A journey into silence: students, stakeholders and the impact of a strategic Governmental Policy Document in the UK

Abstract

For our analysis we draw upon Macherey's essay 'The text says what is does not say' (in Walder 1990) where he argues for the legitimacy of interrogating a text for 'what it tacitly implies, what it does not say … for in order to say anything there are things which must not be said' (Ibid 217, his italics). As with society, all works have their margins – the incompleteness that reveals their birth and production … ' What is important in the work is what it does not say … what the work cannot say … because there the elaboration of the utterances is acted out in a sort of journey to silence' (Ibid 218). Our critical analysis of the Government e-learning strategy (2005) reveals that rather than harnessing technology to empower the typically disenfranchised within the educational debate, it is those very stakeholders at the margins who are silenced whilst the interests of those with institutional and economic power are given voice. Our analysis will show that rather than creating a stakeholder society, Government through its policy documents positions the already disempowered as either silent or deficit and our conclusions suggest that rather than a discourse of transformation, 'regulation not education' (Lillis 2001), is the real goal of the dominant stakeholders.