Education International Research
to another, who the main players may be in making that shift, and what social and environmental change forces may be at work. The questions it raises are in whose interests is a change from one quadrant to another? What are the internal and external forces that push politicians and policy makers from conservation to survival (back to basics? International benchmarking? Scarcity of resources? Pressure groups and special interest groups?). What forces drive the change from the transformational models towards a more market orientated system (political ideology? Parent lobbies? Service providers? Employer groups? Mass media?). The four quadrants are defined by a north-south axis from social to individual, and a west-east axis from closed to open. North-south deals with normative contents and expectations about schooling and is labelled the “value line”. The “east-west” dimension is the socio-technical aspect of schooling —the “supply line” –in which the school is considered as a system, closed and held in place by convention or, alternatively, challenged by a more open set of social and economic forces.
Open
Closed
Social
Individual
From north to south Schools are embedded within societies which value social and individual orientations differently and place the purposes of schools somewhere between those two extreme poles. To the north, education is socially oriented and schools are aimed at cohesion, equity and reproduction (close to OECD scenario 1). The south is individualistically oriented, with schooling increasingly geared to its clients as individual consumers (OECD scenario 6). These two poles express a range of values as to how people are bound together in social arrangements in which schools are an integral part. The teacher plays an active, if implicit, part in the transmission of values as the school is a key expression of the social fabric. 111