Abstract:
Since the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, excellence has become the metanarrative of educational discourse. This metanarrative goes beyond pedagogical discursive spaces and sets the criteria for individual performance and what is required from an individual to meet the criteria for performance. These criteria are not necessarily linked to traditional conceptions of academic attainment and are contingent on the discursive domain which accommodates the metanarrative of excellence. This thesis explores the discursive terrain from which the excellent subject emerges in education and draws on experiences from New Zealand to develop an interpretative conception of forms of governance since the Fourth Labour government and their respective educational narratives. This is done by a poststructural hermeneutics notion of governmentality, historical materialism, narrative knowledge and the constitution of subjectivities. This study is instigated by an inquiry into mechanisms and discourses which contribute to the constitution of the excellent subject instead of a search for the meaning and implications of excellence in education. The discourses which are reappraised in this thesis do not follow any sequence and therefore the format and structure of this thesis is akin to an anthology. The opening of this anthology is a discourse on the hermeneutic approach to the excellent subject. The thesis then follows with a reinterpretation of the rhetoric of reform, political philosophy, political economies, epistemologies and policies which contribute to the constitution of the excellent subject.
