This symposium is concerned with crises in educational policy and rhetoric, both contemporary and historical. Education policy is defined broadly and can refer to political and/or public debates about schools, policy documents or political decisions that lead or have led to changes in schools and education. In the symposium we aim to identify motives, typical sites of thought, key patterns of argumentation and language use in different political regimes. We will also focus on practices that emerge from political rhetoric about education. Persuasion in education policy also involves control of the political process, exclusion or inclusion of parties in the design of governance, organisation and institutions for long-term and systematic influence.
Crisis, on the other hand, often denotes an important moment when decisive change is imminent. A crisis can typically be a decisive moment in a narrative, with great potential for an undesirable outcome. The German historical theorist Reinhart Koselleck combines crisis, critique and fantasy. Critique expresses the possibility that things could have been different. Moreover, criticism involves having or acquiring a historical consciousness through the imagination. The study of political crises, therefore, involves the study of political imagination, the critiques that emerge, the judgments and political outcomes that result from new political judgments.

Koselleck, R (2000): Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. MIT Press