Language Textbooks in the era of Neoliberalism

Pau Bori

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315405520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book examines how neoliberalism finds expression in foreign language textbooks. Moving beyond the usual focus on English, Pau Bori explores the impact of neoliberal ideology on Catalan textbooks. By comparing Catalan textbooks to English textbooks, this book interrogates the similarities and differences between a minor and a global language in the age of neoliberalism. Drawing on insights from critical theory and critical pedagogy, this study provides a fresh perspective on foreign language textbooks and second language education more broadly. Language Textbooks in the Era of Neoliberalism paves the way for new critical perspectives in language education that will challenge the current hegemony of neoliberalism.

1 Introduction

This book is about textbooks, political economy and ideology. More precisely, it is about connections between language textbooks and the latest form of the capitalist project, neoliberalism. This book will examine the ways in which neoliberalism, transformed into the new common sense of our times (Peck and Tickell 2002; Harvey 2005; Hall and O’Shea 2013), finds expression in foreign and second language teaching materials. The overall aims are to advance our knowledge about materials development, to illustrate different kinds of critical textbook analysis and uncover new important issues that need to be contemplated in more detail for critical research on language textbooks in an era of neoliberal globalization. The ultimate goal is to pave the way for new critical perspectives in language education that will counter the current hegemonic ideology of neoliberalism.

Three main arguments provide the rationale for this volume: the enduring centrality of language textbooks in most classrooms around the world (Gray 2015), the ubiquity of neoliberalism in our contemporary societies and above all the need for further and deeper investigations about the relations between language education and neoliberalism. Thus, I strongly agree with the critical education scholar Carlos Alberto Torres (2011: 183) when he suggests that now more than ever it is imperative

to challenge the growing presence of instrumental rationality and neoliberalism’s common sense in the way we live, practice, work, teach, provide advice to our students, conduct research, work in committees and even profess our most cherished values in our professional work as academics.

This first chapter provides the theoretical basis for the discussion and analysis that follows. It starts with insights from the political and economic philosophy of Karl Marx and ends with new approaches in applied linguistics devoted to the relations between language and political economy. First of all, I discuss our understanding of textbooks through the ideas of classical Marxism, the Frankfurt school and critical pedagogy. I then define neoliberalism as a global class project that shapes political economy and ideology worldwide (Harvey 2005) and also as the norm of our existence (Dardot and Laval 2013). This is followed by a presentation of relevant studies about real-world language problems from an interdisciplinary perspective that place neoliberalism at the center of the research. The chapter concludes with a call to make a ‘turn to political economy’ (Block et al. 2012a; Block 2017a) in studying phenomena related to language teaching.

Understanding textbooks

The textbook is a central element in the language teaching and learning process. It has been said that it is the “visible heart of any ELT [English Language Teaching] program” (Sheldon 1988: 237); “an almost universal element of ELT teaching” (Hutchinson and Torres 1994: 315); and “a guide for a teacher, a memory aid for the pupils, a permanent record or measure of what has been learnt” (Awasthi 2006: 1). Furthermore, language textbooks seem to “have a magical hold on both teachers and learners most of whom just can not do without them” (Kumaravadivelu 2012: 21). This is why I consider it essential to study and discuss language teaching textbooks in detail. The approach of this book is based upon the idea that textbooks are cultural artifacts of their time, like any other human creation or activity. They are not born in a vacuum. Textbooks are situated in a determinate moment in time and in a concrete place. As a consequence, they are influenced by the political, economic and historical context where they were created. As Andrew Littlejohn (2012: 287) explains, language teaching materials include “perspectives, attitudes, values, concepts, social and political relations – call them what you will – which will be current in the wider society”.

