Abstract
This chapter offers a Lacanian psychoanalytic critique of the World Bank’s global educational policy for curricular reform. Looking at curricular discourse as a symptom, this analysis performs a critical reading of the enunciations of the text identifying their origins and effects in the Lacanian registers of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. Asking questions such as “What are the conditions that the framing of the policy establish for the emergence of the subject?”, this chapter analyzes the interplay of symptom, language, and subject, as expressed in the transference between the discourse and the reader. The chapter closes with a discussion of the psychic consequences of defining education in transactional terms that disavow subjectivity.
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Notes
- 1.
One wonders whether the term “neoliberal” still applies, given the now universal and unescapable marketization of both private and public life, where truly there is no alternative. Dismissing one of its central pillars, that of freedom of choice, liberalism in its present form is no longer “neo” (a revitalization of its central assumptions), but rather post-liberalism.
- 2.
For Education , the 25 specific competencies are mostly related to abilities for management and implementation of educational trends.
- 3.
In contrast, for Lacan , the first virtue of knowledge is the capacity to face that which is not evident (Seminar IV).
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Murillo, F.M. (2018). Analyzing Symptoms in Policy: A Psychoanalytic Reading. In: A Lacanian Theory of Curriculum in Higher Education. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99765-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99765-0_4
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