The political economy of educational "reform" in Australia

The past two decades in Australia have been remarkable for the movements and transformations taking place within the political and economic spheres. Yet, as Phillip Wexler (1987, 12) has remarked, "despite the salience of education to this linked series of these broad multi-form transformations the nexus has remained unconnected by many current observers." We would argue that few analyses have attempted to explore the dialectic between the nature of educational reform and its relationship to the state, the economy, ideology and human agency within the wider global context. While a constant unfolding of educational "reforms" have punctuated the education landscape in Australia since the collapse of the Keynesian settlement in the early 1970s, what is central to the changes in the 1980s is the depth of the restructuring and reorganization taking place.