Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences

Dave Hill,Ravi Kumar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135906511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

In this groundbreaking critique of neoliberalism in schooling and education, an international cast of education policy analysts, educational activists and scholars deftly analyze the ideologies underlying the global, national and local neoliberalisation of schooling and education. The thrilling scholarship that makes up Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences exposes the machinations, agenda and impacts of the privatising and 'merchandisation' of education by the World Bank, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), biased think tanks, global and national corporations and capital, and the full political spectrum of Neoliberal governments. Including such topics as the increasing polarization of racialized and gendered social classes as a consequence of neoliberal policies, the role and shape of markets and education in the era of globalised Capitalism, the effects of the profit motive in higher education, the impact of the Heritage Foundation in the USA, and even a critical evaluation of education in Cuba--readers are sure to find startling insight and provocative arguments throughout Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences.

1
Introduction

Neoliberal Capitalism and Education

Ravi Kumar and Dave Hill

THE CONTEXTS OF EDUCATIONAL CHANGE

There is a distinct criticality of the current historical conjuncture. This criticality of our times is characterized by redefinitions of fundamental concepts such as “equality,” as neoliberal capital strives to mold discourses to suit its goal. While there is a euphoric façade of rhetoric such as “education for all” on one hand, there is a diminishing role of the state on the other. There is a definitive retreat of the state as a provider of education. This is true of the developed as well as the so-called developing world. This retreat is happening in the face of the global onslaught of private capital, with its insatiable appetite for maximizing surplus accumulation. Hence, we find the gradual destruction of comprehensive schooling in the United Kingdom and severe curtailment of funding for government schools in the United States. Countries like India, riding high on the glory of a booming economy, are no exception to these trends, as the state fails to grant children the right to education despite staggering illiteracy, high dropout rates, and inaccessibility to school facilities. The global march of capital continues relentlessly as opposition is fragmented, weakened, or co-opted. This, however, does not provide capitalism with a smooth path of expansion. It becomes entangled in its own contradictions and the discontent among the masses becomes amply clear in such moments, the case of French working-class assertion being the most recent.

This chapter contextualizes the current anti-egalitarian education system in two ways: (a) the ideological and policy context, and (b) the global/spatial context. The restructuring of the schooling and education systems across the world is part of the ideological and policy offensive by neoliberal capital. The privatization of public services, the capitalization and commodification of humanity, and the global diktats of the agencies of international capital—backed by destabilization of nonconforming governments and, ultimately, the armed cavalries of the United States and its surrogates—have resulted in the near-global (if not universal) establishment of competitive markets in public services such as education. These education markets are marked by selection and exclusion, and are accompanied by and situated within the rampant—indeed, exponential—growth of 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 (or, in parts of the globe, the “choice” as to whether to send children to school or not), privatization of schools and other education providers, and the cutting of state subsidies to education and other public services are only a part of the educational and anti-public-welfare strategy of the capitalist class.

National and global capitalisms wish to cut public expenditure and have generally succeeded in doing so. They do this because public services are expensive. Cuts in public expenditure serve to reduce taxes on profits, which in turn increases profits from capital accumulation. Additionally, the capitalist class globally have: (a) a business agenda for education that centers on socially producing labor power (people’s capacity to labor) for capitalist enterprises; (b) a business agenda in education that centers on setting business “free” in education for profit making; and (c) a business agenda for education corporations that allows edubusinesses to profit from national international privatizing activities.

THE CURRENT NEOLIBERAL PROJECT OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM

The fundamental principle of capitalism is the sanctification of private (or corporate) profit based on the extraction of surplus labor (unpaid labor time) as surplus value from the labor power of workers. 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 labor, the national and international working class.¹

As Raduntz (2007) argues,

globalisation is not a qualitatively new phenomenon but a tendency which has always been integral to capitalism’s growth … Within the Marxist paradigm there is growing recognition of the relevance of Marx’s account expressed in The Communist Manifesto that globalisation is the predictable outcome of capitalism’s expansionary tendencies evident since its emergence as a viable form of society.²

For neoliberals, “profit is God,” not the public good. Capitalism is not kind. Plutocrats are not, essentially, philanthropic. In capitalism it is the insatiable demand for profit that is the motor for policy, not public or social or common weal, or good. With great power comes great irresponsibility. Thus privatized utilities such as the railway system, health and education services, and water supplies are run to maximize the shareholders’ profits, rather than to provide a public service and sustainable development of third-world national economic integrity and growth. These are not on the agenda of globalizing neoliberal capital.³

McMurtry (1999) describes “the pathologization of the market model.” He suggested that the so-called “free-market model” is not a free market at all, and 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.” This is a system where the rules are rigged to favor 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.

