on delight and responsibility:

8/14/2019 On Delight and Responsibility:

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On DelightAnd

Responsibility:

What Is Education

For?

The Education and Inspections Bill received Royal Assent on 8November 2006. It marked the final act of the Blair era on a

subject that he had put central to his whole trajectory when takingoffice eleven years ago.

The mantra of education, education, education enabled Tony Blair

to be brazenly political whilst legislatively authoritarian andtechnicist, a challenge which neither his party dissidents nor the

TUC ever rose to. By proclaiming hokum about educations need tomarch to the drum of a knowledge economy, real structural,surveillance and funding changes have taken its provision far awayfrom public accountability. There is much more to take stock of

since his demise, but readers in England and Wales now have thecompletion of Blairs last education Act to assess his legacy by.

In its White Paper form during autumn 2005 David Chater MP,described this Bill as a harbinger of segregation, segregation,

segregation, though he quickly shrank from critical sight as theyear wore on. Was Chater right? How do we measure this crusade

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alongside Blairs other highly questionable policies? How does theUK fit into a global perspective?

Fundamentally, what is education for?

On Delight and Responsibility

The English young peoples author Philip Pullman wrote about the

purpose and nature of education in an article for The Guardian ofJanuary 22 2005. His poetic assertion was that:

True education flowers at the point when delight falls inlove with responsibility.

Pullman was concluding a lament on the false methods ofteaching literacy that have become common in UK schools, whichelevate the grammar of English above the motivations and impactof language use, or why humans want to communicate with eachother, and what it is they desire to share observations about. Afterall we dont give a baby a dictionary or thesaurus then await itsfirst essay or lecture!

The social delight in what a person is trying to say to another, andthe dialogue it starts, should be the educationalists starting point.The responsibility to analyse if and how this succeeds, so that wecan remember and advance our collective skill, comes next.

Learning will happen if we are responsible in this way about thethings that delight us.

This is a potent phrase to bear in mind when surveying the globalplace of education today for students from all parts of theeconomic spectrum. Much learning is far from delightful. It is oftenmechanical, pointless and disenchanting. For some it is anunattainable luxury. For millions it is often simply absent, non-existent, unknown.

There is also great irresponsibility, exploitation even, ineducations funding, administration and purpose where it does

exist. Like every other commodity education is provided at a pricepaid often by fees. Increasingly, in the twenty-first century,education takes the form of global edubusiness run byedupreneurs as part of the investment by capital in serviceeconomies.

Increasingly for all parts of the world pre-packaged learningmaterials, imposed curricula and rigid, micro-managed schemes ofwork characterise a learning process in both private and public

spheres which is passive, lacks dialogue, and intimidatesspeculative learning and discovery. Progressive notions such ascreativity and internationalism are only sanctioned by governmentin their bastard forms, as necessary elements of global capitalistmarket competition, not universal hallmarks of humanity.

Teaching becomes mere delivery of externally pre-set activitiesand To be driven is now sufficient to pass for inspiration amongstboth teachers and learners. In fact theres so much driving anddelivering going on that teaching could be taken over by eachnations Post Office soon!

The learning process becomes wholly instrumental, devoted tojumping through forgettable hoops of certification.i In this sensethe delight is with a students mere accumulation of credits, notlearning for its own, or a socially useful, sake. The producersdelight can be in the profits realizable in a business with a higherglobal turnover now than the automobile industry.

This global economy can be characterised as one of neoliberalism.From north to south and east to west this system thinks and actswith local and historical variants but core contemporarysimilarities.

UK evangelists for a free market approach to education provisionsuch as James Tooley, whose ideas have certainly contributed toLabours shared taste with their Tory predecessors for public-private partnerships, would have us believe that not only can theprivate sector cater for the worlds needs but it can also do so onan equitable basis.

