This introduction sets the scene by exploring the richness of the diversity of learners and critically examines the imperative for educators within the current educational climate to employ pedagogies that transform learning experiences, particularly for those who continue to be marginalised and are increasingly disengaged from education. The aim of the introduction is to lay the foundation for the significance of supporting educators in pedagogical decisions that prioritise and are socially just and responsive to the inclusion of all learners, thereby engaging and empowering learners as active co-designers and self-regulators of respectful, meaningful and impactful learning. In scaffolding educator efficacy, the introduction encourages self-reflective strategies for sustained critique of applying inclusive, responsive, enabling and socially just pedagogical approaches within their educational practice.

This chapter considers the major causes of mortality and morbidity for adults and describes the significant burden of these non-communicable diseases, their risk factors and potential public health action. While the conditions discussed are relevant to other age groups, those included – cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, mental health problems and long COVID – have particular relevance for the large proportion of the population of working age. This chapter also focuses on specific actions or policies which can be employed to address each of these non-communicable diseases.

The causes of ill health and death are changing and, as we live longer, new health-preventable problems emerge, bringing new challenges. Improving health (physical, mental or both) and promoting general well-being remain major priorities.

Just as important, the difference in health status between rich and poor continues to grow. At a global level, the picture is even more complex. Although there is some evidence that life expectancy is beginning to plateau in developed countries such as the UK, the biggest potential to improve health still lies in addressing inequality between or within countries.

Therefore, this chapter:

• summarizes the models of health improvement that are prevalent today;

• introduces a combined conceptual model to describe the factors affecting health in modern times; and

• presents some case studies of interventions designed to improve health which offer important insight and learning.

This chapter argues that our subjective experiences ߝ how we experience the world and understand ourselves within it ߝ are just as closely governed as our objective conduct, discussed in the last chapter. Whether they realise it or not, contemporary teachers are expected to play a significant role in this form of regulation. After all, teachers are now not simply responsible for transmitting a given curriculum and keeping children in line; they are de facto psychologists, responsible for the mental health, regulation and development of their pupils.

This chapter argues that the issue of ‘truth’ has played a foundational role, not only within the discipline of philosophy but also within many different aspects of Australian culture. However, there seems to be little agreement on what it really is, and while some philosophers contend that truth is a meaningless concept ߝ a linguistic mirage ߝ most would argue there’s something of importance there ߝ but what is it?Even if we struggle to determine the real nature of truth ߝ as we did with the real nature of right and wrong in Chapter 15 ߝ at least we structure our culture, our knowledges and our school curricula around stuff we know to be unequivocally true … or do we? Arguably, many of the assumptions we make, often derived from five centuries of European colonialism, do not stand up to close scrutiny. They are often ‘truths’ that suit particular interests of the powerful, and subtly act to reinforce their worldview.

The working life of educators ߝ whether in schools or universities ߝ has become dauntingly complex, with the relentless focus on standards and testing, pressure to ensure equitable outcomes, a managerialist working environments, ever-growing professional responsibilities and expectations, increasingly heterogeneous classrooms and fairly relentless media criticism, to name only a fewissues. The job requires continual self-reflection, a commitment to lifelong learning and an ongoing dedication to the profession in order to remain viable at all. Making sense of it all ߝ Making Sense of Mass Education ߝ is not an easy task. Hopefully this book can help a little.

A quick glance through history demonstrates that it has not always been an unbroken chain of human happiness, to put it mildly.Different individuals, groups and peoples have faced persecution for any number of reasons: where they came from, how they looked, their perceived (dis)ability, who or what they believed in, who they loved, how they identified, the family they were born into, or, in some cases, for no reason at all. It is against this backdrop that our current set of human rights has emerged. While this chapter focuses primarilyon children’s rights and their relationship with education and educator obligations, it is necessary to understand the history of rights in order to understand why human rights, and particularly children’s rights, are so important to the work we do as educators.

Of all the ways in which humans have chosen to divide themselves, none has a history as problematic as race. This concept has significant implications for almost every aspect of contemporary human conduct, irrespective of what ‘race’ we identify with, or even are deemed to belong to. This is particularly so in the field of education.

This chapter will look at the complicated history of race as well as some of the current challenges being faced. In order to describe the complex issues within this important area, a wide range of interrelated terms are used. Probably the most important of these terms is the underpinning notion of ‘othering’ ߝ that is, thinking about a certain person or group as not ‘one of us’... as ‘the other’. This important concept is also very relevant to discussions of gender and sexualities, so it is discussed further in Chapter 3.

This chapter makes the case for the importance of philosophy as a discipline in its own right, as a subject area vital to the better understanding of education and as a set of self-reflective practices that can make us better teachers. Philosophy is largely concerned with those areas of study and speculation beyond the reach of empirical analysis, addressing problems about how we construct knowledge, how we produce a just society and how we determine ‘right’ from ‘wrong’. Its central research methodology is simply to think with clarity. The significance of this discipline has not been limited to answering abstract questions about the human condition; philosophy has been instrumental in both making us into rational and reflective citizens and framing the ideas behind our entire system of mass schooling.

More often than not, the advent of contemporary information and communication technologies is presented as one of the great success stories of contemporary schooling, and while ICT has the potential to be a transformative force in education, the issues are complicated and the outcomes far from certain. The field is often divided into those who grew up with such technologies ߝ ‘digital natives’/students ߝ and those who have come to these technologies at a later date ߝ ‘digital immigrants’/teachers. This binary articulates a central problem within a power relation where teachers are normally expected to know more than those they teach. Furthermore, such new technologies do not simply represent mechanisms for accessing more information more quickly and in more interesting ways. By stepping outside the domain of traditional linear texts, traditional understandings of literacy start to lose their meaning. New digital technologies necessitate the adoption of the notion of ‘multiliteracies’, a plural understanding of literacy that encompasses a range of other modes of contemporary meaning-making ߝ hypertext, audio, video and so on ߝ which are integral to the digital universe.