Indeed, it is a system where the rules are flouted by the United States and the European Union (EU), which continue to subsidize, for example, their own agricultural industries, while demanding that states receiving International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank funding throw their markets open (to be devastated by subsidized EU and U.S. imports).⁴ Thus, opening education to the market, in the long run, will open it to the corporate giants, in particular Anglo-American-based transnational companies—who will run it in their own interests.

Rikowski (e.g., 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2008) and others (e.g., Coates, 2001; Robertson, Bonal and Dale, 2002; Mojab, 2001; Pilger, 2002; Devidal, 2004; Hill, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2009; Hill and Kumar, 2009; Hill, Macrine and Gabbard, 2008) argue that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and other “global clubs for the mega-capitalists” are setting up this agenda in education across the globe, primarily through the developing operationalizing and widening sectoral remit of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).

WHAT NEOLIBERALISM DEMANDS

The difference between classic (laissez-faire) liberalism of mid-nineteenth century Britain and the neoliberalism of today, based on the views of the neoliberal theorist Hayek, is that the former wanted to roll back the state, to let private enterprise make profits relatively unhindered by legislation (e.g., safety at work, trade union rights, minimum wage), and unhindered by the tax costs of a welfare state (e.g. Hayek and Caldwell, 2007).

On the other hand, neoliberalism demands a strong state to promote its interests, hence Andrew Gamble’s (1988) depiction of the Thatcherite polity as The free economy and the sStrong state: The politics of Thatcherism. The strong interventionist state is needed by capital, particularly in the field of education and training—in the field of producing an ideologically compliant but technically and hierarchically skilled workforce. The social production of labor power is crucial for capitalism. It needs to extract as much surplus value as it can from the labor power of workers, as they transform labor capacity into labor in commodity-producing labor processes.

The current globally dominant form of capitalism, neoliberalism, requires the following within national states:

• inflation controlled by interest rates, preferably by an independent central bank,

• budgets balanced and not used to influence demand—or at any rate not to stimulate it,

• private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange,

• 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, pensions, public building works financed by private capital, and railways),

• within education the creation of “opportunity” to acquire the means of education (though not necessarily education itself) and additional cultural capital, through selection,

• relatively untrammeled selling and buying of labor power for a “flexible,” poorly regulated labor market, and deregulation of the labor market for labor flexibility (with consequences for education),

• 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),⁵

• suppression of oppositional critical thought and much autonomous thought and education,

• a regime of denigration and humbling of publicly provided services, and

• a regime of cuts in the postwar welfare state, the withdrawal of state subsidies and support, and low public expenditure.

Internationally, neoliberalism requires that

• barriers to international trade and capitalist enterprise be removed,

• there be a “level playing field” for companies of any nationality within all sectors of national economies, and

• trade rules and regulations underpin “free” trade, with a system for penalizing “unfair” trade policies.

This is the theory, anyhow. Of course, rich and powerful countries and trade blocs, such as the USA and the Euro...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Education and Neoliberalism
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Neoliberalism and Its Impacts
• 3 Neoliberalism, Youth, and the Leasing of Higher Education
• 4 Higher Education and the Profit Incentive
• 5 Trading Away Human Rights?
• 6 Education, Inequality and Neoliberal Capitalism
• 7 Brazilian Education, Dependent Capitalism, and the World Bank
• 8 World Bank Discourse and Policy on Education and Cultural Diversity for Latin America1
• 9 The News Media and the Conservative Heritage Foundation
• 10 Markets and Education in the Era of Globalized Capitalism1
• 11 Education in Cuba
• Contributors
• Index