This essentially polemical article questions whether the Bologna Process (BP) is necessary (and desirable) in the adaptation of universities to the new social conditions or whether it is a Trojan horse sent out to introduce neoliberal changes in the field of higher education. First, it addresses the circumstances surrounding the origins of the Bologna Declaration, demonstrating that it enabled the instrumental logic of the marketization and commodification of education to pervade universities traditionally conceived of as cultural institutions of knowledge. Then it investigates the eight declared objectives of Bologna and, finally, summarizes the consequences that can be firmly established ten years after the event. These include the fact that three of the pillars of the BP can be interpreted as responding to the requirements of neoliberal New Public Management; namely, study structure (flexibility and market-driven profiles), credits (standardization, mobility and effectiveness) and quality assurance (external control). In conclusion, the paper suggests that the BP primarily represents a problem in understanding a situation that displays signs of the radical transformation of the social function of one dimension of societal life – higher education. Although it is clearly an adaptive reaction to the (neoliberal) transformation of society, it has also become part of the ideological games played by certain special-interest groups and, as such, we must make continual attempts to gain a deeper understanding of it.
Drawing on the traditions of critical pedagogy from Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux to recent critical research developed in the Journal of Pedagogy, this study explores how a particular case of curriculum reform in the US is entangled with racial neoliberalism and paranoia.
Building on historical narrative and social-theoretical analysis, the authoress explores the place of second-wave feminism in relation to three specific moments in the history of capitalism. The first point refers to the movement's beginnings in the context of 'state-organized capitalism'. The second point refers to the process of feminism's evolution in the dramatically changed social context of rising neoliberalism. And the third point refers to a possible reorientation of feminism in the present context of capitalist crisis and US political realignment, which for her could mark the beginning of a shift from neoliberalism to a new form of social organization. Orienting her analysis around four key points of feminist critique - androcentrism, economism, etatism and Westphalianism - the authoress charts a fascinating journey of second-wave feminism since the 1960s to identify a 'dangerous liaison' second-wave feminism developed with capitalism. She concludes that in order to reclaim second-wave feminism as a robust critique conjoining both claims for recognition and redistribution - which were unlinked during the period of rising neoliberalism - feminism needs to become more historically self-aware.
This paper focuses on theoretical analysis of the notion of constructed order (as described by Walter Eucken) against the background of the current economic crisis. The choice of topic is justified by the increasingly evident weaknesses of modern capitalist economy. The literature on the subject points out with growing frequency that the market system should not be allowed to act alone and requires active support, as well as corrective action on the part of the state. These ideas seem to overlap with the premises of Eucken's concept of constructed order, in which the state ensures self-regulation of market economy on a general scale, and guarantees conditions conducive to the realisation of social values.
The field of early childhood education is increasingly dominated by a strongly positivistic and regulatory discourse, the story of quality and high returns, which has spread from its local origins in the favourable environment provided by a global regime of neoliberalism. But though dominant, this is not the only discourse in early childhood education, there are alternatives that are varied, vibrant and vocal; not silenced but readily heard by those who listen and forming a resistance movement. The article argues that this movement needs to confront a number of questions. Do its members want to influence and shape policy and practice? If so, what might a transformed and commensurate policy and practice look like? What are the possibilities that such transformation might be achieved, especially given the apparent unassailability of the current dominant discourse, and the force of the power relations that have enabled this discourse, local in origin and parochial in outlook, to aspire to global hegemony? And if such transformation were to occur, is it possible to avoid simply replacing one dominant discourse with another? Some partial and provisional answers are offered to these questions.
This paper looks at EU expansion through market activity by focussing on the case of British citizens buying property in Bulgaria. The property market at least in the northern-central rural region of the country that is the focus in this work is driven by an attempt to achieve greater security in the context of neoliberal policies that advocate market deregulation and de-prioritise state forms of social provisioning. This creates a 'ready market' for individuals who secure their own futures through the buying (as in the Britons case) and selling (as in the Bulgarian case) of property. Importantly, it is illegal, at present, for foreigners to own land in Bulgaria and thus the present boom provides an example of the dominance of market forces that operate despite state laws designed to regulate market activity. This, the author suggests, is an important dimension of how EU expansion takes place through informal economic activity. Foreign involvement in the property market is also a source of new inequalities arising between citizens of old and new member states.
