Monday, 15 June 2020
Neoliberalism and education: TorontotheBetter speaks to author Paul Bocking
Suitably distanced from each other, but not from the neoliberal, anti-worker policies that bite students and teachers even harder in pandemic times TorontotheBetter recently spoke to union colleague Paul Bocking in downtown Toronto about his new book on education throughout the NAFTA region.
Public education is always a way for establishments to reproduce themselves, and in recent years schools in Canada, the U.S.A. and Mexico have increasingly been focussed
on producing the skills and values needed by a job market dominated by science,
technology and business, that is, embodiments of the neoliberal ideology of small government and
privatization that for the most part these sectors are now serving. Paul Bocking’s new book “Education,
Neoliberalism and Teachers” is an illuminating overview of the various aspects of
this pedagogical process, with a special focus on the limitations of teacher
autonomy that it necessarily involves. Talking to educational workers in all three countries signatory to NAFTA 1 and 2, the book offers insight into how the values of the agreements affect education and so, the minds, of students and teachers alike. Generally, independent minds in either teachers, or
their students, are undesirable human qualities for a system seeking narrow reproducible
market skills. So, TorontotheBetter wondered, are narrowly focused test questions a
method to accomplish the required engineering of human minds for compliance
with a neoliberal world?
Bocking
explained that his book had its seeds in the simultaneous development in all three
countries of the NAFTA region of educational systems that prioritize the interests
of the market, in the way they are funded and administered, as well as in the
curricula they teach and, perhaps, most importantly for teachers and students, in the
standardized and standardizing tests by which their outcomes are validated. One
key consequence for teachers has been a reduction in their roles and autonomy
and a replacement. in school hiring policies, of trained teachers by subject
specialists. Education is now increasingly reduced to “preparation for the test”,
which simplifies the quantitative measurement of learners and learning.
Enabling students to work through any specific issues that exist in their local
environments, what we may call the social determinants of education (parallel
to the now well recognized social determinants of health in the healthcare
sector), is irrelevant and so ignored in this neo-liberalized version of
education.
Supervening over local differences, standardized evaluative instruments, such as the EQAO (Education
Quality and Accountability Office), are now used to evaluate school quality based
on the tests they use and administrators have increasingly become managers,
rather than teachers. The result, argues Bocking, is that “teachers’ ability to
apply their expertise to the specific needs of their class” is displaced and
downgraded. If pedagogy and evaluation are being hollowed out by the neoliberal
regime the associated competition for funds in an increasingly privatized
environment results in parentally fee-funded schools luring the “best”
students, with the highest income(d) parents, and preventing them from leaving
once enrolled.
In general, then, Bocking argues, teaching and teachers have
been de-skilled and degraded from any role as
system destabilizers to obedient pattern reproducers of students with skills that
fill job market needs rather than as defenders of public goods and values. In
Mexico, for a savage example, 43 striking student teachers from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teacers College
were killed in September 2014 by drug cartels aligned with the Mexican state. Thus, Instead of serving democracy and social
questioning teachers are increasingly trained to produce obedient wage slaves, The simultaneous defunding of public schools in favour of private charter
schools in the U.S. compounds this drift towards the production of
technicians rather than citizens. Though primarily a phenomenon of education in
the U.S.A. the “charter school movement”, with its mantra of parental choice
through private school enrolment has been the banner bearer for many of the
above trends, allowing schools to pick and choose wealthier pupils and so
further entrench social and ethno-cultural inequality.
A parallel development,
as anti-tax campaigns and their corollary in declining school budgets have
grown, has been the rise of private technical schools like Herzing and Trios colleges
that narrow education down to business skill preparation. The traditional rounded liberal and
humanities education has been increasingly downgraded and excluded.
Paul Bocking’s new book is a needed exposition of the
destructive effects, for both learners and teachers, of neoliberal philosophy
on public education. It presents those who read it with the challenge of
defending public education and fostering a new embodiment of it that will be required
to build an emancipatory educational future in all three countries of the North
American free trade accords. The stakes are high: the minds and values of the next generations of oung people. If, on the one hand neoliberalism effectively increases
inequality by reducing basic social supports for those who need them though competition
for funds it simultaneously increases
the gap at the other end of the spectrum by aggrandizimg through private investment those already
advantaged.
ToronotheBetter encourages blog visitors reading this review to look for a copy of Paul Bocking's in their local library but we offer substantially discounted copies and free shipping for any who seek to buy their own by emailing postmaster@torontothebetter.net with Education in the subject line.
# posted by Taodhg @ 9:51 pm 
