Education Against the Neoliberal Social Imaginary: Toward a Pedagogy of Democratization

• In Event: 61.028 - Understanding and Resisting the Neoliberal Takeover of Schools and Society: A Theoretical, Pedagogical, and Historical Intervention

Abstract

Education in a democratic society is an intentional enterprise. Explicitly or implicitly, education serves both individual and societal goals, domestically and globally. Even when intentions are not stated explicitly and formally, all educational endeavors convey purposes and underlying ideas about education and about the democratic society whose children education intends to serve. The purpose of this paper is to examine the obsession of the neoliberal social imaginary with the “private” and the implications for furthering a market-based politics, which reduces all relationships to the exchange of money and the accumulation of capital (Giroux, 2012). Equally, the purpose is to argue for a ‘pedagogy of democratization’ as counter narrative to the neoliberal agenda for education.
Rizvi and Lingard (2010) asserted that neoliberal ideology—a driving force behind the processes of globalization—produces and reproduces social inequalities limiting the transformative potential of education. They argued against the historical inevitability of what they call the “neoliberal social imaginary” (p. 34), a form of public and political mystification, a way of thinking shared in a society by ordinary people, the common understandings that make everyday practices possible, giving them sense and legitimacy. The evolution of neoliberal social imaginary in education through standards, assessments, and accountability has restricted educators to particular kinds of thinking, thinking that conceptualizes education in terms of producing individuals who are economically productive; individuals become an economic product.
In the current age of neoliberalism, it is naïve for education in general and educators in particular to believe that the democratic deficits evident in contemporary global politics and economies are accidental or incidental to the rise of neoliberalism. As Blackmore (2000) stated: “Education has . . . been reshaped to become the arm of national economic policy, defined both as the problem (in failing to provide a multi-skilled flexible workforce) and the solution (by upgrading skills and creating a source of national export earnings” (p. 134). Giroux and Schmidt (2004) furthered this argument, “schools are seen less as a public benefit than as a private good, teachers are largely deskilled, knowledge is stripped of its critical functions and matters of equity and funding are given a low priority” (p. 213).
The argument is made in this paper (Giroux, 2012, 2013; Gunzenhauser, 2013; Helsby, 1999; Lipman, 2011) that 'the neoliberal social imaginary’ is a market driven illusion intended to create mystification in the public with respect to education/educational institutions; such imaginaries are structured around tendentially empty and essentially ambiguous signifiers. Also argues is that if educators work to revitalize democracy through the preparation of a democratic citizens to populate the workforce, then, as Weiner (1998) explained, “when social movements press schools to live up to their democratic purposes, the struggles alter the relationship of social forces, exciting forces that can weaken capitalism’s social and political hegemony” (p. 194). A pedagogy of democratization must first and foremost be concerned with the articulation of knowledge to social effects, and in the end only succeeds to the degree teachers encourage the realization of democratic ideals.

Author

• Patrick M. Jenlink, Stephen F. Austin State University