Global Finance, Technocapital, and Schooling the World's Poor

• In Event: Political Economy of EdTech: Analyses of the Racialized, Gendered, and Classed Dimensions of EdTech in the Global Economy

Abstract

The widespread commodification and privatization of education demonstrates the success of the neoliberal policy regime where everything is subject to the logic of the market, education being no exception. While neoliberalism in education takes many forms such as charter schools and vouchers, expansion of private schooling and monetizing aspects of public provision including ‘teacher success’ reified as test scores, and divesting from public education altogether, all of which have been the focus of critical scholarship (Lipman, 2011; Spreen and Vally, 2014; Pedroni, 2007), in this paper I argue that it is the rise of information technology and ‘big data’ analytics that signals the ‘roll out’ of a new and more totalizing form of neoliberal economics than we have hitherto been witness to. I theorize the ways in which information technology and ‘big data’ analytics are leveraged for a comprehensive restructuring of the education sector that will render conventional distinctions between private and public schooling redundant.

This paper builds on research conducted by Kamat, Spreen and Jonnalagadda (2016) in India as part of a public campaign by Education International (consortium of teacher unions) to shed light on the rapidly growing role of multinational corporations in the education sector in developing countries. Our study reveals that India is considered as a ‘test ground’ for finance capital to fund technology based innovations and data driven experiments that have the potential to generate profitable investment models (also see Moeller (forthcoming), Riep (2017), Saltman (2010), Spreen and Kamat (2018) on the role of finance and tech capital in education).

In this paper, I offer a Marxian analysis of the workings of finance capital that are driving innovation and new technologies of power in the education sector, with specific attention to the contributions of Harvey (2001a, 2001b), Lefebvre (1974, 2009) and Jessop (2006, 2016). Using India as an exemplar, I theorize how education has emerged as a key site to rework relations between capital (primarily located in the U.S.) and labor (located in developing and emerging economies) through new forms of ‘spatio-temporal fixes’ (Harvey, 2001, 2003) necessitated by the ongoing crisis of capitalism and the search for newer more profitable markets. The racial dimension of the new arrangements between capital and the labor of education and the disenfranchisement this entails are important to underscore and its implications considered.

Author

• Sangeeta Kamat, University of Massachusetts - Amherst