Educational Chauvinism

The “education” I’m referring to is executive education and by “chauvinism” I mean a fervent, and possibly narrow minded, support for a cause. After the last post I felt it necessary to justify further my claim about framings. My use of  “framing” represents both a distinct adoption of a conventional discourse and its associated ideology, as well as an acknowledgement of the contingency of that frame as a representational system. Education re-presents the world just as much as politics re-presents the world. My point is that we – and I’m speaking from within an education establishment, working as I do at a university-based management school - sometimes forget about the representational powers of education, either assuming them to be neutral or, worse still, invisible or entirely transparent. I’m claiming that it is often only through novel framings (in this case, political) within an established and conventional discourse (i.e. education) that one sees the inadequacies of existing framings. My substitution of a political framing for an educational framing is an extension of my adoption of a poststructuralist interpretation of executive education; and the use of “chauvinism” betrays my interest in radicalizing executive education: part of the strong and political activist sense of the phrase “knowledge into action.”  The radicalizing agenda is wholly dictated by applying a political, not educational, frame to the hegemonic practices of conventional executive education. There can be no other ‘darker forces’ of propaganda or hidden militancy of my re-framing, outside of a political conception in which such conspiratorial motives already make sense.