mundane and everyday that we find the more treacherous operations of power ’ (p135). It is the processes of examination and assessment that are so powerful now, far more so than their outcomes.
* * * *
For Allen, the distinction between examination as scrutiny, inspection, investigation to establish the truth or qualities of an object, and assessment as a vehicle for distribution and reward, a way of valuing and distributing human worth is important. The terms are not therefore synonymous, even if they are invariably used that way in everyday discourse. The distinction helps to explain how traces of old eugenics re-emerge in obsession with the “current ecological status of a population, rather than its prior genetic basis or future possibility” (p210).
It is not therefore tenable simply to denounce the inequities and tyrannies of examination and assessment, as many liberal, progressive, radical and critical educators do before proposing to replace them more holistic and child-centred assessment processes, more realistic aspirations, more authentic and ‘just’ measures of outcomes such as ‘value-added’. Instead, examination is not so easily grasped as a history that we can understand better and then free ourselves from it with new, more progressive methods. Nor is examination a simple monolith: “at any one time, it is distributed across a whole series of arrangements, as a shifting set of functions. To grasp the significance of examination, we must pursue it in all its diffusion… the examination of human worth and mapping of its social distribution has a past worth visiting (pxiv/v).
* * * *
Its sophisticated genealogical approach and telling historical photographs of unwitting subjects of examination and assessment make the book much more than a history of this intertwining. Instead, rooted in eugenics, examination and meritocracy are inextricably linked as evolving forms of power. Allen’s analysis exposes the subtle, often contradictory ways in which these forms of power work, inside and outside bodies. He charts their shifting influence on post-war goals and especially those championed by liberal progressives, from the unashamedly stratified opportunities created by the 1944 Education Act and justified by Labour and Conservative policy makers as a way of ensuring that working class children knew their destiny for unskilled and labouring jobs, through brief flirtation with a comprehensive system in the 1970s, and then to calls for ‘parity of esteem’, equality of opportunity, widening access and participation from the 1980s onwards.
“A fluid meritocracy serves what is now seen as the natural ecology of human existence, in which each individual strives towards the realisation of his or her individual potential” (p244). This contemporary version of acceptable aspiration has generated the inflated ceremonies and celebrations held for successful examinees today, and the parallel rise of liberal-progressive interest in more holistic assessments of the ‘whole’ child, the ‘real’ child, the truly authentic child, its personal development and, increasingly, its emotional development.
The book exposes liberal delusions that it’s possible to personalise, soften and make fairer ranking, selection, over-testing and target-setting as benign violence. This is a strong and original critique. In particular, Allen demolishes the highly influential academic movement that has championed ‘assessment for learning’ and a process-driven education. Its goals for a culture of success go much further, as Allen observes, than well-intentioned feedback from teachers. Instead, old 19th century forms of peer and self assessment and cooperative learning reappear in new guises, as new ways of socialising individuals to work “in an environment of individual striving without the pernicious effects rivalry…trained in the techniques of cooperative activity whilst atomised within practices of self-enhancement’ (p238).
* * * *
I am ‘impact coordinator’ for the 2020 REF. At our celebratory meeting, a colleague asks me how I will improve the rating we got for impact in this one (our case studies, it seems, were given a 4*, 100% score). As a joke, I’m tempted to offer the typical football manager’s response that the team will give 110%. But I mention instead my little resistance against the patronising and demeaning title of ‘champions’ that the university wanted for its impact coordinators. The iron grip of examination and apparent meritocracy encourages the self-deluding comfort of such small, smart-arse symbols of ‘victory’.
* * * *
Actually, as any Foucauldian knows, it’s much worse than mere self-delusion. Liberal progressives who cling to meritocracy and don’t see our ‘period as one in which disorder and the impossibility of fairness are principles that have been elevated above their opposites and incorporated within governmental technique’ (p10, original emphasis), are integral to insidious discourses and processes of governance.
Allen’s focus on this well-meaning group of educators is compelling and controversial. The delusion that more holistic assessment processes are progressive overlooks the ways in which …. “today we live amongst the residues of welfare reform, occupying a broken landscape from which we draw meaning. Our memories of a former system – of the institutions and dreams of the welfare state – play a crucial role in the regime that is its replacement. Hence, to speak of the destruction of the welfare state is to exaggerate the case. Welfare has been destroyed only to the extent to which it has been co-opted and absorbed….put to more effective use by new frameworks of power” (p191-2).
