The ideation, naturalization, and invisibilization of Discourses in Italy’s tracked secondary education: a critical scalar account

1 Introduction

Social and political institutions are simultaneously durable and under constant revision. In the same way that smaller collective entities like sports teams, brands, businesses, and schools manage to maintain immutable identities despite the continual changing of all of their internal components (Agha 2011; Gee 1990) so do nations and large bureaucratic systems. The case in point here is the tracked Italian secondary school system, the basic structure of which was born alongside the Italian Republic in the image of classist nineteenth century society, and whose deeply entrenched underlying structure remains intact despite reframings and rebrandings over the past 160 years. Similar to many (if not most) European school systems, Italy’s secondary education system’s three branches, tracks, or tiers include an academic track, aimed at preparation for university study (called lyceum or ‘liceo’), technical institutes (which offer economic and industrial career-oriented education), and vocational schools (which offer training in specialized trades). These three tracks – despite technically being equal in that diplomas from each type of school allow access to university – have distinct curricula, are associated with distinct social types, attract different demographics of students, are hierarchically ordered, are not uniformly represented across post-secondary life trajectories, and are subject to distinct reforms (Caroselli 2022; Leone-Pizzighella 2018, 2022; MIM 2024; Nello et al. 2008; Romito 2014).

Educational sociologist Emiliano Grimaldi writes about “discomforts” experienced by students, parents, teachers, administrators, and researchers who are wrestling with apparently “self-evident”, “indisputable”, “necessary, obvious, naturally benign” (2019: 10) aspects of modern-day Italian education. The division of secondary education – which both sows and is sown from an assumption about social class differences and imagined futures of work – has many of these characteristics, as has been argued in Italy and well beyond (see Caroselli 2022; Collins 2009; Fordham and Ogbu 1986; Ingram 2018; Larsen 2024; Mehan et al. 1996; Rampton 2006; Romito 2016; Romito 2018; van de Weerd 2023; Willis 1977). Social class division in education is both extremely influential and extremely difficult to interrupt, with its means and ends so well-aligned as to make the division of schools and students seem inevitable.

However, if we look closely at the cyclical reproduction of the divided school system across various related Discourses (Gee 1990), we can start to chip away at its seemingly smooth veneer and parse its component parts. In making these considerations, I draw on the concept of scale (Blommaert 2007) – particularly the activity scales of ideation, naturalization, and invisibilization – as a means of conceptualizing the metadiscursive regime which creates and maintains the tracked Italian school system. Between these scales of discursive activity, we find various forms of emancipatory, ethnographic, and carnivalesque critique (Pietikäinen 2016) which emerge from and inform the activities in and across these scales. I argue here that critique acts as a metapragmatic hinge which allows (aspects of) Discourses which have been invisibilized to be rendered visible or in some way perceptible and, possibly, rescaled.

The present paper contributes to the scholarship on school division and social class reproduction by exploring how particular ways of speaking about school and students are incorporated into education policy (ideated), actively upheld and normalized (naturalized), and then eventually absorbed into the fabric of an institution (invisibilized) where they continue to operate but become so hegemonic that they are no longer mentioned by name. I show here how the ‘straight talk’ (Khalil et al. 2023) and script-flipping (Carr 2011) found in critique (Pietikäinen 2016) can help to uncover elements of this veiled or invisibilized Discourse and make (some of) it available for reuptake and re-ideation. In light of Grimaldi’s (2019) ‘discomforts’, this approach to thinking about education policy may shed light on how old ideas continue to take up space in contemporary education.

2 Theoretical framework: scales of metalinguistic labor and scale-jumping Discourses

Gee’s (1990, 2000, 2015) concept of Discourse (with a capital D) encompasses a wide range of overlapping social theories and can be defined roughly as

a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network’, or to signal (that one is playing) a socially meaningful ‘role’. (1990: 143)

Discourses are therefore inherently ideological, power-laden, and hierarchical, but also embedded, contextual and relative. A complex web of Discourses sustains a system or institution such as the tracked Italian school system, as well as the figures who comprise it and the social roles that they occupy. These Discourses are found in written and oral texts (forms of discourse, with a lowercase d), across legal, political, educational, social, and personal spheres, and these Discourses can be recontextualized and modified in surprising and even apparently conflicting ways as they circulate and create “ripples” (Aderet-German and Lefstein 2021; see also Spillane 2006). In order to examine one slice of this web of shifting, interconnected, layered Discourses and their contexts, I draw on the framework of scale.