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Yet Tooleys simplistic propaganda about a handful of companiesfrom mainly third-world contexts in The Global Education Industrybarely scratches the surface of world need. According to the GlobalCampaign for Education (GCE) in 2005:

over 60 million girls and 40 million boys are still out ofschool worldwide. The first Millennium Development Goal equal numbers of girls as boys attending school by 2005

has already been missed, and according to UNICEF, 9million more girls than boys are left out of school everyyear. To give every girl and boy a decent primaryeducation by 2015, recent rates of progress need to doublein South Asia and quadruple in Africa. (GCE p3)

The significance of girls continuing non-education is that evidencegathered over thirty years shows that educating women is thesingle most powerful weapon against malnutrition; even moreeffective than improving food supply. Without universal primaryeducation, the other goals stopping AIDs, halving the povertyfigures, ending hunger and child death, even controlling climatechange wont happen.

For less than 5.5bn dollars more per year, we couldprovide a quality, free education to every child, and unlockthe full power of education to beat poverty. This amountsto less than two and a half days global military spending.

For the price of just one of the cruise missiles dropped onBaghdad, 100 schools could be built in Africa. (GCE p.4)

Whether or not first-world aid is quite the simple solution impliedby the GCE here, poorer countries and regions are undeniably in adouble bind, having to weather both their historic disadvantagesand the contemporary ubiquity of neoliberalism. Nearer home, 6million UK adults still cannot read and as many as 17 million arefunctionally innumerate.

The issue therefore which motivates this discussion has been putsuccinctly as follows:

Capitalism requires increasing numbers of workers,citizens and consumers who willingly do what they are toldto do and think what they are told to think. The productionof such human capital is the most fundamental role schoolsplay in a capitalist society.But while its strength is obvious and its overall aims areclear, the on-the-ground nature of this assault is still hardto pin down. (Martell p 5)

Therefore this is a partisan stab at examining how neoliberalismworks in education so as best to oppose and replace it. (Forreasons of length and familiarity it will also largely concentrate onschool rather than post-16 educational provision.ii)

Defining Neoliberalism

North American geographer David Harveys Brief History ofNeoliberalism defines his subject as:

in the first instance a theory of political economicpractices that proposes that human well-being can best beadvanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedomsand skills within an institutional framework characterisedby strong private property rights, free markets, and freetrade. (p.2)

Harvey is particularly explicit about the relationship between themarket and the state.

The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality andintegrity of money. It must also set up those military,defence, police, and legal structures and functions requiredto secure private property rights and to guarantee, byforce if need be, the proper functioning of markets.Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such asland, water, education, health care, social security, orenvironmental pollution) then they must be created, by

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state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the statemust not interfere. (p.2)

Not only have nations with differing political formations embracedneoliberalism from China to New Zealand, South Africa to Sweden,and Chile to the USA, but its apologists also occupy positions ofstrategic policy influence in the university corridors, media studios,banking halls and corporate boardrooms of every metropolis. Keyinternational finance institutions, such as the International

Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World TradeOrganisation (WTO) are dominated by its advocates. Indeed,neoliberalism has become;

the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in andunderstand the world. (p.3.)

This is similar but opposite to the sense in which Italian MarxistAntonio Gramsci wrote about common-sense, the collective butfragmentary and shifting folklore of philosophy which, onhistorical analysis, is in fact the product of ideological struggle, awar of attrition, a battle of ideas between vested interests ofbusiness, church, state, workers movements and parties, and preyto more systematic and coherent thought. (Gramsci p.323-43,419-25)

In making this reference we need to differentiate ourselves fromthe post-structuralist readings of Gramsci which adore the broken

narratives of a book compiled from snippets often written oncigarette papers and smuggled out in prison visitors bodies!Gramscis work was popularised amongst English-speakingprogressives following the first English translation of The PrisonNotebooks in the early 1970s, when such other key texts asLukacsHistory and Class Consciousness and Volosinovs Marxismand the Philosophy of Language also made an impact in their firsttranslations. Gramsci was repeatedly but unjustifiably cited inattempts to problematise working class politics not strengthenthem, and were frequent touchstones of what became the anti-Leninism of the Eurocommunist tendency typified by the nowdefunct magazine Marxism Today. This gives us a small clue as to

neoliberalisms appeal in certain quarters of contemporary Britain.