This article addresses access to high-quality education under a neoliberal mentality. It engages at both the discursive and material levels, by mapping how taken-for-granted truths about neoliberal policies circulate through the media. The media—newspapers, network channels, and news websites—have correlated quality education with socioeconomic status, which have effects of power in the fabrication of the productive citizen and low-performer, and in the perpetuation of the “class/room”. The unexpected deceitfulness of numbers operates as a rhizomatic regime of truths, conducting our ways of being and acting in the world. This analysis takes numbers as an actor to challenge the apparent representative and descriptive nature of standardized assessment outcomes, and the idea that competition, freedom of choice, and accountability are a means of securing equity, inclusion, and economic growth. The novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, particularly those featuring the fictional character Sherlock Holmes, and the Sherlock Holmes adaptations portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the TV series “Sherlock” have inspired the narrative of this story. Sherlock’s mind palace—a feature added to Holmes’ personality in the TV series—is put to great use in the narrative of this article.
In this article authors interrogate neoliberal assemblages within the context of eating and feeding practices in early childhood education. They consider how neoliberal assemblages are enacted and created through multiple linkages between micro and macro regulations and policies, and everyday food routines. They attend to the embodied intensities, desires and affects that accompany these neoliberal formations. In particular, the authors are interested in making visible entanglements between particular situated neoliberal assemblages and racialization and neo-colonialism. In their analysis, they consider how eating and food routines, situated within Inuit early childhood education, come to matter as instances of neoliberal encounters that merge with other discursive and material forces to create particular, situated and at times contradictory neoliberal assemblages that have colonizing and racializing effects on the capacities of certain bodies in certain spaces.
This article maps some of the ways in which neoliberalism, pedagogy, and curriculum are closely interconnected. Looking at the Spanish curriculum reform during the first Socialist administration in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it explicitly identifies child-centred pedagogies as an important tool in articulating the neoliberal agenda in curriculum reforms around the world. It explores the way Spain uncritically embraced these curriculum reforms with a notion of the individual not defined by the educational needs of the country but by the neoliberal rationality dominating Spain’s political and economic transition at the time. Based on this analysis and on the way child-centred pedagogies have been implemented in education reforms around the world, this article considers the question of whether such pedagogies can really work toward the democratic ideals they claim to serve. The article concludes by offering some reflections on this question and by calling for a larger and interdisciplinary conversation on the ideological possibilities of these pedagogies.
The case of Greece as the most recent neoliberal experiment can provide valuable insights not only about a generalized attack on the welfare state and the public good, but also about the radical changes in public education that are altering its public mission, vision, and goals. In this paper first we trace the educational landscape in Greece as it emerges both from the reform in primary and secondary education and from the new law 4009 on higher education. The on-going government discourse on education is shaped and constructed along the lines of a market-driven society and unapologetically espouses the neoliberal dogma that aims to convert education into training, universities into corporations, knowledge into a service or commodity, and students into clients. We further examine the official public discourse as illustrated in government documentation in an attempt to map out the marked shift from the university as a public good to the university as corporate entity, and highlight the particular ways in which this is done. The new educational legislation sets the stage for an education where the individual will thrive through relentless competition, where collectivity is abolished, where only “useful” knowledge counts and where “quality” and “excellence” serve as the excuse for a corporate standardization of the university and the academic life and thought.
