Richard MÜNCH, Governing the School under Three Decades of Neoliberal Reform. From Educracy to the Education-Industrial Complex (original) (raw)
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Education and neoliberal globalization
British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2014
This collection of essays is about the struggle between the evils of neoliberalism and the unquestioned goodness of Freirean theory. The essays 'of opposition' were written and delivered by Carlos Alberto Torres to diverse audiences and in different locations and languages. Yet they contain one overarching message suggesting that neoliberal globalization can be contested, challenged, and undermined by illuminating the moral weakness upon which it has been constructed. The central argument is that neoliberal globalization is leading education away from the state and towards the commodification of a market-led provision. As such, the potential for exploitation, social exclusion and inequalities is increasing. This is a spirited, refreshing and values-driven critique of the impact of neoliberalism and globalization on education, and the cultural acceptance of its inevitability as the only viable political economy. However, neoliberalism is positioned as an external evil and there is little understanding of how it becomes internalized as a regulatory mechanism, so we come to discipline ourselves and align our desires with what is required of us by performance and audit cultures. Nor is there any sense of how neoliberalism is a process, with incremental reforms constantly evolving and adapting. It is represented as a static, knowable and identifiable entity. The issue of how neoliberalism has transformed social relations into calculabilities and exchanges is not problematized. Rather, there is a representation of an untainted, purified consciousness that can identify, externalize and extinguish neoliberalism through its morally superior truth claims.
Neoliberalism and Education Reform
2007
[Winner of the 2008 “Critic’s Choice Award” from the American Educational Studies Association] This book has two primary goals: a critique of educational reforms that result from the rise of neoliberalism, and to provide alternatives to neoliberal conceptions of education problems and solutions. A key issue addressed by contributors is how forms of critical consciousness can be engendered throughout society via schools. This means paying attention to the practical aspects of pedagogy for social transformation and organizing to achieve a most just society. Each contributor offers critical examinations of the pragmatics of pedagogy and organizing for social transformation. It is the editors hope that the analysis of neoliberal educational reform provided in the chapters will contribute in multiple ways to the programs of critical scholars, educators and activists working for education and schools that serve the broad interests of the public and against capitalist educational practices. Contents: Foreword, Richard A. Brosio. Introduction, E. Wayne Ross and Rich Gibson. Neoliberalism and the Control of Teachers, Students, and Learning: The Rise of Standards, Standardization, and Accountability, David W. Hursh. No Child Left Behind, Globalization, and the Politics of Race, Pauline Lipman. Education and the New Disciplinarity: Surveillance, Spectacle, and the Case of SBER, Kevin D. Vinson and E. Wayne Ross. The Ideology and Practice of Empire: The United States, Mexico, and the Education of American Immigrants, Gilbert G. Gonzalez. Neoliberalism and the Perversion of Education, Dave Hill. Schools and the GATS Enigma, Glenn Rikowski. A Marxist Reading of Reading Education, Patrick Shannon. Paulo Freire and the Revolutionary Pedagogy for Social Justice, Rich Gibson. The Unchained Dialectic: Critique and Renewal of Higher Education Research, John Welsh. Marketizing Higher Education: Neoliberal Strategies and Counter-Strategies, Les Levidow. Critical Pedagogy and Class Struggle in the Age of Neoliberal Globalization: Notes from History's Underside. Peter McLaren Author Index. Subject Index.
Global neo-liberalism, the deformation of education and resistance
Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 2003
In this paper I position the increasing inequality inside and between education and economic and social systems within the policy context of global neo-liberal Capitalism. Restructuring of schooling and education has taken place internationally under pressure from local and international capitalist organisations and compliant governments. In this paper I examine some effects of neo-liberal policies. These have increased inequalities globally and nationally, diminished democratic accountability and stifled critical thought-by compressing and repressing critical space in education today. I critique neo-liberal theory in education policy and suggest how the marketisation of education has deformed a number of aspects of education: its goals, motivations, methods, standards of excellence and standards of freedom in education. Capital and neo-liberal ideology and policy seek to neutralise and destroy potential pockets of resistance to global corporate expansion and neo-liberal Capital, serving to perpetuate the interests of Capital at the expense of the global and national working class. The intrusion of Capital into education threatens to undermine one important site for its contestation. I conclude by looking at sites of resistance to the global neo-liberal deformation of education and society and by calling for education and other cultural workers to work towards economic and social equality. Global Neo-Liberalism, the Deformation of Education and Resistance 2 | P a g e 3. a Business Plan for Educational Businesses: this is a plan for British and US based Edubusinesses to profit from international privatising activities. Dave Hill 3 | P a g e continue to subsidise, for example, their own agricultural industries, while demanding that states receiving IMF or World Bank funding throw their markets open (to be devastated by subsidised EU and US imports) (4) . Thus, opening education to the market, in the long run, will open it to the corporate giants, in particular US and British based Transnational Companies -who will run it in their own interests. )) argue that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and other `global clubs for the mega-capitalists´ are setting this agenda up in education across the globe, primarily through the developing operationalizing and widening sectoral remit of the GATS, the General Agreement on Trade in Services.
