Neoliberalism, Critical Pedagogy and Education

Ravi Kumar, Ravi Kumar

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317335177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume examines the role of neoliberalism and its impact on education in South Asia. It contends that education is in a state of crisis across the world. This is reflected not only in the way the state has withdrawn to pave way for private capital but also in the manner in which knowledge and ways of understanding the world are being challenged by manipulation and adverse influences. A process of 'factoryisation' is underway as disciplining of human minds and redefinition of the purpose of human existence are being geared to fall in line with the needs of private capital.

The book brings together incisive contributions from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Nepal to explore newer possibilities to deal with the educational crisis, and looks at a range of critical themes in education: pedagogy, teacher–learner relationship, teacher education, the state of the university, and policy.

Rich in content, critical and insightful, this book will be a valuable addition for scholars and researchers of education and education policy, sociology, public policy and South Asian Studies.

Part I

Neoliberalism, critical pedagogy and resistance

Theoretical perspectives on educational crisis

Chapter 1

Critical pedagogy and class struggle in the age of neoliberal terror¹

Peter McLaren

Geographies of desire: the epochal crisis

This is a pivotal moment for humanity, when the meanings, values and norms of everyday life are arching towards oblivion; when human beings are being distributed unevenly across the planet as little more than property relations; when a culture of slave labour is increasingly defining the workaday world; when capital’s structurally instantiated ability to supervise our labour, control our investments and purchase our labour power has reached new levels of opprobrium; when those who are habitually relegated to subordinate positions within capital’s structured hierarchies live in constant fear of joblessness and hunger; and when the masses of humanity are in peril of being crushed by the jackboots of the capitalist beast. The winds of critical consciousness, enervated by outrage at the profligate use of lies and deceptions by the capitalist class – a class that gorgonizes the public through a winner-take-all market fundamentalism and corporate-driven media spectacles – are stirring up the toxic debris from our austerity-gripped and broken humanity. Capitalism subordinates human beings to things, splitting human beings off from themselves. Correlative to a capitalist economy is an unconscious schema of rational calculation governing an erotically exuberant pursuit of knowledge which involves a possessive mastery over commodities, a squandering of human nature, abstracting from the wholeness of human beings and thus turning them into fragments of each other, creating the impersonal, quantifying, and utilitarian rationality and alienated consciousness of homo economicus.

The aggrieved, the oppressed and the immiserated are awakening fitfully from their social amnesia and reminding those who choose to delay their emergence from their hypnopompic state that in standing idle they risk being suffocated by their own past. Thus, the clarion call of First Nations peoples worldwide: Idle No More!

Acknowledging fully the asymmetrical relations of power encapsulated in the uneven and combined development pervading the global South in relationship to the global North, a relation of extreme violence so necessary for us, as Western consumers, to enjoy our relatively middle-class lifestyles, we nevertheless struggle for something that is akin to Agamben’s ‘non-state’ or humanity, through a Gramscian attempt at a war of position, a Freire praxis of conscientization or the permanent revolution found in Raya Dunayevskaya’s philosophy of praxis grounded in ‘absolute negativity’, and an ecological general strike of which the Environmental caucus of the Industrial Workers of the World now speak. Capitalism is more than the sheet anchor of institutionalized avarice and greed, more than excrement splattered on the coattails of bankers and speculators; it is a ‘world-eater’ with an insatiable appetite. Capital has strapped us to the slaughter-bench of history, from which we must try to continue our work of intellectual and cultural struggle, creating working-class solidarity, an integral value system and internal class logic capable of countering the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, while increasing class consensus and popular support.

Inherent in capitalist societies marked by perpetual class warfare and the capitalist mode of production is structural violence of a scale so staggering that it can be conceived only as structural genocide. Garry Leech (2012) has argued convincingly that capitalist-induced violence is structural in nature and indeed constitutes genocide. Leech cites the work of the original formulator of the concept of structural violence, Johan Galtung, who, in 1969, added a consideration of ‘the avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs or … of human life’ to prevailing notions of societal violence.

Javier Sethness (2013), reflecting on Leech’s book, shows how capitalism is a mode of structural violence. He summarizes the structural genocidal politics of three geographical areas of capitalism. Leech uses to demonstrate the devastating logic of genocide nested within capitalism’s social relations of production. These areas include Mexico, Africa and India. Sethness summarizes some of Leech’s observations about India:

Alarmingly, in India, Leech reports that more than 216,000 farmers committed suicide between 1997 and 2009, largely out of desperation over crushing debts they accumulated following the introduction of genetically-modified seed crops, as demanded by the transnational Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS, 1994) and the general shift from subsistence to export-oriented agriculture. In many cases, the genetically engineered seed varieties failed to expand yields to the levels promised by Monsanto, Cargill, and co., leading farmers then to take on further debt merely to cover the shortfalls as well as to pay for the next iteration of crops – which by conscious design were modified at the molecular level so as not to be able to reproduce naturally, thus ensuring biotech firms sustained profitability (a ‘captured market,’ as it were). That such a dynamic should end in a downward spiral of death and destruction should be unsurprising, for all its horror.

The conditions of inequality – stubbornly rationalized by the ruling class through the ideological state apparatus of schooling, religion and media – beguile the people with everyday distractions and falsehoods, mystifying them with respect to their aspirations, loyalties and purposes. As new forms of development of the productive forces arise, existing economic relationships become a burden to the new economic system of production, and as a result of capital’s internal conflict, society reorganizes itself to accommodate these new relationships as the ruling class increases their legal and political demands (McLaren, 2005; Pozo, 2003). These central commissars of knowledge production, these sentinels of common sense, cannot abjure the powers of the working class to resist their immiseration by simply wishing them away (Hill, 2012); they need to control ideological production through discourses that obtain canonical value by assigning high rank to capitalist intellectuals and through constant repetition by means of mind-numbing cultural productions designed to distract people from their woes and to disqualify the claims of the oppressed as unreasonable, impractical and unpatriotic (Best et al., 2011).

John Bellamy Foster (2013) argues that we are living in an ‘epochal crisis’ (a term borrowed from Jason Moore), a tremulous period in which dire economic and ecological crises emerge inextricably entangled in each other. He cites systems ecologist Howard Odum’s revelation that Latin Americans, in particular, are being systematically robbed of their environmental resources through an unequal exchange in trade and production in which ‘embodied energy’ is being withdrawn from the global South to the benefit of the global North – a situation which Garcia Linera refers to as ‘extraterritorial surplus value’ (cited in Foster, 2013a). We are facing what Foster describes as the unlimited expansion of a capitalist system geared to a process of abstract wealth creation. We are witnessing the displacement of natural-material use value by specifically capitalist use value, which does little more than enhancing exchange value for the capitalist so that the production of use value ceases and money creates money without producing any natural-material use value (Foster, 2013).

The ‘real economy’ is being hijacked by the irrational logic of monopoly-finance capitalism organized around financial-asset appreciation, which is dependent on an endless series of financial bubbles. Big corporations and wealthy investors, according to Foster (2013), have ‘increasingly poured their surplus capital into the financial sphere in order to secure high speculative returns’. The response to this additional demand for their products by financial institutions was to supply ‘an endless array of new, exotic speculative opportunities (junk bonds, derivatives, options, hedge funds, etc.)’, which invariably leads to massive credit/debt. And all of this is occurring in the midst of human suffering, the magnitude of which is scarcely imaginable.

Samir Amin (2010) captures general trends in the important evolution of capitalism by describing them in terms of generalized and financialized oligopolies run by plutocrats. According to Amin, since capitalism has reached a stage of centralization and concentration of capital out of all comparison with the situation only 50 years ago, it is best described as one of generalized oligopolies. ‘Monopolies’ (or, better, oligopolies) are in no way new inventions in modern history. What is new, however, is the limited number of registered oligopolies (‘groups’), which stands at about 500, if only the colossal ones are counted, and 3,000–5,000 in an almost comprehensive list. They now determine, through their decisions, the whole of economic life on the planet, and more besides. This capitalism of generalized oligopolies is thus a qualitative leap forward in the general evolution of capitalism.

Paraphrasing Amin, all types of production of goods and services – small, medium and large – are now subordinated to the oligopolies that determine the conditions of their survival. The real reason for this is the search for maximum profits, which benefits the powerful groups who have priority access to capital markets. Such concentration – which has historically been the response of capital to the long deep crises that have marked its history – is at the origin of the ‘financialization’ of the system. Amin remarks that ‘this is how the oligopolies siphon off the global surplus value produced by the production system, a “rent monopoly” that enables oligopolistic groups to increase their rate of profit considerably’. This levy is made possible because of ‘the oligopolies’ exclusive access to the monetary and financial markets which thus become the dominant markets. Amin tells us not to confuse financialization with ‘a regrettable drift linked to the “deregulation” of financial markets, even less of “accidents” (like subprimes) on which vulgar economics and its accompanying political discourse concentrate people’s attention’. On the contrary, financialization ‘is a necessary requirement for the reproduction of the system of generalized oligopolies’. The capitalism of generalized and financialized oligopolies is also globalized, producing a growing gulf between the ‘developed’ centres of the system and its dominated peripheries, and is associated with the emergence of the ‘collective imperialism of the Triad’ (the United States and its external provinces of Canada and Australia, Western and Central Europe and Japan).

