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part of the landscape. Former Federal Education minister Julia Gillard, in a speech to the National Press Club, defended the creation of a website that compared school testing results nationally by arguing that underperforming schools should be understood in terms of teacher inability rather than in terms of societal barriers to success. In short, those with vested interests in education appear to be engaged in an ideological battle for control of the soul of education (Deleuze, 1992). That the educational world is contested is unarguable, but there is little doubt that students move within interesting landscapes—perhaps fundamentally different from what their parents may have experienced.
In Western Australia, neoliberal and performative conceptualisations of education are increasingly seducing governments, policy makers and educationalists, and within these frameworks students are taught to know themselves in narrow and limiting ways. The good student has become part of this performative conceptualisation and is ever more part of the claims to truth and defence of action being made at governmental and bureaucratic levels. Currently, education debate in Australia is dominated by measurement and by the fear of slipping in rank relative to other countries’ levels of achievement (McGaw, 2010). This focus entails all the trappings of the disciplinary institution—the hierarchical observation, the normalising judgement, and the examination—yet it seems to move beyond the level and intensity of the “disciplined” classroom of the early 20th century.
The Performative Culture of Contemporary Education
In late-capitalist times, education has become an increasingly contested space that is utilised by governments as a major political issue (Ball, 2008). This contestation has seen the repositioning of education through viewpoints “dominated by the perspective of economics,” exemplified by the understanding of education as the “producer of labour and skills and values, like enterprise and entrepreneurship, and of commercial ‘knowledge’ ” (Ball, 2008, p. 11). In other words, the terrain of education is changing. The competing interests and philosophies of education’s social