Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences Routledge Studies in Education and Neoliberalism EDITED BY DAVE HILL, University of Northampton, UK 1. The Rich World and the Impoverishment of Education Diminishing Democracy, Equity and Workers’ Rights Edited by Dave Hill 2. Contesting Neoliberal Education Public Resistance and Collective Advance Edited by Dave Hill 3. Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences Edited by Dave Hill and Ravi Kumar 4. The Developing World and State Education Neoliberal Depredation and Egalitarian Alternatives Edited by Dave Hill and Ellen Rosskam Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences Edited by Dave Hill and Ravi Kumar New York London First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2009 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereaf- ter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade- marks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Global neoliberalism and education and its consequences / edited by Dave Hill and Ravi Kumar. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in education and neoliberalism ; 3) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-415-95774-8 1. Education—Economic aspects. 2. Education and globalization. 3. Neoliberal- ism. I. Hill, Dave, 1945– II. Kumar, Ravi, 1975– LC65.G457 2008 338.4'337—dc22 2008009017 ISBN 0-203-89185-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-95774-5 ISBN10: 0-203-89185-6 ISBN13: 978-0-415-95774-8 ISBN13: 978-0-203-89185-8 Contents Foreword vii NICK GRANT Acknowledgments xix 1 Introduction: Neoliberal Capitalism and Education 1 RAVI KUMAR AND DAVE HILL 2 Neoliberalism and Its Impacts 12 DAVE HILL AND RAVI KUMAR 3 Neoliberalism, Youth, and the Leasing of Higher Education 30 HENRY A. GIROUX 4 Higher Education and the Profi t Incentive 54 TRISTAN MCCOWAN 5 Trading Away Human Rights? The GATS and the Right to Education: A Legal Perspective 73 PIERRICK DEVIDAL 6 Education, Inequality, and Neoliberal Capitalism: A Classical Marxist Analysis 102 DAVE HILL, NIGEL M. GREAVES AND ALPESH MAISURIA 7 Brazilian Education, Dependent Capitalism, and the World Bank 127 ROBERTO LEHER 8 World Bank Discourse and Policy on Education and Cultural Diversity for Latin America 151 EDUARDO DOMENECH AND CARLOS MORA-NINCI vi Contents 9 The News Media and the Conservative Heritage Foundation: Promoting Education Advocacy at the Expense of Authority 171 ERIC HAAS 10 Markets and Education in the Era of Globalized Capitalism 208 NICO HIRTT 11 Education in Cuba: Socialism and the Encroachment of Capitalism 227 CURRY MALOTT Contributors 245 Index 249 Foreword Nick Grant ON DELIGHT AND RESPONSIBILITY The English young people’s author Philip Pullman wrote about the purpose and nature of education in an article for The Guardian newspaper of Janu- ary 22, 2005. His poetic assertion was True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility. Pullman was concluding a lament on the false methods of teaching literacy that have become common in UK schools, which elevate the grammar of English above the motivations and impact of language use, or why humans want to communicate with each other, and what it is they desire to share observations about. After all, we don’t give a baby a dictionary or thesau- rus and then await its fi rst essay or lecture! The social delight in what a person is trying to say to another, and the dialogue it starts, should be the educationalist’s starting point. The respon- sibility to analyze if and how this succeeds, so that we can remember and advance our collective skill, comes next. Learning will happen if we are responsible in this way about the things that delight us. This is a potent phrase to bear in mind when surveying the global place of education today for students from all parts of the economic spectrum. Much learning is far from delightful. It is often mechanical, pointless, and disenchanting. For some it is an unattainable luxury. For millions it is often simply absent, nonexistent, unknown. There is also great irresponsibility, exploitation even, in education’s fund- ing, administration, and purpose. Like every other commodity education is provided at a price paid often by fees. Increasingly, in the twenty-fi rst cen- tury, education takes the form of global edubusiness run by edupreneurs as part of the investment by capital in service economies. Increasingly for all parts of the world prepackaged learning materials, imposed curricula, and rigid, micromanaged schemes of work characterize a learning process in both private and public spheres which is passive, lacks viii Nick Grant dialogue, and intimidates speculative learning and discovery. Progressive notions such as creativity