Engaged Disengagement: The Dynamics of Consecration of Expert Elite in the Czech Educational Reforms
摘要
This chapter examines the new nature of the politico-administrative elite in reforming education. It analyses the social topology in the Czech case, which is characteristic of mingling the specific history of the citizens’ distrust towards the state and broader shifted topologies of state power across Europe. This chapter will demonstrate how the formal group of responsible officials ceased to be decision elite in the normative course of educational reforms and was replaced by a fluid group of elite actors continuously developing not a social class but an infrastructure which operates through different logic (combining numbers and morals) and through different spatial forms (expert elite vs. mass of others) than those formally involved in education. Although members of this infrastructure invoke modernisation and democratisation of the state in their normative narratives, they transgress the modern administrative maps by elevating above others through specific expertise, which is introduced as a universal Good.