This understanding of textbooks has its roots in the political and economic philosophy of Marx, known as historic materialism. In his base/superstructure model, Marx argues that human beings are subject to the social and economic circumstances of their existence that influence their particular class system, political organizations, thoughts and culture. The base refers to the economic conditions of the reality and involves the productive forces (labor-power, raw materials and machines) and the relations of production (the relationship between those who own the means of production and those who do not). From the base arises the superstructure, that is, “the social, political and spiritual processes of life” (Marx 1904 [1859]: 11). The superstructure involves the ideology and the political and legal organization that governs a society. In classical Marxism, the superstructure is shaped by the class division of the society between capitalists (or bourgeoisie) and workers (or proletariat). Hence, the ideas, values and beliefs which achieve dominance in any particular age are the ones of those in power, as noted in a famous quote from The German Ideology: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” (Marx and Engels 1998 [1845]: 67).

From a Marxist perspective, capitalism is a socioeconomic system based on private property and the exploitation of the labor force. Its main motion is profit-making. The means for producing goods are owned by a small group of people, the capitalist class. The majority of people, the working classes, sell their labor to a capitalist for a wage in order to earn a living. Exploitation is the result of the uncompensated labor of the working classes, which is used by the capitalist members of society to increase their profit in the market.

The Marxist claim that the ideological superstructure is determined by the economic base has been often attacked for being much too mechanical or reductive. However, the Marxist tradition had repeatedly addressed this criticism. It has been argued that the economic base is a crucial element to understanding the evolution of history, but other factors belonging to the superstructure also influence changes in society (see Chris Harman 1986 for a discussion about the base and superstructure debate in Marxist scholarship). Indeed, as David Block (2014) argues, the relationship between base and superstructure could be interpreted in a nuanced way: “one can appropriate the idea that economic activity is the base for all social activity and development while arguing for a more dialectical approach to how the economic base interacts with Marx’s ‘social, political and intellectual life’” (30). In my study, base and superstructure are understood essentially as a starting point to explain how a cultural artifact as the textbook is shaped by the material conditions of capitalism.

The legacy of Marx has led to a tremendous variety of schools and movements that examine social phenomena in their dynamic relation to wider historical, political and economic realities in capitalist societies. For the approach of this book, particularly relevant is the notion of hegemony used by Antonio Gramsci to explain the ways in which the dominant ideology is disseminated and accepted as commonsensical and normal. Hegemony in Gramsci’s terms is seen as the:

‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.

(Gramsci 1971: 12)

Gramsci sees that the ruling class expresses its power not only by physical force or economic control, but also through cultural institutions such as the media, the school or the church, which are capable of presenting a particular ideology as ‘common sense’, or the natural way of thinking and acting. Of course, hegemonic consent is not always total and complete since “people may accept some aspects but reject others” (Holborow 2012b: 41). Indeed, Gramsci (1971) himself offers the prospect to turn the situation around by encouraging the subaltern classes to develop their own alternative hegemonic ‘collective will’ as a first phase to the revolution.

In order to understand a cultural product such as a language textbook, it is also very important to have in mind the Marxist critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and especially its studies of mass culture. Frankfurt scholars examined mass-mediated cultural products (music, cinema, soap operas, magazines, etc.) within the context of the consumer and industrial society of the mid-twentieth century in Western capitalist countries. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (2002 [1944]) coin the term ‘culture industry’ to signify the process of industrialization of culture created by the commercial imperatives that guide capitalism. These two authors argue that cultural products have the same characteristics as the rest of goods in mass capitalist production: commodification, standardization and massification. However, unlike other goods such as clothes or food, cultural products are not directed to human material needs, but to people’s thoughts (Dant 2003: 110). Hence, cultural products have the specific function of legitimizing capitalism penetrating people’s minds: “Capitalism has an interest in the state of those minds: it needs workers who are happy enough to accept uncritically their position within the system” (Dant 2003: 110). In a similar way, Herbert Marcuse (1964 [1954]) explains that art in advanced capitalist societies became simple entertainment, commercialized according to its value as a commodity in the market. These new artistic manifestations, instead of awakening people’s critical thinking, encourage conformism with the status quo or, in the words of Marcuse, a ‘happy consciousness’: “the belief that the real is rational and that the system delivers the goods” (Marcuse 1964: 84). In sum, for Frankfurt scholars, the culture industry of their time provides “amusement, distraction, relief” to the people and, in that way, “ameliorates the violence that capitalism performs” (Taylor and Harris 2008: 71). As Marnie Holborow (personal communication) reminds me, it is worth noting that the Frankfurt school thesis was developed in a period of capitalist expansion which may explain some the school’s tendency to present the masses as passive victims. They rather wrote off the working class’s ability to resist as they believed that increased material consumption had dulled working-class anger.