Given that feminist arguments have been around for decades, and that there has been progress towards gender equality, many would argue that concerns over gender have been resolved ߝ a battle won. However, declaring victory in this manner seems very premature. After all, the evidence suggests that a significant number of wider questions still attract attention: just what is gender and what is the best theoretical framework for approaching it? What roles do schools play in its construction? Do we still have to go down the ‘men are to blame for everything’ route? Why should schooling have anything to do with gender identity?

This chapter will unpack the complex and changing relationship between gender and education. In order to accomplish this, it will link each of the most common myths in the area with one of the three waves of feminism that characterised the twentieth century. As with the arguments surrounding social class, it will ultimately be suggested that explanations relying upon a master discourse ߝ not ‘the economy’ again, but in this case patriarchy ߝ a unified system of male domination ߝ are outdated.Similarly, it is argued that the view of gender as a binary of man/woman based on anatomy at birth has had its day.

This chapter examines the rather ambiguous notion of alternative education. To some, sending a child to a Catholic school constitutes an alternative education; to others, nothing short of a total rejection of the central parameters of the mass school deserves the label ߝ such as the elimination of timetables, authority relations, organised curricula, fixed learning goals, even the notion that pupils are to be schooled in any way at all. It’s a subject that often engenders no little passion in those who embrace the categorisation, and no little ridicule among those who do not. Strange though some of the alternative education options might seem, they are all worthy of serious consideration … but what exactly are they?

This chapter argues that educators need to have a good grasp of all the various forms of pre-adulthood we take for granted, such as ‘the child’ and ‘youth’. These categories are the focus of a range of different disciplines, most of which found their explanatory models in nature itself. As such, while the behaviour of children and youth may be deemed to require explanation, the very existence of the categories themselves does not. The issues raised in this chapter concern the degree to which childhood and youth are actually socially constructed categories serving particular social functions. Of greatest interest here are the ways in which childhood and youth are both artefacts of, and vehicles for, social governance.

We are living in the era of educational data and standardised testing. As one teacher puts it, ‘Boom, and it’s all about data!’ (Spina 2021). This chapter explores the consequence of ‘datafication’, including how the possibilities of social governance have increased exponentially. Contemporary governance has always been about the management of data, whether this involves making particular populations intelligible through continual assessment, or by constructing ever-increasing categories of difference. However, the ever-increasing need to instantly correlate almost unfathomable amounts of data means we are no longer subjected to ‘an avalanche of printed numbers’ (Hacking 1990, p. 189) as in the early nineteenth century, but rather a worldwide, mile-high tsunami. The potential of governance is moving far beyond those envisaged within earlier iterations of individuationߝdifferentiationߝnormalisation outlined in Chapter 5. The datafication of education ߝ and life in general ߝ means that the possibilities of correlation, differentiation and intervention are now almost limitless.

A lot has been written recently about the emergence of a ‘global society’ in which economies, cultures and political systems of different nations have started to coalesce. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these commentaries have often taken the form of binary debates ߝ ‘globalisation is all-encompassing’ vs ‘globalisation is pretty irrelevant’; ‘globalisation is the glorious road to the future’ vs ‘globalisation is the road to hell’; ‘globalisation is a fundamentally economic issue’ vs ‘globalisation is really about cultural homogenisation’. Generally speaking, these binaries aren’t helpful, and the phenomenon of globalisation deserves a less reductive and more thoughtful analysis, as it increasingly affects us all ߝ particularly within the sphere of education.

This chapter argues that the relationship between popular culture and the classroom remains a contentious issue. Its presence has been used as a symbol of how much our culture has declined and how educationally corrupted our schools have become, while its absence has been used to suggest our schools are out of touch with their primary constituency ߝ young people. This is not a simple issue to address; even the notion of ‘culture’ itself is subject to considerable disagreement.

In this chapter, neoliberalism will be examined in more detail in relation to the ways in which it has reorganised and reconstituted schooling and education. Neoliberalism will be approached from a sociological perspective as the prevailing ‘mentality’ or ‘rationality’ of liberal rule in the West today. From this standpoint, neoliberalism can be understood as a systematic way of thinking about governance that focuses on neoliberalism’s new understanding of the market and its significance for all domains in society, including education. Marketisation will be considered from the sociological perspective as a major ‘technique’ of the neoliberal formula for rule.The chapter will discuss the competitive marketisation of schools; the construction of parents as consumers and teachers as entrepreneurs; and the philosophical underpinning of mass education by the logic of the free market. Of equal importance, it will consider the ‘performative’ character of neoliberalism.

This is the fourth edition of Making Sense of Mass Education. It continues the process of covering more issues than each preceding versions of the book: it updates aspects of the data, it discusses more recent research, it offers more nuanced assessment of specific problems and it does all this within a parallel digital environment ߝ one that provides additional ideas, activities and ways of seeing and understanding. While all these elements are significant, they do not really constitute the most important reason for writing a further edition of the book.

Changes to the field of education have not slowed since the publication of the third edition, which introduced new important discussions of Gonski and school funding equity, the debates over NAPLAN and school ranking tables, arguments over the Australian curriculum, the rise in interest in alternative forms of education and global concerns over the ethics of big data use. Of course, this edition offers an updated contemporary assessment of all these topics; however it also provides an extensive discussion of the important and rapidly changing area of schooling and sexuality, as well as a discussion of the field of children’s rights and the increasing marketisation of schools and its relationship with the professional life of teachers.