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an increase in paperwork, an increase in surveillance of teachers’ work, and a developing gap in schools between senior staff and teaching staff (Ball, 2008). In Australia this performative culture has also seen schools subscribe to corporate thinking, in which effective organisational reform is seen as best delivered by the market. As a result, many schools are now following business models that use the media and marketing as competitive strategies (Meadmore & McWilliam, 2001). The privileging of competition in education is not new; however, the high stakes involved, the relentless surveillance, and the fluidity of competition are key features of the performative culture and are critical in establishing the performative self of both teachers and students. Writing about the experience in the United States, Maxine Greene argued that
The experience of the student within this performative culture has largely been forgotten or ignored by many policy makers, who focus instead on buzzwords such as efficiency, accountability, and economy. This book examines the ways that the ideal of the good student is written and performed as scripts that young people in schools enact within these new terrains. These scripts are often contradictory and conflicting, but what is clear is that the good student is framed more and more in terms of performative measures. The growing pervasive impact of high-stakes testing is also a reference point for these articulations. In policy, if not in practice, students are measured in terms of their performances on various tests associated with image and competition; this is increasingly colouring and normalising the terrain of the good.
It is worth recalling Foucault’s argument that living life as an aesthetic practice could be seen as a practice of freedom (Foucault, 1990c). May argued that when life is lived as an aesthetic practice, it offers three freedoms “that may yet constitute the most important legacy of