This article offers an analysis of the rhetoric of education policy text
during the timeframe from 2000 to 2012 in the Republic of Ireland. The
study was framed within two different discourses of the role of the
teacher: one discourse regards the teacher as a professional within a
dynamic system of democratic relations (Anyon, 2011; Apple, 2012; Ball
2012; Giroux, 1988; Lynch, 1999) while the other discourse regards the
teacher as a functionary and technician within a top-down hierarchical
system of compliance, surveillance and legal edict (Department of
Education and Skills 2000, 2003, 2010; 2012; Teaching Council Act,
2001, Teaching Council Code of Professional Conduct, 2006, 2012). The
tale of The Pied Piper of Hamelin is used as a metaphor to interrogate
education policy within a small peripheral nation at a time of economic
austerity coupled with a deepening deficit in vision and democratic values
across Europe and the Anglo-American world (Morpurgo, 2011). The
study asks who is making the policy, whose interests are being served and
what evidence is there of a politics of moral engagement with any of these
issues? Findings show that while the tune of neo-liberalism in education
policy started off ‘pianissimo’ in the early 2000s it grew to ‘mezzo-forte’
by 2006 and reached ‘fortissimo’ in the period after the bank bailout in
November 2010. Irish people continue to remain seduced by the
irresistible tune played by the Pied Piper of Neo-Liberalism. Achieving a
different world order will require a paradigm shift from competitive
individualism to a different logic of collaboration, care and creativity.
Similar to the perplexed world of 1895 we now need a new Five E’s Campaign to restore the vital and lost link between education, equity, ethics, economics and the environment (Mc Kernan, 2004).