The neurotic parent: affect, risk and school choice

The original neoliberal policy design for school choice is quite straightforward: parents exercise school choice as rational consumers pursuing competitive familial advantage through cost-benefit analysis and self-interest. In contrast to these narrow, instrumental accounts of school choice, critical education researchers insist that school choice is characterised by complex intransitive preferences and emotions that are deeply personal and social. The idea being that school choice is shaped not only by calculation and clinical detachment, but by anxieties and insecurities that evade the standard rationality presupposed by public choice and rational choice perspectives. Adding to this growing body of literature, this paper documents the dynamics of school choice as affectively organised behaviour. We draw on Isin’s (2004) concept of the ‘neurotic citizen’ to show how school choice architecture, such as school websites, appear to overlay and encourage seemingly conflicting orientations to choice: rational calculation and affective insecurity. Through a case study of the South Australian preschool sector, this paper documents how schools create affective atmospheres that work to both soothe and intensify parental fears and anxieties. These insights point to strategies in the management of neurosis or ‘governing through neurosis’.