Reframing educational governance and its crisis through the ‘totally pedagogised society’

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the critical policy studies of educational governance and its crisis, through canvassing Basil Bernstein’s concept of the ‘totally pedagogised society’ (TPS). The TPS witnesses not only the growth of transnational private actors, but also the disjuncture between global and national agendas of reform, on the governance of knowledge and subjectivity. This argument is illustrated through a court case surrounding the invalidation of a history exam question in Hong Kong, which occurred after the 2019 social unrest. At the heart of this crisis is a dislocation of pedagogic discourse. The history exam can be considered as an indirect outcome of recontextualising the global policy imaginary of producing subjects of ‘critical thinking’ and ‘knowledge economy’, but it is incommensurate with China’s regulative discourse, that is, to govern the political consciousness of its postcolonial subjects and legitimise its rule through pedagogic means. The concept of TPS considers the other side of a high-performing regime in Asia: the crisis of reform, the return of a strong state, the evolving power and control relations inside/outside the education system, and the rising tensions between pedagogic agents/agencies, in a period of rapid social change as revealed in Hong Kong today.