In the field of education, the works of Marx, Gramsci and the Frankfurt school are the roots of critical pedagogy, an approach which aims to show how formal and informal education are transformed by relations of inequality and power (Apple et al. 2010). Critical pedagogy is also “a practical approach to teaching, learning, and research that emphasizes teaching through critical dialogue and a dialectical analysis of everyday experience” (Macrine et al. 2010: 2). This movement has been developed mainly in North America with key figures such as Peter McLaren and Henry Giroux, but its genesis can be traced to Paulo Freire’s literacy campaigns with working-class and peasant students in Brazil, in a struggle against oppressive social structures. Freire’s work, especially his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire 1970), has inspired many critical educators and theoreticians who viewed his work as “a new synthesis for a humanist and libertarian pedagogy, which aimed through its praxis at transforming oppression and the culture of domination” (Peters 2005: 35). For our understanding of textbooks, the research carried out by critical pedagogues on the ideological character of curriculum and textbooks is especially interesting. Michael Apple, in his widely influential book Ideology and Curriculum, first published in 1979, argues that curriculum is not neutral knowledge, but is always the result of a process of ‘selective tradition’:

the way in which from a whole possible area of past and present, certain meanings and practices are chosen for emphasis, certain other meanings and practices are neglected and excluded. Even more crucially, some of these meanings are reinterpreted, diluted, or put into forms which support or at least do not contradict other elements within the effective dominant culture.

(Apple 1990: 6)

The selective tradition disseminated in schools reflects the interest and the beliefs of the ruling class in society. Thus, schools have the function to reproduce the hegemonic ideology and, in that way, reinforce and naturalize the current socioeconomic system (Apple 1990; Giroux 1997). In this vein, critical educators agree that textbooks embody particular ideologies and present an officially sanctioned knowledge (Luke 1988; De Castell et al. 1989; Apple and Christian-Smith 1991). For example, in The Politics of the Textbook, Apple and Linda Christian-Smith (1991) contend that school textbooks “are not simple ‘delivery system’ of ‘facts’” (1), but “they signify – through their content and form – particular constructions of reality, particular ways of selecting and organizing that vast universe of possible knowledge” (3–4). In that way, as an educational tool in general, textbooks have an important ideological and reproduction role in society:

As part of a curriculum they participate in no less than the organized knowledge system of society. They participate in creating what a society has recognized as legitimate and truthful. They help set the canons of truthfulness and, as such, also help re-create a major reference point for what knowledge, culture, belief, and morality really are.

(Apple and Christian-Smith 1991: 4)

What knowledge is relevant, accurate and worthy of transmitting to future generations will vary depending on each historic context (Choppin 2000). More precisely, according to Marxism, it will depend on the dominant ideology at a given moment in history. The dominant ideology coincides with the interests of the ruling classes, and it is conditioned by the material activity of people in the society at large (Marx and Engels 1998 [1845]). Following Holborow (2012a, 2015), in my study, the term ideology is understood as “a one-sided representation, articulated from a particular social class but constructed as a world view, part-believed and part rejected, influenced by real-world events and coextensive with language, but distinct from it” (2015: 130). The purpose of my book is to analyze the underpinnings of neoliberal ideology in current textbooks in capitalist societies. Evidently, though, other textbooks instantiate ideologies other than a capitalist or neoliberal one. For example, textbooks from other contexts and periods may endorse a socialist ideological paradigm or a particular system of religious values in line with the guiding principles of the social, political and economic system where they are created.

