EDucate! - Development

The Contexts of Educational Change

The current anti-egalitarian education system needs to be contextualised in two ways. Firstly, the policy context – the restructuring of the schooling and education systems across the world – needs to be placed within the ideological and policy context of the links between Capital, Neo-liberalism (with its combination of privatization, competitive markets in education characterised by selection and exclusion) and the rampant growth of the national and international inequalities.

It is important to look at the big picture. Markets in education, so-called ‘parental choice’ of a diverse range of schools, privatization of schools, cutting state subsidies to education and other public services are only a part of the educational strategy of the capitalist class. National and global capitalism wishes to, and has succeeded in cutting public expenditure. It does this because public services are expensive. Cuts serve to reduce taxes on profits. In addition, the capitalist class has a Business Plan for Education and a Business Plan in Education. The former centres on socially producing labour-power (people’s capacity to labour) for capitalist enterprises, the latter focuses on setting business ‘free’ in education for profit-making. Thus, business wants to make profits from education, and to make education fit for business – to make schooling and further and higher education subordinate to the personality, ideological and economic requirements of capital.

The Current Project of Global Capitalism

The fundamental principle of capitalism is the sanctification of private (or, corporate) profit based on the extraction of surplus labour (unpaid labour-time) as surplus value from the labour-power of workers. This is a creed of competition, not co-operation, between humans. It is a creed and practice of racialized and gendered class exploitation, exploitation by the capitalist class of those who provide the profits through their labour, the working class.

John McMurtry’s The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (1999) describes ‘the Pathologization of the Market Model’. He suggests that to argue for a ‘free market’ in anything these days is a delusion: the ‘market model’ that we have today is really the system that benefits the ‘global corporate market’ – a system where the rules are rigged to favour huge multinational and transnational corporations that take over, destroy or incorporate (hence the ‘cancer’ stage of capitalism) small businesses, innovators, etc. that are potential competitors. Thus, opening education to the market, in the long run, will open it to the corporate giants – who will run it in their own interests. Glenn Rikowski (The Battle in Seattle: Its significance for education, 2001) and others 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.

Globalisation Inequality and Economic and Social Justice

Global inequalities have been well described with the IMF/World Trade Organisation/World Bank inspired cuts in health and welfare budgets throughout the Third World.

In Britain the increasing inequalities, the impoverishment and creation of a substantial underclass has also been well documented (for example in Dave Hill and Mike Cole, Schooling and Equality: Fact, Concept and Policy, 2001). For example, in Britain the ratio of chief executives’ pay to average worker’s pay stands at 35 to one. In the USA it has climbed to 450 to one (from around 35 to one in the mid-1980s). Inequalities both between states and within states have increased dramatically during the era of global neo-liberalism. In the USA, for example, the economic apartheid nature of capitalism has been widely exposed in the work of Peter McLaren (e.g. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire and the pedagogy of Revolution, 2000). To give one example, in the USA, the top 1 percent of the richest people have wealth – financial wealth – equal to the bottom 95 percent.

To take another example, Chile, hailed as a beacon of neo-liberal policies ‘boasts one of the most unequal economies in the world…in which only 10 percent of the Chilean population earns almost half the wealth and in which the richest 100 people earn more than the state spends on social services. Real salaries have declined 10 percent since 1986 and they are still 18 percent lower than when Allende was in power’.

The Effects of Neo-Liberal Capitalism

In discussing the Market, as a part of neo-liberal ideology and policy, it is important to see how this impacts on people’s lives, life chances and deaths, to become aware of the effects of what John McMurtry calls the The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (1999), and of market ideology in fiscal, social and educational provision.

Neo-liberalism requires that the state establishes and extends:

1. Privatization/Private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

2. The provision of a Market in goods and services – including private sector involvement in welfare, social, educational and other state services (such as air traffic control, prisons, policing).

3. Within education the creation of ‘opportunity’ to acquire the means of education (though not necessarily education itself, as McMurtry notes) and additional cultural capital, through selection.