Scale affords a consideration of communicative acts (i.e., discourse) both as “uniquely contextualized, one-time phenomena” and as “coher[ing] with previous traditions of making sense [and] their connection to shared, enduring patterns of understanding” (Blommaert 2007: 3), which we might characterize as Discourses. Indexical connections between scales can link momentary events (low-scales) to durable processes (high scales) via shared modes of living, believing, speaking, and understanding. Scale affords a means of pushing beyond micro-macro, local-global, low-high dyads (Blommaert et al. 2015; Clonan-Roy et al. 2016; Lemke 2000), and recent work has suggested they need not be hierarchically arranged, and instead that “[t]here could also be rhizomatic relations where the influences are nonlinear, unpredictable, layered, and multidirectional” (Canagarajah and De Costa 2016: 3).

In light of Blommaert’s (2007) reflections on pragmatic indexing (Silverstein 2006) and the retrievability of meaning from one scale for reproduction at another scale, I treat scales here as cyclical, spiraling, or rotating rather than as strictly nested, stacked, vertical, linear, or hierarchical. This involves “decoupling” scales from spaces and places (Canagarajah 2016: 53), especially in light of the inevitable mismatch of the function of scales across diverse contexts. Given this, whereas education policy and language policy scholars have used scale to explore the types of policy activities happening in spatiotemporal spaces and places (Hult 2015, 2017; Scollon 2008; Scollon and Scollon 2004), I consider scales in terms of the characteristics of the discourse occurring within them, such as talk which is momentary and localized as opposed to durable and widespread (Blommaert 2007: 6). Instead of applying these characteristics to actual settings (like classrooms vs. courtrooms vs. media studios), I apply them to discursive transformations that have those characteristics. The scales that I draw on here are as follows:

Ideation: discursive or semiotic activity marking the “beginning” or the calling-into-being of a way of understanding as determined by the vantage point of a given scalar project (Carr and Lempert 2016). Ideation does not represent an absolute beginning, but one relative to a given time-space and vantage point. This scale involves the performative speech acts required for the ideation of a given Discourse, such as a legal decree, policy text, political manifesto, or similar. Being a localized, momentary speech act – however durable and wide-ranging its effects may be – it is considered to engage with a given Discourse at a low level scale. (Blommaert 2007: 5)

Naturalization: a higher scale, consisting of sustained and widespread metalinguistic labor (Carr 2006) which functions to “guard, protect, and patrol […] highly naturalized assumptions” (p. 635). These ‘highly naturalized assumptions’ include Discourses about what is good and correct in a given society, and can include reinforcements of de facto and de jure policies, gatekeeping mechanisms, and popular narratives which contribute to the naturalization or normalization of Discourses ideated at a lower scale. The activity at this scale continually reinforces the givenness or obviousness of a Discourse, system, or institution.

Invisibilization: a still higher scale, where the constructedness and social situatedness of a given Discourse loses visibility or speakability and becomes hegemonic. At this scale, while the hegemonic Discourse may become impossible to retrieve in its entirety, various forms of critique can unveil aspects of it and bring them to a (new) ideation scale for reworking. An invisibilized Discourse may be the (invisible) elephant in the room: causing tension, taking up space, blocking progress, but also difficult to unveil since no one is quite sure where to grab hold or how much of it needs to be unveiled. (see Grimaldi 2019; Lefstein 2013)

