The current neoliberal mutation of capitalism has evolved beyond the days when the wholesale exploitation of labor underwrote the world system’s expansion. While “normal” business profits plummet and theft-by-finance rises, capitalism now shifts into a mode of elimination that targets most of us - along with our environment - as waste products awaiting managed disposal.
The education system is caught in the throes of this eliminationism across a number of fronts: crushing student debt, impatience with student expression, the looting of vestigial public institutions and, finally, as coup de grâce, an abandonment of the historic ideal of universal education. “Education reform” is powerless against eliminationism and is at best a mirage that diverts oppositional energies. The very idea of education activism becomes a comforting fiction.
Educational institutions are strapped into the eliminationist project - the neoliberal endgame - in a way that admits no escape, despite the heroic gestures of a few. The school systems that capitalism has built and directed over the last two centuries are fated to go down with the ship. It is rational therefore for educators to cultivate a certain pessimism. Should we despair? Why, yes, we should - but cheerfully, as confronting elimination, mortality, is after all our common fate. There is nothing and everything to do in order to prepare.
This book attempts a realistic assessment of what we are stuck with for the time being. Sold with hyperbolic fanfare, education “reforms” will continue: some for the better, some for the worse. We are in a period, though, where the really big changes are highly unlikely to be the products of individual or even collective volition. Those changes are coming, yes, but they will of necessity result from structural dynamics rather than volitional grit and determination.
In the meantime, we must wait. Not even the grandest experts can predict what comes next and when. This means that everyone, including the most ruddily optimistic and busiest of activists, must continually cope with existing systems even as conditions worsen. This is where an appreciation of fate can come in. Yet “fate” sounds intolerable to modern ears, as all we can hear is “futility.” But the conflation is false. The ancients understood how fate is tied to hope and the two must come together. As the first woman on earth, Pandora, discovered, hope may need to be surrendered before it is found.
Many people have aided this manuscript, including students and audiences in the US and UK who have been subjected to talks derived from bits and pieces of it. I deeply appreciate the good work of Tariq Goddard, John Hunt, Trevor Greenfield and Liam Sprod and others at Zero Books, an extremely cool operation with which I’m very happy to be associated. I’m especially grateful for the kind attentions of Bob Hampel, Chris Higgins, Doug Lain, Alpesh Maisuria, Curry Malott, Chris Martin, Chris Phillips, Andrew Ross and the Occupy Student Debt movement. Most of all, I thank Marcia Blacker, Jessica George and Aideen Murphy for their above-and-beyond-the-call critiques of both substance and style. Please don’t blame any of these people of course; all they did was suggest I make the thing better than it would have been. Finally, I am grateful for permission to use, for portions of Chapter 5, substantially revised material from “An Unreasonable Argument Against Student Free Speech,” Educational Theory (2009): 124-143.
This book is dedicated to the memory of radical historian, activist, mother and grandmother Margaret George, who for so long saw through it all.