Over the past few decades there has been a rapid expansion in alternative ‘fast track’ routes for teacher preparation. Among the most aggressive of these are Teach for All (TFA) schemes characterized not only by their ultra-fast entry to teaching (6 – 7 week course) but also by their underlying philosophy that the so called ‘crisis’ in poor rural and urban schools can be solved by attracting the ‘best and brightest’ university graduates for a two year appointment in ‘difficult to staff’ schools. With its missionary zeal TFA is heralded by some as one way to solve socio-educational problems that governments cannot. Others condemn such schemes as not only patronizing, but also part of an ideologically driven and deliberate neoliberal attack on public education, teachers, teacher professionalism and working class or ‘other’ communities. Recently Teach for All came knocking on New Zealand’s door. Concerned about the possible implications of this for the teaching profession and education more generally, the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) Te Wehengarua commissioned a review of the international literature on TFA schemes. This paper synthesizes some of the key findings of this review with particular focus on TFA’s marketing strategies and the connections TFA schemes have with so called social entrepreneurs or venture philanthropists, many of whom are actively and aggressively engaged in shaping educational reforms in line with neoliberal agendas.
In this article we trace first the history of “management,” particularly in the United States, from the plantation to the factory to the corporation, with the intention of understanding and contextualizing “classroom management” in today's educational lexicon. To do so, we look at the intertwining history of racial knowledge and the management of enslaved persons; the subsequent development of the scientific management; social efficiency educators' application of scientific management to education; and conceptions of classroom management in today's neoliberal environment, in which education is increasingly positioned as a consumer good subject to individual choice and competitive markets. We further look to examples from the post-colonial Africa to demonstrate the ways in which neo-colonial forms of scientific management comingle and entwine with neoliberal policies and procedures. The global phenomenon of scientific management, rife with neoliberalism and racism, is finally examined in the context of (so-called) Culturally Responsive Classroom Management, a neoliberal project that claims to advocate social justice through the process of managing bodies in classrooms.
Authors argue that neoliberal educational policy has emerged as proto-fascist governmentality. This contemporary technology relies on State racisms and racial orderings manifested from earlier liberal and neoliberal practices of bio-power. As a proto-fascist technology, education policy, and school choice policies in particular, operate within a racial aesthetics that connects ultra-nationalism with micro-fascisms of racialized bodies. They discuss historical examples of liberal school segregation and residential schools in relation to the contemporary examples of chartered ethnic-identity schools to illustrate the complexities of proto-fascist education policy
Human Capital Theory has been an increasingly important phenomenon in economic thought over the last 50 years. The central role it affords to education has become even more marked in recent years as the concept of the ‘knowledge economy’ has become a global concern. In this paper, the prevalence of Human Capital Theory within European educational policy discourse is explored. The paper examines a selection of policy documents from a number of disparate European national contexts and considers the extent to which the ideas of Human Capital Theory can be seen to be influential. In the second part of the paper, the implications of Human Capital Theory for education are considered, with a particular focus on the possible ramifications at a time of economic austerity. In problematizing Human Capital Theory, the paper argues that it risks offering a diminished view of the person, a diminished view of education, but that with its sole focus on economic goals leaves room for educationists and others to argue for the educational, social, and moral values it ignores, and for the conception of the good life and good society it fails to mention.
The term knowledge society refers to the specific form assumed by the capitalist system in the last forty years, and it also represents its specific social, economic, ideological, and political systems. Although there is a strong rhetoric denying it, it is quite obvious that politics and economics are interconnected and that their relationship influences the social dynamics by establishing specific patterns of ideological dominance. One characteristic of the knowledge society is the negation of any form of connection between these variables while denying its ideological character. The alleged separation of the political from the economic and the social forms the basis of Schumpeterian democracy, which becomes the knowledge society's political model, just as neoliberalism becomes its economic model. This paper analyses the specific patterns of this model in Latvia.
Teacher's professionalism is a problem in which the question of responsibility is crutial. Because different contexts of considering this professionalism constitute his different meanings, they also constitute different understandings of teacher's responsibility. Those differences create dialectics, in which so called base sense of professionalism with its definition of material and formal responsibility (notion of H.Jonas) is being negated (in a hegelian sense), by neoliberal sense of professionalism, which is characterised, by reduction of teacher's responsibility to its formal aspect. Negation (Aufhebung) of this neoliberal sense is consequence of the dialectic logic, which we have to consider. Especially because it constitutes thinking as a matter of teacher's material responsibility.
