Capitalist Education: Pedagogy of Debt

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

Abstract

The strength, cunning and unity of neoconservatives and their sundry politicos have delivered the driving force behind the rapid rise of global capitalism—neoliberalism.1 This ascension is marked by state decentralizations, market deregulations, and reduced political interventions. These policies, unleashed in the early 1980s, have ignited vast institutional changes aimed at liberalizing trade and financial activities, lowering inflation by cutting public expenditures and raising interest rates, cutting social welfare, creating “flexible” labor markets by removing labor regulations and decimating unions, and privatizing all things public.
On a global level, these policies have wrought havoc on developing countries creating debtor nations with intensified commodification of every kind of resource (Parker, 2005). On a local level, these policies have attacked the middle and working classes and the poor by reversing decades of social progress and developmental efforts (Minqi Li, 2004) via exploitation, marginalization, debt enslavement and demolishing union power. McLaren (2006) writes that the era directly preceding our neo-liberal dispensation was a time when the US was a creditor nation; however, it is now a debtor nation.
While education has been absent from many of the current debates about neoliberalism and globalization, recent trends in the US and Britain clearly point towards greater privatization and the corporatization of education (Giroux, 2007; McLaren, 2006; Rikowski, 2006, Saltman, 2005). Such a trend means the adoption of market mentalities in education, increased curriculum standardization, coupled with an amplified corporate presence and branding in schools which suggests that we can no longer allow market mechanisms and solutions to direct education.
This paper examines the comparison between both student and worker debt and Marx’s notion of wage slavery. The paper equates the Marx’s notions of oppression with the oppression of developing nations by the WB and the IMF and parallels these practices with the oppression of the working class and university students. Both of whom find fewer and fewer options, with rising costs determined by the finance industry. In addition, students who go into debt also have fewer vocational options after they graduate because they need to secure positions that will enable them to repay their loans.
The essay first establishes neoliberalism’s predatory practices that are working to dissolve democracy, both at the global and local levels, through the enslavement of citizens, demobilization of the working class, subordination of knowledge and cultural workers, and the reduction of education by corporate-style managerialism slated to maximize profits (Levidow, 2001). Then, it takes up the issue of debt subjugation by addressing the politics of debtor pedagogy using a Marxist analysis, including an examination of wage slavery, and the current trend in economic entrapment or neo-slavery at work within global and local cultural contexts. In response, I advocate for the development of a “public” critical pedagogy, one that recognizes the need for personal liberty and collective consciousness that can help us to solve these challenges to the public interest and academic freedom in this diminishing democracy and culture of freedom (Giroux, 2004).

Author

• Sheila L. Macrine, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth