The Austerity School: Grit, Character, and the Privatization of Public Education

• In Event: 35.082 - Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: 35.082-11 - Austerity Education and the Pedagogies of Debt

Abstract

Austerity politics informs not just the structural dimensions of education such as funding and finance, but also as Alex Means has shown in his book Schooling in the Age of Austerity, subjectivity formation through disciplinary practices including surveillance, security apparatus, and punishment. This paper builds on Means’ insights as to how students live austerity in schools by investigating how the new educational trend towards fostering “grit” in students found in KIPP and Relay Education and popularized by New York Times author Paul Tough participates in a new austerity climate in schools. Grit demands that students, particularly poor students of color submit to bodily controls and learn to regulate themselves. The paper develops the link between the defunding of social supports and the denial of social contexts in the new educational reform strategies. Both moves individualize responsibility for social and individual life chances and social conditions. Moreover, the turn to “grit” reworks a long legacy of character education in ways that simultaneously deny politics and ethics while promoting a conservative politics of individual self-reliance. The paper draws on a key distinction between “grit character education” and Erich Fromm’s socially situated concept of “social character” in terms of 1) relations to authority in the development of rationality and autonomy and 2) trauma as incidental or constitutive of development, and development and 3) culture as a formative versus denied dimension of youth development.

Author

• Kenneth J. Saltman, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth