Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education. Henry A. Giroux
is that those who advocate such changes are called the new education reformers. They are not reformers at all. They are reactionaries and financial mercenaries, and resemble dystopian zombies in spewing toxic educational gore. In their wake, teaching is turned into the practice of conformity, and curricula are driven by an anti-intellectual obsession with student test scores. In addition, students are educated to be active consumers and compliant subjects, increasingly unable to think critically about themselves and their relationship to the larger world. This virus of repression, conformity, and instrumentalism is turning public and higher education into a repressive site of containment, devoid of poetry, critical learning, or soaring acts of curiosity and imagination. As Diane Ravitch sums it up, what is driving the current public school reform movement is a profoundly anti-intellectual project that promotes “more testing, more privately managed schools, more deregulation, more firing of teachers, [and] more school closings.”20
At the level of higher education, the script is similar with a project designed to defund higher education, impose corporate models of governance, purge the university of critical thinkers, turn faculty into a low-wage army of part-time workers, and allow corporate money and power to increasingly decide course content and determine what faculty get hired. As public values are replaced by corporate values, students become clients, faculty are deskilled and depoliticized, tuition rises, and more and more working-class and poor minority students are excluded from the benefits of higher education. There are no powerful and profound intellectual dramas in this view of schooling, just the noisy and demonstative rush to make schools another source of profit for finance capital with its growing legion of bankers, billionaires, and hedge fund scoundrels.
Public schooling and higher education are also increasingly harnessed to the needs of corporations and the warfare state. One consequence is that many public schools, especially those occupied by poor minority youth, have become the equivalent of factories for dumbing down the curricula and turning teachers into what amounts to machine parts. At the same time, such schools have become increasingly militarized and provide a direct route for many youth into the prison-industrial complex via the “school-to-prison pipeline.”21 What is buried under the educational-reform rhetoric of hedge fund and casino capitalism is the ideal of offering public school students a civic education that provides the capacities, knowledge, and skills that enable students to speak, write, and act from a position of agency and empowerment. At the college level, students are dazzled with a blitz of spaces that now look like malls, while in between classes they are endlessly entertained by a mammoth sports culture that is often as debasing as it is dangerous in its hypermasculinity, racism, and overt sexism.22
Privatization, commodification, militarization, and deregulation are the new guiding categories through which schools, teachers, pedagogy, and students are defined. The current assaults on public and higher education are not new, but they are more vile and more powerful than in the past. Crucial to any viable resistance is the need to understand the historical context in which education has been transformed into an adjunct of corporate power as well as the ways in which the current right-wing reform operates within a broader play of forces that bear down in antidemocratic ways on the purpose of schooling and the practice of teaching itself. Making power visible is important but only a first step in understanding how it works and how it might be challenged. But recognizing such a challenge is not the same thing as overcoming it. Part of this task necessitates that educators anchor their own work in classrooms, however diverse, in projects that engage the promise of an unrealized democracy against its existing, often repressive forms. And this is only a first step.
Public and higher education, along with the pedagogical role of the larger culture, should be viewed as crucial to any viable notion of democracy, while the pedagogical practices they employ should be consistent with the ideal of the good society. This means teaching more than the knowledge of traditional canons. In fact, teachers and students need to recognize that as a moral and political practice pedagogy is about the struggle over identity just as much as it is a struggle over what counts as knowledge. At a time when censorship is running amok in public schools and dissent is viewed as a distraction or unpatriotic, the debate over whether we should view schools as political institutions seems not only moot but irrelevant. Pedagogy is a mode of critical intervention, one that endows teachers with a responsibility to prepare students not merely for jobs but for being in the world in ways that allow them to influence the larger political, ideological, and economic forces that bear down on their lives. Schooling is an eminently political and moral practice because it is directive of and also actively legitimates what counts as knowledge, sanctions particular values, and constructs particular forms of agency.
One of the most notable features of contemporary conservative reform efforts is the way in which they increasingly position teachers as a liability and in doing so align with modes of education that are as demeaning as they are deskilling. These reforms are not innocent and actually promote failure in the classroom. And when that is successful, they open the door for more public schools to be closed, provide another chance at busting the union, and allow such schools to be taken over by private and corporate interests. Under the influence of market-based pedagogies, public school teachers are subjected to what can only be described as repressive disciplinary measures in the school and an increasing chorus of verbal humiliation from politicians outside of the classroom. Academics do not fare much better and are often criticized for being too radical, for not working long hours, and for receiving cushy paychecks—a position at odds with the fact that more than 70 percent of academic labor is now either part-time or on a non-tenure track. Many contingent faculty earn so little income that they are part of the growing new class of workers who qualify for food stamps. With no health insurance and lacking other crucial benefits, they are truly on their own.
Teachers and academics are not only on the defensive in the neoliberal war on schools, they are also increasingly pressured to assume a more instrumentalist and mercenary role. Such approaches leave them with no time to be creative, use their imagination, work with other teachers, or develop classroom practices that are not wedded to teaching to the test and other demeaning empirical measures. Of course, the practice of disinvesting in public schools and higher education has a long history, but it has strengthened since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and intensified in the new millennium. How else to explain that many states invest more in building prisons than educating students, especially those who are poor, disabled, and immersed in poverty? What are we to make of the fact that there are more black men in prison than in higher education in states such as Louisiana and California?23 The right-wing makeover of public education has resulted in some states, Texas for example, banning the teaching of critical thinking in their classrooms, while in Arizona legislation has been passed that eliminates all curricular material from the classroom that includes the histories of Mexican Americans. The latter case is particularly loathsome. Masquerading as legislation designed to teach students how—no irony intended—to value each other and eliminate the hatred of other ethnic groups and races, Bill HB2281 bans ethnic studies. According to the bill, it is illegal for a school district to have any courses or classes that will “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”24 Schools that do not comply with this racist law will lose 10 percent of their monthly share of state aid.
It gets worse. In addition to eliminating the teaching of the history and culture of those ethnic groups considered a threat or disposable, the Arizona Department of Education “began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.”25 The targets here include not only ethnic studies but also those educators who inhabit ethnic identities. This is an unadulterated expression of educational discrimination and apartheid, and it is as disgraceful as it is racist. It is worth noting that these states also want to tie the salaries of faculty in higher education to performance measures based on a neoliberal model of evaluation. In this case, these racist reforms share an unholy alliance with neoliberal reforms that make teachers voiceless, if not powerless, to reject them by preoccupying them with modes of pedagogy as repressive as they are anti-intellectual and depoliticized.
Fighting for democracy as an educational project means encouraging a culture