and internationalism are only sanctioned by gov- ernment in their bastard forms, as necessary elements of global capitalist market competition, not universal hallmarks of humanity. Teaching becomes mere “delivery” of externally preset activities and “to be driven” is now suffi cient to pass for inspiration amongst both teachers and learners. In fact, there’s so much ‘driving’ and ‘delivering’ going on that teaching could be taken over by each nation’s postal ser- vice soon! The learning process becomes almost entirely instrumental, devoted to jumping through forgettable hoops of certifi cation.1 In this sense the delight is with a student’s mere accumulation of credits, not learning for its own, or a socially useful, sake. The producer’s delight can be in the profi ts realizable in a business with a higher global turnover now than the automobile industry. This global economy can be characterized as, with very few exceptions, one of neoliberalism. From north to south and east to west this system thinks and acts with local and historical variants but core contemporary similarities. UK evangelists for a free-market approach to education provision such as James Tooley (e.g., Tooley, 2001), whose ideas have certainly contrib- uted to the UK Labour government’s shared taste since 1997 with their Conservative predecessors for public-private partnerships, would have us believe that not only can the private sector cater for the world’s needs but it can also do so on an equitable basis. Yet Tooley’s simplistic propaganda about a handful of companies from mainly developing world contexts in The Global Education Industry barely scratches the surface of world need. According to the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) in 2005: . over 60 million girls and 40 million boys are still out of school worldwide. The fi rst Millennium Development Goal—equal num- bers of girls as boys attending school by 2005—has already been missed, and according to UNICEF, 9 million more girls than boys are left out of school every year. To give every girl and boy a decent primary education by 2015, recent rates of progress need to double in South Asia and quadruple in Africa. (Global Campaign for Educa- tion, 2005, p. 3) The signifi cance of girls’ continuing noneducation is that evidence gathered over thirty years shows that educating women is the single most power- ful weapon against malnutrition, even more effective than improving food supply. Without universal primary education, the other goals—stopping AIDS, halving the poverty fi gures, ending hunger and child death, even controlling climate change—won’t happen. Foreword ix For less than 5.5bn dollars more per year, we could provide a qual- ity, free education to every child, and unlock the full power of educa- tion to beat poverty. This amounts to less than two and a half days’ global military spending. For the price of just one of the cruise missiles dropped on Baghdad, 100 schools could be built in Africa. (Global Campaign for Education, 2005, p. 4) Whether or not fi rst-world aid is quite the simple solution implied by the GCE here, poorer countries and regions are undeniably in a dou- ble bind, having to weather both their historic disadvantages and the contemporary ubiquity of neoliberalism. Nearer home, six million UK adults still cannot read and as many as seventeen million are function- ally innumerate.2 The issue therefore which motivates this collection of research has been put succinctly as follows: Capitalism requires increasing numbers of workers, citizens and con- sumers who willingly do what they are told to do and think what they are told to think. The production of such human capital is the most fundamental role schools play in a capitalist society. But while its strength is obvious and its overall aims are clear, the on- the-ground nature of this assault is still hard to pin down. (Martell, 2005, p. 5) The writers in this book examine how neoliberalism actually works in education. The authors trace a general thread across a number of par- ticular global sites to illuminate the turbulent yet recurrent features of learning in a new millennium. How do factors of race, ethnicity, and nationality, or gender and sexuality, impinge on new systems? What hap- pens to minority languages and cultures? How does the rural interact with the urban? Who controls access to or has a voice in managing the new systems? What pay and conditions can the producers, the education workers, expect? But having started with Philip Pullman’s poetic attempt at a work- ing defi nition of what we might mean by education, we now also need to indulge in “a naming of parts,” outlining precisely what we mean by this core term neoliberalism.