The Quest to Eliminate Public Education
It’s summer reading time.
So please read David J. Blacker’s book, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame
Blacker does a tremendous job of helping us understand the economic background behind what is driving the current mode of corporate education reform. It’s important to understand this because education reform is greatly affected by the context it exists within, and this context is neoliberalism.
Trying to summarize Blacker’s thesis in a short blog entry is impossible, but let me try. He argues that because of the technological changes affecting everything, combined with capitalism’s inherent internal structure, the ability to create profit is shrinking. Adjustment to this profit shrinking requires a shift from extracting from labor for profit to extracting from financial markets, a shift that is aided and abetted by technological advances. With this shift, not only is labor is no longer needed to the same degree, but it becomes an obstacle to profit. As Blacker puts it, “In capitalism’s neoliberal phase, however, the ‘more is better’ mania for exploitation is replaced by a technologized ‘less is better’ mania for eliminating labor costs.” People become dispensable. Austerity rules. And thus students, who in the past were educated for positions in a labor economy, have no additive function. Which makes an education, and schools, and educators, expendable according to neoliberal logic.
Got it?
You, educators and students, are at best superfluous and costly burdens on the back of neoliberal economy.
Here is a more from his introduction:
“Not as many workers are needed to turn whatever profits remain and government largesse is reserved exclusively for ‘too big to fail’ financialized The Quest to Eliminate Public Education | educarenow:
