Competition, freedom and choice: Contextualising private education

Propagators and defenders of privatisation processes in education often resort to the ideas of ‘competition’, ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ to argue for the alleged advantages of privatisation in education. My lecture will (i) look at how market forces and non-state actors are legitimised in the field of education; (ii) illuminate how consumption practices can reinforce individual experiences of, and desires for, ‘freedom’; and (iii) relate these processes back to diverging basic conceptions of freedom that demarcate different views of the individual, the society, the state, and the market. Occasionally, the lecture will draw on findings from my research project on private education in urban China.