I adopt here Pietikäinen's (2016) three types of critique as a means of considering their discursive potential for unveiling and re-scaling elements of a given Discourse which has been invisibilized. Emancipatory critique, the critical examination of a traditional theory or Discourse, has the aim to “liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer 1982: 244 in Pietikäinen 2016: 267). To do this, it engages with naming dualist, antagonistic concepts and relationships (e.g., poor/bourgeoisie) as a means of placing power relations in the foreground and creating awareness of inequality. It “starts with a set view of what seems to be the problem, and with a set of strategies to solve it” (p. 270). Ethnographic critique involves the problematization of given boundaries via the telling of interrelated individual stories, gathering them into collectives which allow for the emergence of new configurations and ways of understanding lived experience. In this way, it rejects the dualism of emancipatory critique and takes a multivocal approach to understanding broader patterns via local or individual experiences. Carnivalesque critique includes the ephemeral, ludic “poking fun” at the status quo as a means of highlighting its absurdity and constructedness (Pietikäinen 2016: 272), providing an alternative view on hegemonic Discourses. This type of critique is often unfinished, partial, and apparently light-hearted, but functions as a means of cracking open the smooth façade of social life and inviting critical reflection on it, often outside of its usual contexts.

These forms of critique serve as metapragmatic hinges, which discursively swivel, flip, or otherwise reorient talk about a given Discourse. Critiques do this via changes in register and other semiotic transformations, as well as via script-flipping. As argued by Blommaert (2007), changes in register (e.g., from casual talk to interview talk) and other semiotic TimeSpace transformations (e.g., from I to we, from specific to general) are part of all up- and down-scales. However, it may behoove us to consider not only how these function in a nested, stacked set of hierarchical scales, but also as a hinge which “outscales” a given Discourse in a less predictable way. Two types of discursive tools which I discuss in light of the data considered here are papo reto – “straight talk” which was used strategically in activist discourse to reframe and “outscale” political speech (Khalil et al. 2023; Silva 2022) – and script-flipping – in which one party uses another party’s own rhetorical tools against them (Carr 2011). These two discursive moves allow us to consider how movement from scale to scale may occur in a non-hierarchical framework.

Thus, this analysis shows how a given big-D Discourse (e.g., “education should be separated”) is ideated, naturalized, and invisibilized via small-d discourse (e.g., interpersonal, mediatic, and institutional texts, utterances, and interactions across a variety of contexts). Once a Discourse becomes hegemonic or invisibilized, I consider how Pietikäinen's (2016) emancipatory, ethnographic, and carnivalesque critiques, as well as the use of different registers, semiotic transformations, and script-flipping within them (Agha 2007; Carr 2011; Khalil et al. 2023) can unveil elements of a hegemonic Discourse and make them available for reuptake at the ideation scale. These three scales of activity, these three forms of critique, and the types of discourse used within them are used as a framework for exploring the Discourses involved in tracked Italian secondary schools.

3 Ethnographic methods and scalar vantage points

With scales, the “vertical dimension of hierarchical ordering and power differentiation” is not framed as natural or given, but as situated and contextual. As Carr and Lempert (2016) argue,

The fact that scaling involves vantage points and the positioning of actors with respect to such vantage points means that there are no ideologically neutral scales, and people and institutions that come out ‘on top’ of scalar exercises often reinforce the distinctions that so ordained them. In other words, the scales that seem most natural to us are intensively institutionalized […] Yet people are not simply subject to preestablished scales; they develop scalar projects and perspectives that anchor and (re)orient themselves. (p. 3)

Thus, the adoption of any vantage point at all both forces us to reject a neutral stance and forces us to focus on only a small slice of a given phenomenon (Jackson 2013). Singh and Spotti (2021) posit that this aspect of scale is useful in that it “allows us to become aware of the particularity of our research and consequentially our own positionality as researchers” (p. 2). An emic, participatory and collaborative role in research affords a partial but intimate view of a given phenomenon, allowing us to begin to understand what has value for whom, which webs of connections nurture each other, and to see beyond surface-level artifacts. By way of a positionality statement, it is therefore relevant to state here that I have been continually invested in the Italian school system for the past fifteen years as an educational researcher, teacher trainer, teacher, student, and parent. The data analyzed here are inevitably affected by the frameworks and footings that these roles have afforded to me.

Data collection for this paper included research in digital archives, ethnographic research, and the analysis of oral and written texts. It draws on the digital archives of the Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana, which contains the original and amended versions of laws, acts, and decrees since the birth of the Italian Republic in 1861 (www.gazzettaufficiale.it). It also draws on ministerial documents, guidelines, and policies published by the Italian Ministry of Education (whose acronyms include MIUR, MPI, MIM) and reports and statistics published by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). The naturalization of Discourses about the tracked secondary school system also draws on linguistic ethnographic research from a doctoral research project in Umbrian upper secondary schools during the 2016–2017 school year (Leone-Pizzighella 2022) and from a postdoctoral participatory action research project in South Tyrolean and Venetan middle schools during the 2022–2023 school year^[1] (Leone-Pizzighella 2021, in press). In each school, I observed 2–3 mornings per week throughout the school year for a total of 330 h of in-class observation in Umbria and 415 h of in-class observation in South Tyrol and Veneto. Fieldnotes were coded with NVivo and selections of audiovisual data were transcribed based on noteworthy moments in class, as documented in the fieldnotes.^[2] Linked to findings from these ethnographic projects, this paper also includes a critical analysis of webpages about upper secondary school selection on the website Unica, a creation of Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government and its re-branding of the Ministry of Instruction, Universities, and Research as the Ministry of Instruction and Merit in 2022. Finally, forms of critique are considered in light of the seminal literary text Letter to a Teacher (Milani 1967) written in collaboration between radical educator Don Lorenzo Milani and his students, the book Tra i bianchi di scuola,^[3] written by the Rwandan-Italian activist Espérance Hakuzwimana (2024) and a sketch comedy segment from Fratelli di Crozza (2024), a popular Italian news satire show. These texts are taken into consideration here as instances of critique because Milani (1967) is widely considered to have influenced political and popular discourse about education in the 1960s, Hakuzwimana (2024) is a newly released text which critiques 21st century Italian schooling, and Crozza (2024) was selected because it is a widely viewed “mainstream” satirical news program on network television in Italy.

4 Scales of ideation, naturalization, and invisibilization in Italian education policy

The metadiscursive regime of tracked secondary education in Italy is regimented via the metalinguistic and/or metapragmatic up-scaling of Discourses across the scales of ideation, naturalization, and invisibilization. The scalar project that I adopt here is focused on rendering visible the inherent and inescapable classism in the present Italian secondary school system, but also how the classist and separationist Discourses underpinning the system have shifted across scales and contexts toward a focus on (rights-oriented) access, (dis/ability-oriented) inclusion, and (neoliberal) merit. The movement of Discourses across scales is not necessarily linear or unidirectional, and cycles of ideation-naturalization-invisibilization do not necessarily always unfold in the same ways. However, by way of briefly tracing how the separationist Discourse travels through scales within the metadiscursive regime of tracked education, mutating along the way, I provide here a simplified overview of Italian education policy Discourses from 1859 to the 1960s. The two cycles described below serve as a means of providing necessary background information about the tracked school system, as well as a means of conceptualizing the ideation-naturalization-invisibilization cycle in terms of relevant historical events.

4.3 The reactionary Merit Discourse: ideation and carnivalesque critique

Concurrently with the time period in which Hakuzwimana produced her ethnographic critique of the multifaceted exclusionary practices in Italian schools, the right-wing administration of Giorgia Meloni created the Ministry of Instruction and Merit (MIM). The addition of “merit” to the name of the Ministry of Education in 2022 links Meloni’s administration to the widespread conservative reactions against “wokeism” which characterize the global populist shifts of the 21st century (Pennycook 2022), especially in education, and rejects the previous rights-oriented Discourses (and their associated critiques by marginalized groups) in favor of the neoliberal conceptualization of individual skills and merit.

A critical analysis of the MIM’s new webpages – called Unica – explores how the Ministry lifts tracked secondary education out of the Discourse of Class, Access, or Inclusion and instead “informs” students about their possible “paths of growth” in upper secondary school. The landing page of the website^[12] greets visitors with the following text:

Know how to choose so that you can follow your path in the best way.