4. Relatively untrammelled selling and buying of labour power, for a ‘flexible’, poorly regulated labour market.

5. The restructuring of the management of the welfare state on the basis of a corporate managerialist model imported from the world of business. As well as the needs of the economy dictating the principal aims of school education, the world of business is also to supply a model of how it is to be provided and managed.

6. Suppression of oppositional critical thought and of autonomous thought and education.

7. Within a regime of cuts in the post–war Welfare State and low public expenditure.

Privatization, Business and Education

How, in more detail, do education markets fit into the grand plan for schooling and education? What is capitalism’s ‘Business Plan for Education’? McMurtry is one among many who note that education as a social institution has been subordinated to international market goals including the language and self-conceptualisation of educators themselves.

Richard Hatcher in his article “Getting down to the business: schooling in the globalised economy”, in the British education journal Education and Social Justice (2001), shows how Capital/Business has two major aims for schools. The first aim is to make sure schools produce compliant, ideologically indoctrinated, pro capitalist, effective workers. That is, to ensure that schooling and education engage in ideological and economic reproduction. National state education and training policies in the business agenda FOR education are of increasing importance for national capital. In an era of global capital, this is one of the few remaining areas for national state intervention – it is the site, suggests Hatcher, where a state can make a difference The second aim is for private enterprise, private capitalists, to make money out of it, to make private profit out of it, to control it: this is the business agenda IN schools.

The effects of neo-liberalism in education and society

Neo-liberal policies globally have resulted in a loss of

Equity, Inequalities and Economic and Social Justice

Democracy – as business values and interests are increasingly substituted for democratic accountability and the collective voice.

The Growth of Educational Inequality

There is considerable data on how poor schools have, by and large, got poorer (in terms of relative education results and in terms of total income) and how rich schools (in the same terms) have got richer. Markets exacerbate existing inequalities.

A Critique of Neo-Liberal Theory: Neo-Liberalism and Education

I now want to look at one theoretical and academic aspect of some neo-liberal arguments and suggest where they fall down. Neo-liberals make a number of unwarranted implications or conclusions about the role of the state in education and about the role of the market in education. These relate to their assumption that the market/privatization is compatible with education.

Education is not a commodity, to be bought and sold. One can buy the means to an education, but not the hard graft of autonomous learning itself. John McMurtry, among others, has noted that education and the capitalist market in terms of their opposing goals, opposing motivations, opposing methods, and opposing standards of excellence.

Firstly, the goals of education. ‘Private profit is acquired by a structure of appropriation, which excludes others from its possession. The greater its accumulation by any private corporation, the more wealth others are excluded from in this kind of possession. This is what makes such ownership ‘private’. Education, in contrast, is acquired by a structure of appropriation that does not exclude others from its possession. On the contrary, education is furthered the more it is shared, and the more there is free and open access to its circulation. That is why learning which is not conveyed to others is deemed ‘lost’, ‘wasted’ or ‘dead’. In direct opposition to market exchanges, educational changes flourish most with the unpaid gifts of others and develop the more they are not mediated by private possession or profit’.

Secondly, opposing motivations. McMurtry notes that ‘the determining motivation of the market is to satisfy the wants of whoever has the money to purchase the goods that are provided. The determining motivation of education is to develop sound understanding whether it is wanted or not. ‘The market by definition can only satisfy the motivations of those who have the money to buy the product it sells. The place of education, on the other hand, remains a place of education insofar as it educates those whose motivation is to learn, independent of the money – demand they exercise in their learning’. In addition, ‘development of understanding is necessarily growth of cognitive capacity; wherein satisfaction of consumer wants involves neither, and typically impedes both’.

Thirdly, opposing methods. ‘The method of the market is to buy or sell the goods it has to offer to anyone for whatever price one can get…The method of education is never to buy or sell the item it has to offer, but to require of all who would have it that they fulfil its requirements autonomously’... Everything that is to be had on the market is acquired by the money paid for it. Nothing that is learned in education is acquired by the money paid for it.