Policy Futures in Education, 2020
This article is the second of three on 'Sources Of Authority In Education,' all of which use the work of Amy Gutmann as a heuristic device to describe and explain the prevalence of market-based models of Education Reform in the United States and what Pasi Sahlberg, former Director General of CIMO (of the Ministry of Education and Culture) in Helsinki, terms the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). The first two are “Negating Amy Gutmann: Deliberative Democracy, Education and Business Influence” (to be published in Democracy and Education) and “The Odd Malaise of Democratic Education and the Inordinate Influence of Business” (to be published in Policy Futures in Education). Along with a fourth article, “Profit, Innovation and the Cult of the Entrepreneur: Civics and Economic Citizenship,” the first three are intended to be included together as chapters of my proposed Democratic Education and Markets: Segmentation, Privatization and Sources of Authority in Education Reform. The “Negating Amy” article looks primarily at Deliberative Democracy. The present article considers, primarily, the promise of egalitarian democracy and how figures such as Horace Mann, John Dewey and Gutmann have argued it is largely based on the promise of public education. “The Odd Malaise” article begins by offering some historical background, from the origins of the common school in the 1600s to No Child Left Behind, market emulation models and how this is reflected in a '21st century schools' discourse, and ends by considering what happens to the Philosophy of Education when Democracy and Capitalism are at odds. The “Profit, Innovation” article looks at how ideological forces are popularized, considering Ayn Rand's influence, the concept of Merit, Schumpeter's concept of 'creative destruction' and the ideal of the entrepreneur as related sources in changing common sense, pointing out that the commonplace of identifying the innovator and the entrepreneur is misplaced. The present article accordingly begins the question of business influence and how we may outline its major features using Amy Gutmann's work as a heuristic device to interpret business-influenced movements to reform public education. Originally the title was “Turning Amy Gutmann on her Head” and consequently it returns to Gutmann's Democratic Education and its three sources of authority, suggesting that the business community is a fourth source. It continues with a consideration of what might be called a partial historical materialist analysis – the growth of inequality in the United States (and other countries) since the 1970s that correlates with much of the basis for changes in the justifications and substance of Education reform. After casting this question in principal-agent terms, it then looks at both those who sought to create a public will for public education and recent reform movements that have sought to redirect public support for a unified education system and instead advocate a patchwork of charters, vouchers for private schools, on-line education, home schooling, virtual schools and public schools based on market emulation models. Drawing from other theories of education, especially Plato (and Sparta), Locke and John Stuart Mill, it also suggests that it might be instructive to compare Gutmann's 3 sources of authority to Abraham Kuyper's concept of Sphere sovereignty. It concludes that ultimate authority for education is, somewhat paradoxically, vested in the adult the child will become, creating practical problems regarding the education of the sovereign that the book never fully resolves and which may, in fact, be unresolvable based on rational deliberation. Finally, it looks at one instrument of business, market segmentation, and its importance as a motivating factor for education reform.
Beyond neoliberalism: Reflections on capitalism and education
Education within capitalism too often reproduces social and economic inequalities. Schools are depicted as failing and teachers are blamed. In this paper, I examine the discourses underlying this situation and the role of foundations in the US and the World Bank in developing countries in maintaining it. I look at the neoliberal remedy of privatization and the fundamental problems with capitalism. In conclusion, I consider alternatives to capitalism and within education.
EDITORIAL Andrew Wilkins: Pedagogy of the consumer: The politics of neo-liberal welfare reform ARTICLES Kevin J. Burke: Strange bedfellows: The new neoliberalism of catholic schooling in the United States Christopher G. Robbins, Serhiy Kovalchuk: Dangerous disciplines: Understanding pedagogies of punishment in the neoliberal states of America Jon Frauley: Post-Social politics, employability, and the security effects of higher education Magnus Dahlstedt, Fredrik Hertzberg: Schooling entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurship, governmentality and education policy in Sweden at the turn of the millennium Susan M. Martin: Education as a spectral technology: Corporate culture at work in Ontario‘s schools Glenn C. Savage: Being different and the same? The paradoxes of ‘tailoring’ in education quasi - markets Panayota Gounari, George Grollios: Educational reform in Greece: Central concepts and a critique
Global neo-liberalism and the perversion of education
The Institute for Education Policy Studies, 2002
In this paper I place the perversion of increasing inequality within education systems within the policy context of neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism is a global phenomenonrestructuring of schooling and education has taken place internationally under pressure from international capitalist organisations and compliant governments. I examine the effects of neo-liberal policies in increasing inequalities globally and nationally, and go on to make a critique of the theory of neo-liberalism, of how the marketisation of education has perverted the goals, motivations, methods, standards of excellence and standards of freedom in education. I conclude by looking at sites and arenas of resistance to the global neo-liberal perversion of education and by calling for cultural workers to work towards economic and social equality.
Le néolibéralisme, subversion, et démocratie en education
2013
This paper aims to further address what we regard as the detrimental influence that neoliberalism has had on any and all commitments to democratic ideals in educational settings. The argument is simply that a robust pluralism and cosmopolitanism in educational theory sits in tension with the neoliberalism of contemporary Western mass society. Our argument has two parts. First, we argue that the neoliberal hegemony of contemporary North American schooling is oppressive insofar as it negates and stifles any effort to enact democratic practices within classrooms settings, while simultaneously producing systemic inequities, dehumanization, and instrumentalization of teachers and students in schools. We then argue for an educational ethic of subversion, an ethic that we see as warranted, justified, and often necessary in the face of systems of schooling that are organized according to the logic of neoliberalism.
A Political Economy Perspective on Education Privatization and Global Neoliberalism
Research on humanities and social sciences, 2016
Neoliberalism has emphasized that the role of market mechanisms can play in reconfiguring the public sector. In education, neoliberalists argue that the consumer choice and school competition can lead to more effective and efficient public education systems. This paper examines the increasing inequality in and between education, economic and social systems within the policy context of neo-liberal capitalism. Neo-liberal capitalism is a global phenomenon-- the restructuring of schooling and education has taken place internationally under pressure from international capitalist organizations and compliant governments. The effects of neo-liberal policies in increasing inequalities globally and nationally, in diminishing democratic accountability and in stifling critical thought is presented along with a critique of the theory of neoliberalism in education policy. Keywords : Marxism, Socialism, Capitalism, Neo-Liberalism, Globalisation, Education, Business, Inequality,