what kind of world do we want for our children?

what kind of people are we? what kind of people are we becoming? what kind of people do we want to be? what kind of world do we want for our children? fundamental questions of identity, relationships, and social conditions i recall (as accurately as i can from this distance) from Gee, Hull, and Lankshear's (1996) new work order: behind the language of new capitalism.

i am wearied by the arguments and narratives which circulate as the genres of justification for market-driven public service governance. i am wearied by the practical and technical rationality which underpins and is maintained and reproduced by those genres. i am wearied by the smug, self-interested certainties (the raised eyebrows, the patronizing tones, and incredulous sighs) of the public service managers, and their steely refusal to recognize the lie of the totally practical response to market demands, whatever the human cost. i am wearied by the management discourses which not only reduce public need to a purely logistical problem with a practical and technical solution, which not only reduce public servants to unitized, commodified resources for cost effective distribution, which not only reduce socially connected human beings to hollowed out, atomic means to ends, but also seek to engage those human beings as the fully responsible agents of their own dehumanization.

i am wearied and i am angry.

i am angry that so many of us who work in the public services as teachers, nurses, social workers, and many, many more, suffer the effects of these management practices (routinized language uses and the actions they produce) - the ways our personal and professional identities, relationships, and activities are hollowed out and reduced to things, the ways the management arguments and narratives produce and distribute versions of our working world which we don't recognize and we don't value, and the bewildering mixture of formal and informal styles adopted by managers, who hoodwink us into engaging in our daily work with the people we care for, in accordance with rules, procedures, and schemes which are the products and producers of marketized, consumerist attitudes and values we don't share.

i am angry that 6 social workers have been sacked by the senior management of Birmingham Children's Services. I am angry that a Staffordshire hospital management was more concerned to meet its targets than care for sick people. i am angry that governments have been consciously developing the neo-liberal discourses and strategic management practices necessary for the justification of the development of marketized public services, designed to achieve value for public money rather than meet public need.

i am angry that even those who are suffering - and causing others to suffer as an effect of the necessity to work in these conditions - refuse to recognize the lie of the strategically managed, competitive, entrepreneurial society, which encourages the narrow pursuit of individual, private wealth over the public requirement to meet the real, concrete physical and social needs of our fellow human beings.

we need to challenge the linguistic, material, and economic logics which underpin our society. we need to talk a different talk, walk a different walk, and be prepared to pay for a realistic alternative. we can't have a low tax economy and a properly funded, genuinely 'public' public services. we need to make ourselves personally poorer to have a richer experience of own and others humanity.

what kind of people have we become? a people who have grown desperate to hang on to what is ours at any cost to our fellows. a people prepared to accept the lie that we can have personal wealth and a secure, fair, and compassionate society.

let's challenge the lie whenever we hear it repeated in any of its many and different forms. let's start living again, free from the fear of losing what is ours, by giving what is ours privately, and enjoying what is ours publicly.