The grave threat of a capitalism of generalized, financialized and globalized oligopolies is enhanced as a result of its private status, since its continuation is bound to result in the destruction of the societies in the peripheries: those in the so-called emerging countries as well as in the marginalized countries, and very well could mean the destruction of the entire planet.

Amin warns us about changes in the structures of the governing classes (‘bourgeoisie’), political practice, ideology and political culture. He argues that the ‘historical bourgeoisie is disappearing from the scene and is now being replaced by the plutocracy of the “bosses” of oligopolies’. He maintains that this ‘drift of the practice of democracy emptied of all content and the emergence of ultra-reactionary ideological expressions are the necessary accompaniment of the obsolete character of contemporary capitalism’.

Yet things are not going so well in some parts of the Triad. Here, in Los Angeles County, in the most dominant country of Amin’s Triad, an estimated 254,000 men, women and children experience homelessness during some part of the year. On any given night, 82,000 people are homeless; between 4,800 and 10,000 of them are young people. One-third of this population holds a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 25 per cent of the population as a whole (Wells, 2013). Throughout the United States, 80 per cent of the population faces poverty or near poverty (Yen and Naziri, 2013). Gun violence is astronomical in the United States (McElwee, 2014).

A striking and largely unremarked upon characteristic of the United States is that in many American counties, in the deep South especially, ‘life expectancy is lower than in Algeria, Nicaragua or Bangladesh’ and that the United States ‘is the only developed country that does not guarantee health care to its citizens’. This remains the case, even after the Affordable Care Act. McElwee (2014) notes that ‘America is unique among developed countries in that tens of thousands of poor Americans die because they lack health insurance, even while we spend more than twice as much of our GDP on health care than the average for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a collection of rich world countries’. The United States has a frightening infant mortality rate, ‘as well as the highest teenage-pregnancy rate in the developed world, largely because of the politically motivated unavailability of contraception in many areas’ (McElwee, 2014).

As far as raising children goes, McElwee (2014) notes that the United States ‘is among only three nations in the world that does not guarantee paid maternal leave (the other two are Papua New Guinea and Swaziland)’. Poor American mothers must face the choice between raising their children and keeping their jobs. On the other hand, the education system is

plagued with structural racial biases, like the fact that schools are funded at the local, rather than national level. That means that schools attended by poor black people get far less funding than the schools attended by wealthier students. The Department of Education has confirmed that schools with high concentrations of poor students have lower levels of funding. It’s no wonder America has one of the highest achievement gaps between high income and low income students, as measured by the OECD Schools today are actually more racially segregated than they were in the 1970s. Our higher education system is unique among developed nations in that is funded almost entirely privately, by debt. Students in the average OECD country can expect about 70 percent of their college tuition to be publicly funded; in the United States, only about 40 percent of the cost of education is publicly-funded. That’s one reason the U.S. has the highest tuition costs of any OECD country.

In the midst of the current epochal crisis, the US Department of Education and its spokespersons in the corporate media are diverting us away from the central issues of the crisis of capitalism and the ecological crisis by turning our attention to the failure of public schools (McLaren, 2006, 2012). They propose as a solution to smash public schools and the commons by privatizing education. Of course, this is not symptomatic only of the United States. We are facing the imperatives of the transnational capitalist class, and so the challenge to public education is occurring on a transnational scale.

Financialization and the neoliberal mind

After the economic stagnation of the 1970s, neoliberals called for, and brought about, the replacement of the embedded liberalism in the welfare state to the louche world of neoliberalism, where pencil-moustached hedge fund executives amassed staggering profits through financial speculation without producing anything of use value, not even portable latrines for those construction workers still able to find work repairing the savaged infrastructure of America’s dying cities. As David Harvey (see Lilley, 2006) has argued, neoliberals view civilization’s highest achievement as protecting individual property rights, free markets and free trade, and after the deindustrialization of US cities when manufacturing jobs in the unionized sectors were outsourced in Mexico and China and elsewhere, neoliberals abandoned their policies of full employment in order to pursue strategies to fight inflation. I attempted to frame this dilemma in 2005, and it has largely remained the same since then:

Part of the problem faced by the educational left today is that even among the most progressive educators there appears to exist an ominous resignation produced by the seeming inevitability of capital. This problem continues to obtain even as financial institutions expand capacity in inverse proportion to a decline in living standards and job security. It has become an article of faith in the critical educational tradition that there is no viable alternative to capitalism. When class relations are discussed, they are rarely ever talked about in the Marxist sense of foregrounding the labor/capital dialectic, surplus value extraction, or the structure of property ownership; instead, the conversation is directed towards consumption, lifestyle politics...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Neoliberalism, critical pedagogy and resistance Theoretical perspectives on educational crisis
• Part II Neoliberalism in education in South Asia
• Part III Politics of knowledge production under neoliberalism
• Part IV Perspectives on resisting neoliberalism in education
• Index