The essay proceeds by first examining the idea of international and national statistics as a field of cultural production and reproduction concerned with the social administration of the freedom of the individual. This social administration has a double quality. It is to make the world intelligible and calculable for policy and social intervention. But a different element of social element of administration also comes into play. The social administration is to achieve immediate or future interventions in the lives of individual human beings, but also that the changes in the conditions of people will also produce changes in the kind of people that they are. In this later sense of social administration, international and national reports of educational statistics are examined as fabrications of kinds of people. Fabrication is to consider the knowledge of statistics as a fiction in the sense of the categories that are not real but representations that are made-up to identify and order relations for social planning, as in the histories of the classifications such as employment/unemployment, 'at-risk', and ethnicity and minorities. But the fabrications also make biographies that, related to individual actions and participation. The essay examines: (1) Contemporary arguments about statistics as a function of modern state problem solving. (2) Statistics is then considered historically as embodying particular rules and standards of reason related to the State administration of populations in the name of freedom and liberty. This administration involves the 'taming of chance' by making objects of the world intelligible and calculable for policy. (3) The third section is concerned with how the categories and magnitudes of numbers construct a practical causality of deviancy related to kinds of people and the biographies that social planners are to act on. (4) Finally, the notion of at-risk found in recent policy and statistical reporting is explored as embodying a particular set of rules of reasoning to produce biographies that simultaneously exclude as they include. Our task of inquiry is different: it is to examine the system of reason in which statistical discourses circulate and to make apparent the duality of the knowledge of education in governing social inclusion/exclusion. The rules that are used to widen inclusion are, at the same time, rules of normalcy and divisions whose implications are to simultaneously construct systems that exclude as they include.
Systems of reason; Statistics; Educational governing; Exclusion; Inclusion; Policy; Change
