Abstract
The Cambridge academic Stefan Collini wrote recently: ‘One of the most fascinating yet elusive aspects of cultural change is the way certain ideals and arguments acquire an almost self-evident power at particular times …’ (Collini 2011). In relation to political discourse on British schooling at the turn of the twenty-first century, ‘standards’ fits this description. By then it had acquired the status of a political myth — that’s to say, ‘depoliticised speech’, as in the work of Roland Barthes (Barthes 1973: 142). For much of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the notion that ‘standards’ — held, largely, to reside in the results of written tests — were falling and that the actions of successive governments would raise them went virtually unchallenged in the political mainstream.
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Wagg, S. (2014). Whiteboard Jungle. In: Wagg, S., Pilcher, J. (eds) Thatcher’s Grandchildren?. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137281555_10
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