In the second part of this special issue on neoliberalism, pedagogy and curriculum, the author explores the contributions of each author to confronting neo-liberal reforms of education, notably the spectre of neo-liberalism haunting aspects of pedagogy, teaching and curriculum. Exemplary of the scholarly work produced by many critical educators, the contributing authors share an understanding of the oppressive function of educational apparatuses and their complicity with the reproduction of dominant episteme of knowledge/power. In this case, neo-liberalism is defined as a canonical narrative through which existing education relations, practices and discourses are structured and mediated. Against this neo-liberal imaginary, the authors argue in favour of models of knowing, learning and teaching that work to sustain practices of critical inquiry and self-discovery among learners as active, reflexive and engaged subjects. The result is a timely collection of papers critiquing the nuances pertaining to the global transmission of neo-liberal education and a much-needed reinvigoration of the Freirean demand for a liberating and critical pedagogy.
The article utilizes critical social theory and critical religious theory to examine the emergent and historically aberrant alignment between Catholic schools and neoliberal market-based reforms in the United States. The author traces the historical split between Catholic and public schooling, attending to the role of the litigious in shaping American parochial contexts. In the face of declining enrolments and vocations as well as skyrocketing tuition and a contracting share of the educational ‘market,’ Catholic leadership has sought public support through market instruments (tax credits and vouchers) in order to preserve dying religious schools. Lost in this paradigm shift is the irony of the move from proud separatism to a governmental reliance that would have seemed abhorrent thirty years ago. Missing, too, in the rhetoric of ‘saving Catholic schools’ is concern for the harm done to education on a whole when religious schools are presented as competitors with, rather than alternatives to, a free public education. Examined through the lens of the largest provider of Catholic schoolteachers in the United States, the article ultimately concludes that the public good is being sacrificed at the altar of religious pride.
This paper draws on a qualitative study of Polish parents in thirty families who migrated to Scotland after Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004. It investigates the different ways in which these parents negotiate child-care and paid work, looking at how their preferences and choices relate to social and policy norms in Poland and the UK, to their own personal life trajectories, and to the contexts and opportunities available to them in Scotland. In my analysis, I make use of theory relating to labour market change and to women’s preferences in work, drawing on Catherine Hakim’s ‘Preference Theory’. I look at the relevance of historical influences and norms stemming from communism and Catholicism in Poland, as well as the more recent impact of neoliberalism, on paid work and child-care strategies. In my analysis, I highlight in particular the importance placed by parents on the opportunities provided by the more flexible labour market, greater availability of parttime work and easier access to vocational training for parents in the UK than in Poland. To assist analysis, I distinguish three family types within my study group: first, young families in which parents migrated singly and subsequently started families in the UK; second, older families who migrated with school-age children in search of a better standard of living; and third, professional or skilled parents who migrated to take up employment in their field in the UK. I find that each type of family is associated with a different pattern of child-care and employment in the UK and explore how migration has impacted on parents’ ability to enact their chosen lifestyle.
This paper understands the basic elements of neoliberalism in education and governmentality to be the technologies for the neoliberal government of education. It outlines Foucault’s methodology for analysing governmentality and shows how neoliberalism is a discursive formation which homogenises apparently unrelated language games and discourses. It places particular emphasis on the rhizomatic dispersion of neoliberal discursive and non-discursive practices, which in the end create a mosaic of thinking and acting with its own existing internal logic. This paper provides a cross-sectional perspective on how neoliberalism has implanted itself as a universal phenomenon along the horizontal and vertical lines of the education sphere and shows how, particularly through the policy of lifelong learning for a knowledge society, it is transforming first of all the education of adults and how subsequently it has become a fundamental blueprint for the complex revision of the higher education and regional schooling, including pre-school education. This paper prefaces this single-issue edition of the Journal of Pedagogy and therefore presents and summarises the articles published in this issue, and suggests how they are thematic examples of a single and more general theoretical framework.
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