Page 101 - Šolsko polje, XXIX, 2018, no. 1-2: The Language of Neoliberal Education, ed. Mitja Sardoč
P. 101
m. sardoč ■ an interviw with henry giroux
Under neoliberal modes of governance, regardless of the institution, every
social relation is reduced to an act of commerce. Neoliberalism’s promo-
tion of effectiveness and efficiency gives credence to its ability to willing-
ness and success in making education central to politics. It also offers a
warning to progressives, as Pierre Bourdieu has insisted that the left has
underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and
have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front.”
According to the advocates of neoliberalism, education represents
one of the main indicators of future economic growth and indi-
vidual well-being. How – and why – education became one of the
central elements of the ‘neoliberal revolution’?
Advocates of neoliberalism have always recognized that education is a site
of struggle over which there are very high stakes regarding how young peo-
ple are educated, who is to be educated, and what vision of the present and
future should be most valued and privileged. Higher education in the six-
ties went through a revolutionary period in the United States and many
other countries as students sought to both redefine education as a demo-
cratic public sphere and to open it up to a variety of groups that up to that
up to that point had been excluded. Conservatives were extremely fright-
ened over this shift and did everything they could to counter it. Evidence
of this is clear in the production of the Powell Memo published in 1971
and later in The Trilateral Commission’s book-length report, namely, The
Crisis of Democracy, published in 1975. From the 1960s on the, conserva-
tives, especially the neoliberal right, has waged a war on education in or-
der to rid it of its potential role as a democratic public sphere. At the same
time, they sought aggressively to restructure its modes of governance, un-
dercut the power of faculty, privilege knowledge that was instrumental to
the market, define students mainly as clients and consumers, and reduce
the function of higher education largely to training students for the global
workforce. At the core of the neoliberal investment in education is a desire
to undermine the university’s commitment to the truth, critical think-
ing, and its obligation to stand for justice and assume responsibility for
safeguarding the interests of young as they enter a world marked massive
inequalities, exclusion, and violence at home and abroad. Higher educa-
tion may be one of the few institutions left in neoliberal societies that of-
fers a protective space to question, challenge, and think against the grain.
Neoliberalism considers such a space to be dangerous and they have done
everything possible to eliminate higher education as a space where stu-
dents can realize themselves as critical citizens, faculty can participate in
99
Under neoliberal modes of governance, regardless of the institution, every
social relation is reduced to an act of commerce. Neoliberalism’s promo-
tion of effectiveness and efficiency gives credence to its ability to willing-
ness and success in making education central to politics. It also offers a
warning to progressives, as Pierre Bourdieu has insisted that the left has
underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and
have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front.”
According to the advocates of neoliberalism, education represents
one of the main indicators of future economic growth and indi-
vidual well-being. How – and why – education became one of the
central elements of the ‘neoliberal revolution’?
Advocates of neoliberalism have always recognized that education is a site
of struggle over which there are very high stakes regarding how young peo-
ple are educated, who is to be educated, and what vision of the present and
future should be most valued and privileged. Higher education in the six-
ties went through a revolutionary period in the United States and many
other countries as students sought to both redefine education as a demo-
cratic public sphere and to open it up to a variety of groups that up to that
up to that point had been excluded. Conservatives were extremely fright-
ened over this shift and did everything they could to counter it. Evidence
of this is clear in the production of the Powell Memo published in 1971
and later in The Trilateral Commission’s book-length report, namely, The
Crisis of Democracy, published in 1975. From the 1960s on the, conserva-
tives, especially the neoliberal right, has waged a war on education in or-
der to rid it of its potential role as a democratic public sphere. At the same
time, they sought aggressively to restructure its modes of governance, un-
dercut the power of faculty, privilege knowledge that was instrumental to
the market, define students mainly as clients and consumers, and reduce
the function of higher education largely to training students for the global
workforce. At the core of the neoliberal investment in education is a desire
to undermine the university’s commitment to the truth, critical think-
ing, and its obligation to stand for justice and assume responsibility for
safeguarding the interests of young as they enter a world marked massive
inequalities, exclusion, and violence at home and abroad. Higher educa-
tion may be one of the few institutions left in neoliberal societies that of-
fers a protective space to question, challenge, and think against the grain.
Neoliberalism considers such a space to be dangerous and they have done
everything possible to eliminate higher education as a space where stu-
dents can realize themselves as critical citizens, faculty can participate in
99
