ABSTRACT

Accounts of neo-liberal change in education often stress that the orthodoxies associated with neo-liberalism do not so much eradicate the practices they seek to replace, as incorporate them, selectively, in a new framework (Bernstein, 1990; Apple, 1995). It could be added, however, that such incorporation is rarely complete. The practices targeted for recuperation are not always and entirely amenable to it, and however persuasively dominant new discourses seek to make use of the resources of previous educational cultures, there remain residual elements that resist incorporation, often to the extent that they provide material for a practical critique of the new.