Fourthly, opposing Standards of Excellence. ‘The measures of excellence in the market are (i) how well the product is made to sell; and (ii) how problem – free the product is and remains for its buyers. The measures of excellence in education are (i) how disinterested and impartial its representations are; and (ii) how deep and broad the problems it poses are to one who has it’….the first works through ‘one sided sales pitches...which work precisely because they are not understood’, the second ‘must rule out one – sided presentation appetitive compulsion and manipulative conditioning’.

In analysing the relationship between neo-liberalism and education, the last critical theoretical point I wish to make here is that the Market suppresses Critical Thought and Education itself.

McMurtry concludes, powerfully, ‘this fundamental contradiction in standards of excellence leads, in turn, to opposite standards of freedom. Freedom in the market is the enjoyment of whatever one is able to buy from others with no questions asked, and profit from whatever one is able to sell to others with no requirement to answer to anyone else. Freedom in the place of education, on the other hand, is precisely the freedom to question, and to seek answers, whether it offends people’s self-gratification or not’.

McMurtry succinctly relates his arguments above to the ‘systematic reduction of the historically hard won social institution of education to a commodity for private purchase and sale’. The commodification of education rules out the very critical freedom and academic rigour which education requires to be more than indoctrination. Much of my own work calls for critical education and for the development of teachers as critical transformative intellectuals.

The Role of Critical Transformative Intellectuals in Education and other Cultural Sites

The first is that critical educators can indeed attempt to provide a spark that can ignite the desire for revolutionary democratic social transformation throughout the world. To carry the metaphor even further, it does so at a time when critical/radical education, almost everywhere, is in danger of terminal ‘burn-out’. However, the question of how far this transformative potential can be realized is the subject of considerable debate, for contemporary theory as well as practice. The autonomy and agency available to individual teachers, teacher educators, schools and departments of education is particularly challenged when faced with the structures of capital and its current neo-liberal project for education.

I recognize and do not underestimate the limitations on the agency and autonomy of teachers, teacher educators, cultural workers and their sites, and indeed, the very limited autonomy of the education policy/political region of the state from the economic. There are, in many states, greater and greater restrictions on the ability of teachers to use their pedagogical spaces for emancipatory purposes.

The repressive cards within the ideological state apparatuses are stacked against the possibilities of transformative change through Initial Teacher Education and through schooling. But historically and internationally, this often has been the case. Spaces do exist for counter-hegemonic struggle – sometimes (as now) narrower, sometimes (as in Western Europe and North America, the 1960s and 1970s) broader. Having recognized the limitations, though, and having recognized that there is some potential for transformative change, whatever space does exist should be exploited. Whatever we can do, we must do, however fertile the soil at any given moment in any particular place. But schools and colleges are not the only place.

Working Outside of the Classroom! Local Action

Unless critical educators’ actions, within schools and education, are linked to a grammar of resistance, such resistant and counter-hegemonic activity is likely to fall on relatively stony ground. Hence, using schools and educational sites as arenas of cultural struggle and education in general as a vehicle for social transformation needs to premise upon a clear commitment to work with communities, parents and students. When I say working ‘with’, I do not mean simply ‘leading’ or ‘talking at’; working with means ‘learning’ from the daily existence of the exploited classes. Ideally it means fulfilling the role of the organic intellectual, organically linked to and part of these groups. This means also working with communities – and their own despair and anger – in developing the perception that schools and education themselves are sites of social and economic and ideological contestation, not ‘neutral’ or ‘fair’ or ‘inevitable’, but sites of economic, cultural and ideological domination, of class domination. It is thereby important to be aware of the role of education in capital reproduction and in the reproduction of class relations.

Mass Action as Part of a Broader Movement for Economic and Social Justice

Globally and nationally societies are developing and have always developed, to a greater or lesser degree, critical educators, community activists, organic intellectuals, students and teachers whose feelings of outrage at economic and social class and racial and gender oppression lead them/us into activism. It is being part of action, part of networks, part of mini – and of mass action. Ideological intervention in classrooms and in other cultural sites can have dramatic effect. However, actualising that ideology, that opposition to oppressive law or state or capitalist action, the effect of taking part in, feeling the solidarity, feeling the blood stir, feeling the pride in action, the joint learning that comes from that experience, can develop confidence, understanding, and commitment.