title: Pedagogic Mis-governance in Hong Kong
Creators: name: Kwok, Yan Shing Henry
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: pedagogic mis-governance
subject: education reform
subject: parallel conflicts
subject: policy
subject: Hong Kong
subject: Liberal Studies (LS)
subject: postcolonial
subject: East Asian

description: This thesis sets out to theorise ‘pedagogic mis-governance’, that is, the impossibility of the state to govern entire populations through education reform according to its policy ideals, amidst increased level of contestations, as witnessed in postcolonial Hong Kong. Pedagogic governance embeds an unthinkable gap and openness towards possibilities. However, this openness also inscribes future crises, transgression, and ungovernable consequences which constitute the politics of education reform. The notion of ‘pedagogic mis-governance’ extends Basil Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic device, through the Foucauldian lens of governmentality and power-knowledge relations. Any attempt by the state to govern through pedagogic means inevitably leads to ‘mis-governance’. Paradoxically, the inevitability of ‘mis-governance’ through pedagogic means does not deter the state from education reforms. Ironically, the state accelerates education reforms in an attempt to govern though pedagogic means. The study has two purposes. First, it is intended to contribute to critical studies of education reform, by highlighting the parallel conflicts within and outside school systems – in particular, the tensions in distribution, recontextualisation and evaluation of curricular knowledge. Second, to demonstrate the breakdowns and breakthroughs that are intrinsic to most policy shifts as well as the schizophrenic desires for different subjectivities to be articulated in pedagogic discourses, the study investigates the assemblage of reform initiatives in Hong Kong throughout recent years. This investigation centres around the controversial school subject of Liberal Studies (LS), which was in place since 2009, and its sudden demise after the mass social unrest in 2019. This narrative provides an alternative account of a high-performing East Asian educational regime. Beneath the surface of stellar economic and educational achievement is the crisis-ridden tendency of a neoliberal regime: growing inequality; social fragmentation; existential anxiety; and political polarisation – in short, the price paid for the Asian miracle. In the opening section, the methodological style of ‘theory as method’ inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1994) is introduced. An account is given of the historical origins of ‘pedagogic mis-governance’. Despite sovereignty transfer in 1997, the ambivalent boundary of ‘one country, two systems’ has intensified conflicts and yet creates new possibilities in the broader society, while power relations between and within groups inherited from the colonial past and neoliberal global capitalist order have not been weakened. The machine of education reform in Hong Kong since the late 1970s has no doubt paralleled the ‘catch-up’ features of many East Asian economies, but also contains within itself unresolved agonies which pave the way for the crises and impasses as exhibited in Hong Kong. The paradox of pedagogic mis-governance is best illustrated through the experiment of introducing LS as a core subject in the post-2009 new senior secondary curriculum. Using Derrida’s work, I elaborate on the nature of distribution of knowledge, theorising why a weakly framed curriculum like LS is always open to transgression. However, the subversive power of knowledge is limited by the evaluative rules through high-stakes public assessment and legal-juridical regulations. The increased level of state re-regulation reached its climax after the government decided to invalidate an extremely controversial exam question in 2020 along with the reform subject LS into a new subject called Citizenship and Social Development (CSD) in September 2021. The aftermath of pedagogic mis-governance is the emergence of a totally pedagogised society (TPS). Education is highlighted as a ‘security’ challenge and splitting of the subject, that is, the schizophrenic tension between the desire for ‘critical thinking’ and ‘multiple perspectives’, and the libidinal drive for ‘awareness of national security’. The TPS, therefore, portends a precarious and unknown educational future. This study contributes to the critical studies of education in three significant ways. First, the postcolonial, East Asian context provides not only the epistemic sources for theorising, but supplies what I call ‘hermeneutic’ resources, which prompt us to revisit the intellectual roots of some minor, ferociously difficult work from the North/West – for example, Basil Bernstein’s sociology of education and his under-developed theories. Second, research practice, as a form of decolonisation, also means a critical reflection upon the inbuilt defects of most Western/Northern concepts and theories, and it takes courage to ‘creolise’ them in the light of the East Asian empirical context. Third, through a meta-dialogue with the poststructural theories of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, this study contributes ‘theory as method’ as an emerging research approach to using Bernstein’s sociological oeuvre. In this approach, the researcher is not merely collecting data to analyse, but also to develop and use concepts in order to expediate thinking. Furthermore, this data collection method perceives data as shifting and changing in accordance with the constitution of our non-static empirical world.