The mission of Unica: Offer a world of digital services to accompany girls and boys on their path of growth, to help them to make informed choices and to cultivate and help their talents emerge.

Here, the website does not frame the division of upper secondary school students as tracking, but in terms of “choice”, which is consonant with the circulating Discourses described in Sections 4.1 and 4.2. However, the choice is not framed here as creating the path – as giving students tools to follow their dreams and interests – but instead as preexisting the moment of the choice. The choice, as framed here, simply serves to help students best follow that predetermined path. Their talents, according to the website, already exist, and the choice of school will simply help those talents emerge, not build them. Further down the same page, we find another mention of innate abilities and innate competences, next to an image of a small child drawing a rainbow on a window (Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Why Unica? (Screenshot of Ministry of Instruction and Merit Unica webpage.)

The text here reads:

Why?

To offer to all the girls and boys a targeted accompaniment/training which makes everyone’s competences and abilities emerge, and valorizes them, through the possibilities offered by the school.

These texts – published on the ministerial website – exemplify the naturalization scale at work. The concept of innate and/or already-existing competences, abilities, and talents which simply need to find the right path so that they can reach their full potential frames the divided system as working in the service of the fully-formed individual, as simply helping them fulfill an obvious, given role in society. From this perspective, it is not the institution which creates philosophers, plumbers, and dancers: it is the institution which helps dancers, plumbers, and philosophers to become such, to realize their destiny. By shifting the focus from the division of the system to the ample selection of paths afforded to students by the divided system, the website puts the onus on the student to decide not only what they want to become, but what they indeed already are. In doing so, the Merit Discourse both naturalizes social class divisions as social facts and invisibilizes the Class Discourse entirely.

On the page dedicated to helping students choose the best upper secondary school for them, the user is invited to “find the study pathway which best serves your needs”.^[13] On this page, shown in Figure 2, the types of secondary schools are ordered from left to right, with lyceums in the preferential far-left, followed by technical institutes, and then vocational schools.^[14] Then, hidden, after an arrow, we find two types of IeFP (the 3-year and 4-year programs in Istruzione e Formazione Professionale [Vocational Education and Training] which do not yield diplomas which grant access to university).

Figure 2:

Left-right preference of upper secondary school types. (Screenshot of MIM's Unica webpage.)

Under each of these tabs, we find a synthetic and purely idealistic description of what students do in these various types of schools. The descriptions of lyceums do not list “work” as a potential “pathway” after the diploma, nor do they include logistical information about timetables or schedules. This selective information recalls the “wink” at the upper class – if you know, you know – which functions to exclude anyone without the cultural capital that students at lyceums typically possess. On the contrary, this type of specific information about technical institutes and professional institutes is readily available. The language on the Unica website carefully avoids any of the widespread discourses about types, typologies, and taxonomies of schools and students, never mentioning how much studying is expected of students outside of school, what the cultures of the different disciplines are like, what the profile of a typical student might be. The students come to know this information through other channels such as those mentioned in Section 4.2.

Table 1:

Carnivalesque critique of merit Discourse.

Giuseppe Valditara. Ministro dell’Istruzione e del MERITO. ME-RI-TO. Una volta si chiamava il Ministro della PUBBLICA Amministrazione. Hanno tolto PUBBlica. Guarda un po’ anche ai nomi, si capisce già tutto. Però ci hanno messo IL MERITO e infatti Valditara ha IL MERITO di aver ideato una riforma alla scuola epocale. Che risolverà tutti i problemi. ((reading a newspaper headline)) Voto in condotta, la riforma Valditara è legge. Si viene bocciati con il 5 in condotta. ((laughs from audience)) Con 5 in condotta, sei bocciato. BRAVO Valditara. È lì da due anni, 69 crolli negli ultimi 12 mesi, e a lui è venuto in mente il 5 in condotta. Pensa che riforma.