Besides being an ideological artifact, the textbook is also seen by critical education scholars as a commercial product, that is, an economic commodity that should compete in the market to achieve profits for the publishing industry (Apple 1985). In other words, the content and the form of textbooks are determined by political and ideological conditions outside the classroom, which also include the economic imperatives of the market, meaning the need to augment its sales and accomplish corporate goals. The seminal work of critical pedagogy in the analysis of education materials in relation to the political and economic climate has subsequently inspired many critical studies of textbooks, including also foreign and second language textbooks such as The Hidden Curriculum of Survival ESL (Auerbach and Burgess 1985), the studies of John Gray (2010b, 2013b) and Christian Chun (2009) about English textbooks, or a recent edited collection about the politics of language textbooks (Curdt-Christiansen and Weninger 2015a), as I will explain in detail in Chapter 3. Finally, in the particular field of applied linguistics, Marxism has also influenced the emerging interest to put neoliberalism at the center of the research from the perspective of political economy. Before considering the studies of neoliberalism and applied linguistics, however, it is necessary first to define our understanding of neoliberalism.

What is neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism is a term used today mainly by its critics¹ to designate the latest phase of capitalism which began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the first instance, neoliberalism is an economic policy paradigm based on a theory which holds “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” (Harvey 2005: 2). For Pierre Bourdieu (1998: npn), one of the first critical scholars to use this term, neoliberalism is a political “programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic”. Its theoretical roots can be found in the works of the Austrian political philosopher Friedrich Hayek in the 1940s and of the Chicago School of Economics in the 1950s with Milton Friedman as its key figure.² Neoliberal thinking was first put into practice in Chile after the US-backed Pinochet coup in 1973 under the direction of many economists who had graduated from Friedman’s University of Chicago, and which imposed drastic economic changes on the country (Klein 2007). The characteristics of neoliberal economic policy are free trade and deregulation of financial markets, privatization of state enterprises (including energy, water, health, education, housing and transport services), reduction of public spending on welfare, and tax cuts for the rich. It promotes a flexible work market, the decline of worker unions and consumption through debt. Another key feature of neoliberalism is the “extension of market-based competition and commodification processes into previously insulated realms of political-economic life” (Brenner et al. 2010: 329), such as education and health.

In the 1980s, neoliberal policies began to be implemented at the center of the capitalist system under the governments of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain. According to David Harvey (2005), this neoliberal recipe came in response to the mid-1970s international crisis of the capitalist system that had dominated from the end of World War II. That approach had followed Keynesian economic prescriptions that advocate for state planning to reduce unemployment and stimulate economic growth, and which had led to the development of a welfare system in most Western capitalist societies. Especially after the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the disappearance of this strong alternative to capitalism, neoliberalism became the dominant economic doctrine around the world. US-dominated financial bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank played a highly active role in the spread of neoliberalism globally through the imposition of the dictates of what was known as the ‘Washington Consensus’ in developing countries that received the loans they issued. The Washington Consensus, a term first used in 1989, is a set of ten economic prescriptions promoted by US-based institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the US Treasury Department. These prescriptions comprising the new global economic policy include the decrease of government spending to control inflation and reduce the public deficit, trade liberalization with the abolition of state restrictions on imports and exports, the deregulation of markets, the privatization of state enterprises and the prot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A short history of foreign language education in Europe
• 3 Critical research on language textbooks
• 4 Analyzing textbooks from a political economy perspective
• 5 The Catalan context
• 6 Social class in textbooks
• 7 The world of work: constructing an entrepreneurial identity
• 8 The world of housing: creating a neoliberal fairytale
• 9 Conclusions
• References
• Index