The Neoliberal conspiracy on education, as with all their projects, has fairly straightforward aims. It intends to increase the power of wealth and destroy people’s ability to be independent of the control of the wealthy or wealthy organisations.
Control of information, or the embedding of information in people is vital for the control of people and the possibilities of what they can imagine. Hence any dictatorship, or authoritarian structures, will aim at control of education. In particular Neoliberalism does not wish to allow any competition with ‘the market’ in terms of how people’s lives are regulated. They must be regulated by the market, and the sum of corporate desire.
Neoliberal Educational Theory
In neoliberal educational theory:
1) Education should be privatised and corporatised as much as possible. People should get the education they can afford, or risk being indebted for life. This helps make sure that wealthy people will have better educated children than those of poorer people. Education is a privilege not a right. Knowledge is power, and neoliberals don’t want the wrong people with knowledge.
- 1a) Providing your own education for your children is fine. Your children do not come into contact with other classes of children for any sustained time, so they will think of themselves as an elite, or as isolated individuals. If you can afford good private teachers that is great – wealthy children deserve good education – if you wish to teach them your authority that is fine as well – it helps make the children uncritical and obedient.
2) If education for most people is wound down, then they are less likely to protest successfully, or understand writings critical of the establishment successfully, and they can more easily be led by propaganda to vote for the established powers and to fall for scapegoating. So this is a good thing.
3) Modern society seems to be requiring less labour, so it may be that there is no need to educate most people. They could be educated to produce their own enjoyment, food and art, but that is clearly a waste of money.
4) To help privatisation of education, taxpayers should increase support for wealthy private schools. Every extra discrimination helps – and the education of the privileged is clearly a good thing for everyone.
5) The best private schools will always be exclusionary, as their purpose is to confine good social contacts to the right class of people. No matter how subsidised they are, they will charge fees that keep most people out. The presence of a few charity students who know their place, just shows how good the system is, and does not invalidate the general proposition.
6) As students pay, students are customers and student satisfaction with courses and with not failing is paramount. Who cares if engineers cannot do mathematics? Or if students of politics cannot write or think coherently or clearly? Especially if the qualifications help them get a job? (Actually who they know will be of more use to getting a job than any qualifications, hence the importance of quality private schools keeping the scum out).
7) Defunding universities means that universities become more dependent on high paying students and thus devote more energy to getting them than on low paying students. This brings in money to the country from foreign students, which gets spent here and helps the economy, but is generally unpopular. It also means that universities are particularly vulnerable to tensions between countries and to pandemics. But no pandemic assistance will be received – indeed, as we know in Australia, regulations will be changed many times to make sure that university workers don’t get funded by accident – unless they work for private universities.
8) As students are customers, they get to evaluate teaching staff, to keep the staff in line. The idea that staff should be able to evaluate managers is given lip service, but it amounts to nothing if there is dissatisfaction.
9) As universities are now businesses, they get to be run by business figures who know, or care, nothing for education.
10) However, these business people do have a strong belief that high level managers of schools and universities should have massively increased salaries to match those in the private sector, even while salaries are cut back for most staff, especially in public education which has its public funding cut. This helps reinforce neoliberal policy. The income of high level managers depends on the acceptance of that policy.
11) The public education workforce is to be casualised in line with general neoliberal policies. This helps keep the educational staff overworked, exhausted and terrified of dismissal for controversy. Most of university teaching staff in Australia, is casualised.
12) Education should be oriented to provide what the corporate sector thinks it needs or wants. Non of this ‘education for life’ business, or pointless ‘critical thinking’.
13) Social sciences should be defunded as much as possible, because these people tend to disagree with neoliberal policies and also point out these policies do not deliver what is promised. These people have to be cancelled. Perhaps we should make these degrees so expensive that fewer people take them, that should help lower the importance and distribution of the teaching.
14) Star researchers should be privileged. The university only needs a few star researchers for publicity reasons…
15) Research is evaluated by the profit it brings, or is likely to bring.
16) Star researchers are those who attract money and good publicity.
17) Research should be sponsored by the corporate sector, and belong to that sector, so it is obviously of value to private enterprise and unchallenging to private enterprise
18) However, corporations prefer private think tanks in which they can pay their money and get the results (propaganda) they want. So university research outside the sciences will remain unfunded. Neoliberals tend to only want to hear information that reinforces their inclinations and biases (as, for example, the Australian governments on fossil fuels). This refusal to hear counter-evidence is one reason why the neoliberal system will collapse – but it will likely take everyone with it.
19) Universities could begin this think tank route to get income. It is probably the ideal solution for neoliberal research – research that gives the wealth and powerful the results they want.
20) Privately funded and controlled education centres or research centres, help give people the education the wealthy think they should have.
21) Sometimes, as the Australian government’s ideal Vocational Education and Training scheme saw, we have students weighed with debt and not learning much at all, despite the government money the suppliers took. This scheme helped weaken the long standing and publicly funded Technical and Further Education organisation. This destruction probably means the scheme counted as a success. The word ‘corrupt’ has been used in this context.
22) While privatised research centres funded by foreign governments are suspect, universities are after the money and potential profit, because they are underfunded, and the managers are business people. However, these centres may not give the neoliberal message, and so often have to be attacked.
23) In any case, neoliberalism appears to demand that research should produce private intellectual property which needs to be owned by the right people – who have the right to keep it secret, patented or suppressed.
24) Ultimately education and research are simply businesses, to be controlled by bigger business and provide the right thinking for continuation of the system, or they exist to extract money from students who do not have the right contacts.
In neoliberalism, nothing at all, is to exist outside of the market, or to resist market control.
Tags: Disinformation, neoliberalism
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