Giuseppe Valditara. Minister of Instruction and MERIT. ME-RIT. It used to be called Minister of PUBLIC Administration. They took out PUBlic. Check out the names, they explain everything. But they put MERIT and in fact Valditara has THE MERIT of having ideated a momentous reform. Which will solve all of the problems. ((reading a newspaper headline)) Conduct grade, Valditara’s reform becomes law. Students with a grade of 5 in conduct will be failed. ((laughs from audience)) With a 5 in conduct, you’re failed. BRAVO Valditara. He’s been there for two years, 69 building collapses in twelve months, and he’s thinking about the 5 in conduct. What a reform.

The freshly ideated Merit Discourse has already been subjected to carnivalesque critique on a political satire sketch comedy show called Fratelli di Crozza (5 October 2024), linking it to the literal and figurative collapse of the public school system and to the privatization of education in Italy. The host of the show introduces (with the ta-da sound of a trumpet; see Table 1):

The host of the show posits that the concept of ‘merit’ lies in direct contradiction with public education (calling to mind the Discourse of Access) and that the only reform made by the new Minister of Instruction and Merit thus far has served to alienate students who do not behave (calling to mind the Discourse of Inclusion). The conduct grade – abolished in 2017 and reinstated in 2024 – is the outcome of complex and often strategic decision-making around students’ final evaluations and, not being the result of a grade point average, is often even more subjective than other types of evaluations (Leone-Pizzighella 2022). Later on in the segment of Fratelli di Crozza, the host of the show does a satirical impression of the Meloni administration’s Minister of Culture, Giuli, who is dressed in a white suit and gives a speech about the historic curiosity and self-reflection of the political Right. This satirical Giuli (played by the host of the show) goes on to provide evidence of this curiosity and self-reflection by framing the March on Rome (Mussolini’s takeover of Italy) as a “healthy field trip”. Throughout his speech, he advertises bottles of fabric softener with names such as Giuli Gentile (which “renders acceptable even the most terrifying ideas”), Io mi presto (which “softens even the toughest regimes”), and Ammorbidestra Giuli (a play on words ammorbidente [fabric softener] and destra [right wing]). This carnivalesque critique of the Merit Discourse rebrands the new extreme Right as a brighter, cleaner, softer version of Fascism. Here, we see the concept of merit used as a hinge on which to flip the script about Valditara’s education policies: merit, like ammorbidestra Giuli, is a new brand for an old product. Merit places the onus for academic success on the individual, releasing the State from providing satisfactory conditions for education, which is functionally the same as keeping the haves and the have-nots divided.

5 Discussion: the role of critique in re-scaling Discourses

In the work of Black favelada scholar-activist and Brazilian stateswoman Marielle Franco, papo reto – “straight talk” – functioned as “a means of circumventing the convoluted talk of bureaucracy or other upper-class registers that predominantly preclude favelados from having access to state welfare and other resources” (Khalil et al. 2023: 26). “Illegible as political speech” (p. 26) in the current politics of Brazil, Franco’s use of papo reto in political spaces was a “metapragmatic means of inverting its indexicality … and reframing it was necessary for making demands to the state on behalf of its marginalized subjects…anticipat[ing] and produc[ing] a future-oriented time of a different politics where registers such as papo reto index not political disqualification but possibility” (pp. 26–27).

Milani’s (1967) and Hakuzwimana’s (2024) simulated conversations between students and the archetypal teacher, between citizens and ministers, performed in a register which is not only accessible to, but calls out to, the people, successfully moves deeply entrenched Discourses into a different scale. Letter to a Teacher achieves a similar effect to Marielle Franco’s papo reto (Khalil et al. 2023) via its intentional “straight talk” by giving names to the second-order indexicals of social class (Silverstein 2003) that factor into social class division at both the naturalization scale (curricular and social gatekeeping) and the ideation scale (creating and maintaining policy). The papo reto in Hakuzwimana (2024) also does the metalinguistic labor of explicitly linking certain clusters of identity features to previously invisibilized Discourses about intergenerational social capital and social class – consistent with the underpinnings of the school – and posits that these are involved in teacher’s gatekeeping of a student’s academic progress. The straight talk in the critiques shown here has the same metapragmatic function of broadening political participation by shifting the scale of ideation from “the Chamber” to the bar, to the kitchen table, refusing to engage with the creators and maintainers of the system which oppress the people who use this type of talk to do politics.