* * * *
Allen observes that assessment’s current reach and effects are more profound than ever before “….once the social engineer retreats, only those who believe improvement is a perpetual possibility can be depended on to make the effort required to constantly reposition themselves in the social hierarchy” (p237). The focus now is on ‘the hapless ways of helpless children’ (p237). Modified, adapted eugenics appears again: ‘the vulnerable child must become resilient rather than rebellious’ (ibid).
This resonates powerfully with my own critique of the inexorable rise of universal social and emotional learning interventions. In the spirit of modified eugenics, positive psychologists evangelise about programmes to train children, young people and adults in the mindsets, dispositions and ‘skills’ of ‘emotional well-being’ under the previous government, and ‘character’ under this one. Such claims lead instrumental behaviourists and equally instrumental liberal and progressive educators to present ‘resilience’ as one of many essential dispositions that we can and should teach. Across the education system, ever-more intrusive informal and formal assessments of the minds and hearts of children, young people and adults are new forms of governance that create and then respond to new disordered and emotionally troubled identities.
* * * *
In the week before Christmas, the head of Britain’s 149 job-centres[2] tweets a stream of seemingly banal bon mots from positive psychology to her staff. One seems spookily apposite for the REF shenanigans: “be fired with enthusiasm or be fired with enthusiasm”. In his forthcoming book ‘The happiness industry: how government and big business sold us well-being’, William Davies argues that the growing trend for companies to require workers to take part in well-being programmes is a response to worsening levels of disaffection and stress-related illnesses amongst employees. Some human resource managers propose sacking workers who either resist them, or are simply critical (Davies 2015).
In a tightening circular grip, the bossy bon mots of the job centres director are far from banal: instead, the nasty, increasingly blatant tentacles of the drive to assess our emotional responses, dispositions and attitudes now entangle our inner feelings and responses to the assessment systems that govern us.
* * * *
For me, this book signals that be positive or suffer the consequences is the logical outcome of attempts by progressive educators to humanise the expanding reach of assessment in meritocracies. Perhaps Allen hopes that be cynical or suffer the consequences helps us understand the schizophrenic tyrannies and benefits of examination and assessment and the price we pay for progressive delusions. In the Foucauldian gloom of his moral high ground, there is no blueprint for action, nor any optimism that any aspect of education is emancipatory or benign. Instead, in the last line of his book, he tells us that his aim is to get under our skin, to excoriate, to trouble us to resistance.
* * * *
I see his point but I’m not sure what response it warrants. Allen presents genealogy as an incitement, an incomplete engagement in combat “without intellectual restraint… an insurrectional device, designed for rebellion” (p247). He concludes by saying that rebelling against out educational present requires us to “explore its perversions, its cynicisms”, to “ disabuse ourselves of our well-meaning but shallow commitments” (p250). Yet if hoping for some, any, progressive possibilities is futile, there is no chance either of collective resistance to the tyrannies Allen charts so relentlessly.
So I consider some tiny ones. As the next REF grinds into action, I’ll ask colleagues to read two articles published in the Times Higher Education in December 2014: Allen’s critique of research impact and a truly excoriating, militant account of the REF by a professor of cultural history who excluded his own research from assessment as a protest against its inequities and corruptions (Allen 2014, Sayer 2014).
And yet I remain both pessimistic and cynical ….. if liberal delusions enable meritocracy to function better, indeed are essential to its functioning, surely resistances and excoriations do the same. We can resist a little - and then it’s governance as usual.
References
Allen, A. 2014. Who benefits from the impact agenda? Times Higher Education, 6th November 2014
Davies, W. 2015. The happiness industry: how government and big business sold us well-being, London: Verso
Sayer, D. 2014. One scholar’s crusade against the REF, Times Higher Education, 11th December 2014
[1] This is an amended version of a book review submitted to the Journal of Education Policy.
[2] These are centres funded by the Department of Work and Pensions to offer support, advice and guidance to unemployed people of all ages.