Bindings

And so it has come to this, that the words of a decade of digging are now in neatly typeset leaves of paper; their power is bound, the runes enchained. Somewhere in the heart of the old Queensway, in some modern sweatshop, the deep blue and gold is being crafted into bindings.

And the number of their pages is 313, a strangely evocative number. It is as if the Trinity were made One and Three again. It is as if oddness sauntered down the road and stopped to admire a postbox.

Whatever it is, it is done. It is finished. The covers will enclose the text, and then the text will be somebody else's problem or delight in the long years ahead.

Nobody Expects

The spinach inquisition, perhaps? A source of strength and amusement, and yet serious in its issues.

The examiners noted the ambitious nature of the project, the brazen attempt to tackle an extremely large scope, and the excellent and informative presentation by the candidate. They therefore require only two things for completeness: 1) the candidate should change the thesis title to reflect the large scope better; and 2) the candidate should edit the last few paragraphs so as to be less modest about his findings and contributions to new knowledge.

England expects, and the duty is done; nobody expects, and it is done anyway.

Back to the Future

My thesis amendments have been accepted. And now they will do two things to me: they will put me to the question to find out if I really did what I did, and they will examine my ignorance to see if it is more illuminating than the ignorance of others.

In practical terms, what this means is that I have to become an expert on being me; I have to read all the stuff I thought I'd read from 1995 onwards. And I have to remember it even though a lot of it is no longer worth remembering. Sigh.

Thornies

And so it was that I finished indexing the many branches and roots and twigs and other woody-woodened-he bits of the huge plant that had bracketed my life and entrellised my days.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not the tree of eternal life. Anyone who has read the old tales knows this.

Dissing

Writing a dissertation, and then having to make corrections to it which are mutually exclusive because you have multiple examiners, is loathsome activity. And the worst part is after you've done the corrections, you find yourself correcting the corrections while realising you're never going to please everyone.

Advice from supervisor: don't let the examiners re-read everything. Just write enough to keep them satisfied, point it out to them, and hope they won't notice it no longer coheres.

Growl.

Metathetical

It seems so long ago that this was written. I shall also note that when I wrote this, I had switched off the Anglophone part of my brain.

When this research project was first mooted, the general hypothesis looked rather straightforward. The state has its objectives, in a strong state the various instrumentalities of the state will include schools in a centralised school system, schools will therefore be used to pursue state objectives. In an age of globalisation, schools will be used to prepare citizens to reach outward, to anchor them homeward, and to insulate them from unwanted influences and effects.

As can be seen, the exploration did not exactly produce such a straightforward single-thread narrative structure. States sometimes have conflicting or irreconcilable objectives, states have past histories and unique situational needs; schools are not completely faceless and mindless instruments of policy; citizens have their own minds. In this study of even a relatively tiny state, the number of sociocultural influences competing to make the most of historical and geographical circumstances quickly multiplied into a complex tapestry of threads.

According to most of the literature on the globalisation of education, two main types of motivation orientation persist. Either the world will follow common economic goals and education will be used primarily to develop human capital to obtain the most from the resultant homogeneous and ubiquitous economic system; or the world will follow common socially progressive goals and education will be used primarily to develop human beings, regardless of race, language or religion, based on justice and equality, so as to achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for all.

Thesis

It has 265 pages and concludes that educational research, without rich historical context to hold it together, is mostly useless in analysing the broad sweep of state-level or international education. What have I done, and why have I done it? Sigh.