As Blommaert (2007) points out, “jumping scales depends on access to discursive resources that index and iconicize particular scale levels, and such access is an object of inequality.” However, the function of the “downscale” in register and in interactional format achieved by the straight talk in Milani (1967) and Hakuzwimana (2024) is incompatibility or incongruity more so than inequality: it is “illegible as political speech” but in a positive sense, in that this register gains social distance from the metadiscursive regime of tracked education. In this sense, these critiques function as metapragmatic hinges moreso than as rungs on a ladder in that they swing, swivel, and flip the Discourse in an unexpected direction. “Flipping the script” is described by Carr (2011) as referring to – among other definitions – making non-believers believe (p. 274). As Carr notes of a women’s outpatient facility for addiction treatment, “flipping the script” was a common, contingent, and even collaborative practice by which clients “us[ed] dominant parties’ rhetorical tools against them” (p. 275). For instance, in an institutional context where honesty and shame were considered to be inversely connected with addiction, the clients/patients were able to call on shame as a means of flipping the script on their case managers who had begun to monitor the urine sampling procedure (which the clients called shame-inducing) to ensure the honesty of the patients’ assertions about abstention from drug use. Carr asserts that

to say that clients effectively participated in policy making when they flipped professional scripts does not mean that they had a direct hand in establishing the content of enduring policy mandates. Rather, by contributing to and influencing the flow of discourse about urinalysis, AA [Alcoholics Anonymous], and other collective concerns, script flippers engaged in the ongoing policy work of debating and legitimating, stabilizing and destabilizing, and naturalizing and denaturalizing program practices. (2011: 215)

We can see a similar phenomenon occurring especially via the carnivalesque critique of the Ministry of Merit: by calling out the neoliberal orientation to individual skills, talents, and subsequent individualized success as inherently anti-public education, and therefore classist, Crozza reframes the “client-oriented” approach of the Ministry of Merit as rebranded classism, and specifically fascism. Reorienting it as such, for a mainstream audience on national television, could very feasibly call into question how “merit” works, and who it serves to benefit.

6 Conclusions

Critical researchers must contend conceptually, bureaucratically, methodologically, and politically with the very real and tangible consequences of hierarchical structures, their branching dichotomies, and their naturalness or invisibility. Paulo Freire’s concept of conscientização, or “critical consciousness” is what “leads the way to the expression of social discontents precisely because these discontents are real components of an oppressive situation” (1970: 36). The process of conscientização is what leads educators and students to acknowledge the “discomforts” and “discontents” in an institution, to name them, to poke fun at them, and to imagine alternatives, often thought of in the form of new and different policies or new and different laws. Education, in simultaneously being created in the image of society and in creating society, is particularly tangled up with overdetermined Discourses which make dialogue particularly challenging. In the case of education, we have a particularly challenging task that requires as many scalar vantage points as possible. As Dewey (1938/1997) states, “[Learning] is to a large extent the cultural product of societies that assumed the future would be much like the past, and yet it is used as an educational food in a society where change is the rule, not the exception” (p. 19).

The separation of schooling not only means that young people are differently socialized into ways of doing school, but also that Discourses about academic ability remain tied to particular forms of schooling and therefore to particular types of people. The results produced by this siphoning of students are so predictable that they seem to justify the division of these students in the first place. Mehan et al. (1996) make a compelling argument for the need to render visible the linguistic and interactional norms of schooling as a means of providing each individual student with more control over their education. I argue, in line with Mehan et al.’s (1996) push to “untrack” students, that divided school systems continually reproduce schooling in the image of a society that no longer exists, and in doing so, the foundational Discourses which underpin these systems become increasingly more entrenched, and therefore more difficult to identify and undo. Whether the next step in this process is simply a step up or a swivel is yet to be seen.