Strange Bedfellows: Education, Neoliberalism and the Need for Subversion

The neoliberal ideology has not only ensured that educational practices are being modelled on practices from business world, it has become the dominant philosophy of most educational institutions.

by Bernard Cauchi

Image: Isles of the Left

 

[beautifulquote align=”full” cite=””]Sometimes I am criticised for being too utilitarian, for using education simply for employment. But as an academic as well as a consultant, I am positively convinced that education for the sake of education is critical, and no one is denying this, but at the same time, if we provide education but at the end of the road, the students are not employable, then we have failed somewhere.” [/beautifulquote]

from an interview with Silvio Debono, President of the Board of Governors of MCAST.

 

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he neoliberal ideology has not only infiltrated educational practices, with the latter being modelled on practices from the world of business. It is also determining the educational philosophies of most educational institutions, including of many of those schools which traditionally embraced a very strong ethos (be it traditional, progressive, religious, etc). In the light of Antonio Gramsci’s claim that every hegemonic relationship is necessarily a pedagogical relationship, this article engages with issues of power relations inside the school, the classroom and other educational spaces.

 

Neoliberalism inside the classroom: a fleeting glance

Neoliberalism is a political-economic theory holding that “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” The state has to limit its presence in the economy to the barest minimum. Neoliberals support practices like privatisation, deregulation, decentralisation, fiscal austerity and a drastic reduction in the government’s expenditure, as well as the reduction of direct taxes while leaving sectors such as education and healthcare more and more in private hands. In many western countries, mainstream larger parties, which traditionally hailed from opposite ideological spectrums, have come to accept the neoliberal tenets as dogmatic commandments.

In the past few years, neoliberal ideas have infiltrated the various levels of education, affecting both national/regional/continent-wide policies, and educational practices inside classrooms and schools. The 2011 National Curriculum Framework (which determines current educational policies) for instance, weaves together quite seamlessly discourses about community involvement and collaborative learning with neoliberal passages on entrepreneurship, success and employability.

The implicit and explicit meanings of the neoliberal dogmas are translated at grassroots levels in schools and classrooms: during the lessons, in the posters exhibited in the corridors, and in prize-days.  The hidden (and not so hidden) messages are frequently imbued with a neoliberal ethos. What follows is a list of educational spaces where neoliberal influences seem to be mostly evident:

 

1. The belief promoted by many educational sites that competition is natural.
   Grouping together children according to the results they obtain in exams (even though several studies show that mixed ability groups will not affect the learning outcomes of individual students) implies that the educational system is essentially a competition. In state schools, until very recently, students were classified in different ‘tracks’ (according to the results obtained in benchmark exams). In such a context, a ubiquitous discourse claims that competition (rather than collaboration) is healthy and almost inevitable, since it can be found both in nature and in society.

 

2. The meritocracy myth: those who fail ought to blame themselves.
   Universal education is supposed to favour meritocracy – those who succeed are those who deserve success. Yet, in an educational system modelled on the race track analogy, not everybody starts from the same point. For a number of reasons, many start with a number of disadvantages. As Don Lorenzo Milani used to assert, to treat equally children who are not equal is the ultimate injustice.

 

3. The labour market as the elephant in the room.
   “What would you like to be when you grow up?” is a question which accompanies children through their educational journeys. Rather than guided to engage critically with economic structures from a very young age, children are moulded in relation to the labour market (an impossible feat in most cases, given the fluctuation of the labour market). Positive aspects such as teamwork, creativity and leadership skills are all read from such a perspective. The labour market also determines the students’ choice of optional subjects when they are not yet teenagers. An effect of this is that school subjects are seen in a kind of hierarchy whereby subjects which are linked to the worlds of science, technology and the financial world are given more importance, space and resources than the humanities (whereas the latter could constitute a basis for critical pedagogy).

 

4. Practices borrowed from the worlds of management and business.
   Schools’ leadership have come to be referred to as ‘Senior Management Team’. Their job is to make ‘effective and efficient’ use of the ‘human and material resources’ at their disposal. People from the ‘quality assurance’ department ask educators to come up with ‘SMART action plans’. These are only samples of the managerial discourses which invade everyday school life, evidence of the pervasiveness of a managerial state. The main issue is that schools should not be businesses and their main aims shouldn’t be profit and efficiency.

 

5. Education as a consumer good.
   With the excuse of lifelong learning, a large number of individuals (including children from a very young age) feel the need to learn and be involved in some sort of training in sports, psycho-social skills and other activities so that they feel ready to face innumerable social challenges. The problem is twofold. Firstly, education is increasingly becoming devoid of its public and political roles and is transforming itself in some form of training to equip individuals with skills which are deemed necessary by the labour market. As a consequence, education becomes a frenzy to obtain certificates. Secondly, we should ask ourselves what kind of society is resulting from such practices. Notwithstanding this ubiquitous rush to be trained and obtain certificates, we are all-too-often faced with different forms of shallow thinking, illogical arguments, and common-sense reasoning which make Paolo Freire’s articulation of education as liberation a very distant goal.

 

This neoliberal ethos in the everyday practice of educators, parents and students have led to an educational system that, rather than reading critically the world in order to transform it, reflects and perpetuates hegemonic practices and sustains the status quo.

 

The subversive school and the opening up of possibilities

[dropcap]E[/dropcap]ducators have a duty to contradict and resist neoliberal normalising discourses, and to propose radically democratic alternatives. When arguing about the need for an inclusive democratic education, John Portelli highlights the need for subversion. In other words, as the Latin etymological roots of the word sub vertere suggest, things need to be seen from a totally different, bottom-up perspective.[beautifulquote align=”full” cite=””] In a context where neoliberalism promotes a monolithic and authoritarian vision of the world, educators who are guided by democratic ideals have to embrace subversive ideas and actions so that education can open genuinely democratic horizons of possibilities. Education needs to be seen primarily as a political intervention whereby, in the classroom and other educational spaces, educators and learners collectively and critically engage with the world around us. While evading hegemonic and Eurocentric interpretations of the world, they need to seek plural readings of the world in order to start working on its transformation. [/beautifulquote]

Through such radically democratic practices (as opposed to the way in which neoliberalism articulates democracy as something which is mainly cosmetic and based on pre-established economic recipes) those who lack a political voice become authors of the country’s development and progress.