Ed. v. Ed.: Neoliberal Antagonisms between Higher Education and Public K12 Schooling

• In Event: Counter Points and Counter Stories: The Long Struggle of Resistance

Abstract

This paper explores what the impact of neoliberalism has been on the relationship between K-12 schooling and higher education. That is, rather than ask about the way neoliberalism is shaping education by looking at one institution or the other, I aim to bring together both sets of scholarship and offer an analysis of how neoliberal logics are shaping the way each institution relates to the other. This paper asks, then: how might neoliberalism’s impact on higher education be seen as connected to the neoliberalization of public K-12 schooling, and vice versa? I engage scholarship on the professional managerial class as well as epistemologies of ignorance to ultimately argue that there is good reason to consider this relationship as increasingly antagonistic.

Author

• Caitlin Howlett, DePauw University