Cultural Compromise? The fate of the eighth Mayer Key Competency

[Extract] In recent decades, major re-structuring of work practices has occurred and continual, sometimes urgent, change has become an established feature of working life in Australia and in other industrialised economies (Kalantzis & Cope, 1994). Workers arc now expected to be multi-skilled, creative, adaptable, capable of autonomous decision making, and responsive to technological, organisational and market contingencies. Identification with negotiated purposes and workplace culture is also expected (Kalantzis & Cope, 1994; Bernstein, 1996). Accompanying the changes in work practices and the increasing emphasis on workplace culture as a mechanism of motivation has been 'a much publicised (and criticised) rhetoric about education as the key to economic recovery—the means to make Australia the clever country' (Wyatt-Smith & Burke, 1996, p. 43). Underpinning this rhetoric was the assumption of an unproblematic link between education and improved economic performance in conditions of intensifying global competition (Luke, 1992—93). A succession of Australian ministerial documents, government reports and education authority statements have taken up this rhetoric about education as an instrument of economic policy, insisting that educational reform is a key to increasing competitiveness and productivity in the international marketplace, particularly in the Asian region (e.g. Asian Studies Council, 1988; Garnaut, 1989; Ingleson, 1989).