Globalization, Neoliberal Policies, and Theories of the Subject

• In Event: Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Globalizing Policies: Standardization in an Increasingly Nonstandardized World

Abstract

I make an attempt in this paper to theorize and historize the current global education reform movement which the Finnish education policy analyst Pasi Sahlberg (2011) has coined the GERM (Global Education Reform Movement), the “virus that is killing education.” The key drivers of that global education movement adopted in Western countries with very few exceptions render the triad of accountability, standardization and privatization as a marker of the corporatization of educational provision.

More specifically, I will analyse the intellectual history of neoliberal ideology, its complicit academic contributions in instrumental curriculum theory and educational psychology with its historical succession of theories from behaviourist psychology to cognitive and learning theories. In this sense, William Doll’s (1993) recognition of the Tyler Rationale’s (1949) intellectual affinity to Descartes’s Method as a core of modernization is not incidental. Descartes’s curriculum theory overtly co-equalizes between knowledge and ethics, but actually subordinates ethics to instrumental science and knowledge. Descartes’s initiatives led to the modernist stratagem where ethics seeks its refuge in the self-referentiality of logocentric Reason and, by implication, seeks to legitimate the moral supremacy of instrumental mode of rationality in human activities: the good in terms of instrumentality is the moral interior of the logocentric reason; hence there is no proper reason to question the validity and legitimacy of instrumental rationality. Simultaneously and significantly, the logocentric subject provides the hidden place and source of colonialism and exploitation.

These early embodiments of instrumentalism reverberate in current neoliberal education and general policies where neoliberalism would render a totalitarian “theory of everything” from a blueprint for neoliberal society to amputated redefinitions of subjectivity and learning where “economic thought is coterminous with rationality.” In terms of concrete world history, they are identifiable events that consolidate these sweeping theoretical-historical, political and educational dynamics the most consequential of which arguably is the educationalization of the Cold War in the aftermath of the Sputnik shock. The shock lead to the establishment of the OECD whose enemy was not only Russians but also the then progressive educational ideology and powerful teacher unions in the U.S. The ensuing radical shrinkage of curriculum in terms of “core curriculum” and the reception of education increasingly in terms of educational psychology and “learning theories” are complicit in the current crisis intensified by the diminished intellectual power of influence of the European Bildung/Didaktik tradition after the collapse of the Nazi Regime when authoritative sources were sought in the USA.

The crisis of increasingly neoliberal democracy is an oxymoron with sweepingly detrimental effects upon education that are implied in the activation of the approaches of the North American reconceptualized curriculum and Chinese curriculum studies which have certain intellectual affinities with Bildung and Didaktik traditions. As an example, I will deal with China’s reforms which - while incorporating cosmopolitan concepts ancient and contemporary from East and West and rather than imposing a simplistic model of reform as in the Western world - make efforts to promote local innovation, organizational diversity, complexity and student-centeredness.

Author

• Tero Henrik Autio, Tallinn University