Many youthful British Communist Party members or fellow-travellers of that period became UK Cabinet apologists for rampantimperialism, including Jack Straw, John Reid, Kim Howells, PatriciaHewitt, Hilary Benn and Charles Clarke, not to mention PeterHains even more radical pedigree leading the militant sorties ofthe Anti-Apartheid Movement, and Alan Johnsons trade unionbackground.

Thankfully not everyone has followed their career trajectories, andmost of these individuals careers have faded in the Brown era. Buta political problem for the remaining left, in the post-glasnost era,has arisen because a rhetoric of liberation has been carried withthese rightward moving figures to sell a completely different kettleof fish, usually passed off as a nebulous third way politics.

Its not just that Iraqs invasion and occupation are pitched to us interms of freedom and democracy, but the ideology of neoliberalismin education policy is now being touted as the radical solution tohistoric under-achievement of deprived UK communities. (LikeUS Democrats theyre not allowed to say working-class). Harvey,noting this language of classlessness in the service of ruling-classpower, questions its sell-by date.

The widening gap between rhetoric (for the benefit of all)and realization (the benefit of a small ruling class) is now

all too visible. (p202/3).

This perversion of terminology has two effects. Firstly, it soothesthe bile within the body of the UK Labour Party for those fewremaining foot soldiers demanding some crumbs of domesticcomfort to sweeten the bitter fruits of disastrous foreign policies.Secondly, and more importantly for this discussion, it confusesattempts amongst wider forces to identify precisely what level ofneoliberalism were dealing with, leading to mistaken oppositionalstrategies.

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Dexter Whitfields invaluable handbook New Labours Attack onPublic Services highlights OECD 2005 data that shows the UKenjoying pole position for the outsourcing of governmentalcentral services by a modern state; twice as much as France andItaly, more than Germany and even more, incredibly, than theUnited States. (Whitfield p.34)UK public servants drown under incessant initiatives withdissembling titles cascading and overlapping in all branches of ourpublic services. A new one is on top of us before previous ones

have hit the ground. Its a bedazzling enough picture for those thatwork daily inside these services; it must be utterly mystifying tothose that dont!

Perhaps the most outrageously misleading notion adored bygovernment is the entity labelled a Trust. As the preferredfunding and administrative form in the National Health Service andnow the BBC it has produced obscene distortions of mismatchbetween real needs and efficient services. Consequently there hasnever been less popular trust in a governmental public sectorpolicy. The label is now being extended to schools, even thoughthe word itself is nowhere to be found in the enabling 2006legislation.

Such inversions of truth and language are almost naturallyapparent from the southern hemisphere. Looking north toneoliberalisms strongholds Uruguyan Eduardo Galeano seesclearly that:

Developing countries is the name that experts use todesignate countries trampled by someone elsesdevelopment. According to the United Nations, developingcountries send developed countries ten times as muchmoney through unequal trade and financial relations asthey receive through foreign aid.

In international relations, foreign aid is what they call thelittle tax that vice pays virtue. Foreign aid is generallydistributed in ways that confirm injustice, rarely in waysthat counter it. In 1995, black Africa suffered 75 percent of

the worlds AIDs cases but received 3 percent of the fundsspent by international organisations on AIDs prevention.(Galeano p.37)

This wonderful catalogue of neoliberal absurdities, Upside Down: APrimer For A Looking Glass World, also asks:

In the jungle, do they call the habit of devouring theweakest, the law of the city?

From the point of view of sick people, whats the meaningof a healthy economy?Weapons sales are good news for the economy. Are theyalso good news for those who end up dead? (p.115)

As the common-sense of the C21st neoliberalism hopes to shapenot only the means by which wealth is created and disbursed butalso the relations between those creating this wealth. As Harveynotes;

In so far as neoliberalism values market exchange as anethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all humanaction, and substituting for all previously held ethicalbeliefs, it emphasises the significance of contractualrelations in the marketplace. It holds that the social goodwill be maximised by maximising the reach and frequencyof market transactions, and it seeks to bring all humanaction into the domain of the market. (p.3)

In a gruesome anecdote this was well illustrated in the weekbeginning March 13 2006 at Northwick Park hospital in Harrow,north-west London. Six young men who had volunteered to trial abrand new drug for a payment of around 2000 each becameswiftly and critically ill with unpredicted major side effectsincluding massive swellings of bodily organs and features. Tworemained unconscious a week later, though the other four took fivedays to regain consciousness. None died.

Fundamental questions were being asked about the safety andmethodology of such testing. Why, for example, were the six

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inoculated simultaneously?Thus the particular private firm conducting the trials and theMedical Research Council were bracing themselves for a publicrevolt against such tests and a shortage of future trialists. After all,the scandalous mass trials of a fictional tuberculosis drug Dypraxaon unknowing Africans had formed the dramatic core of John leCarres popular 2001 novel The Constant Gardenerand its prize-winning film version in 2005.

But far from it. Applications to take part in such tests tripled duringthe week, because it seems that the UK population hadnt realisedthe level of payment for so doing! More specifically the UK studentpopulation, drowning in debt from fees and bank loans, woke up tothe possibility of fast bucks.

So, returning to our focus on education, something as innocent asdelight in learning, or the joy of play, can only confront theneoliberalist as a challenge or threat, something to commodify, toturn from an intrinsic good into a saleable good, giving it a pricebefore exchanging it for private gain.

This privatisation of value confronts the common wealth ofpeoples, expressed in terms of their spaces and places, resourcesand rituals, history and culture in all their signs and meanings, asan alien modernity.

Neoliberalisms Genesis

This debasement of language and the prevalence of dog-eat-dogethics are symptomaticof the neoliberal facts of life, but not theirgenesis. Harvey does therefore trace for us when, where and howits predominance was achieved, with a very broad but captivatingbrush.

Financially key was the Volcker shock of 1979, marking awatershed between a period of post-Second World war Keynesianorthodoxy (full employment but high inflation) and a period since

of monetarist then neoliberal orthodoxy. Paul Volcker waschairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank under President JimmyCarter. Volckers move to raise the nominal rate of interestovernight in October triggered a long deep recession that wouldput millions out of work, neuter trade unions, initiate thedismantling of welfare states and put debtor nations on the brinkof insolvency.Politically key were the twin ogres Ronald Reagan and Margaret

Thatcher who revelled in tax and budget cuts, deregulation andconfrontation. The PATCO air traffic controllers defeat by Reagan in1981 and Thatchers more protracted defeat of the miners by 1986became testaments to this hegemony. Energy, transport andtelecommunications industries were asset-stripped and sold-off,media operations were deregulated to spawn many competing newkids on the block up against a handful of world-wide corporategiants. The US Federal minimum wage, equal to the poverty levelin 1980, was 30% below that level by 1990. US corporate taxeswere reduced dramatically and in 1985 top personal taxes wereslashed from 70 to 28%!

The UK had already been subject to the infamous IMF squeeze onChancellor Denis Healey in 1976 when the first retrenchment viafunding cuts hit UK public services. By 1980 Thatcher had givenbanks and building societies new freedoms to lend, not just tonations or regions but also to individuals, producing the politicallycompromising 1.2 trillion pounds of personal credit card and

mortgage repayment debt amongst UK workers in 2006.

This has impacted politically on UK trade unionism, in the sensethat individual workers can, subject to increasingly slack creditrating, make a phone call or visit a cash-machine rather than seekcollective action strategies to improve their pay, therebycementing Thatchers legal proscriptions on secondary action andmandatory balloting procedures to the effect that between 1979and 2006 the percentage of UK workers subject to collectivebargaining agreements fell from 78% to 33%. Tony Blair hadassured readers of The Times before his first election win on 31March 1997 that those shackles would remain the most restrictive

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in the western world.

Also significant to the neoliberal strategy was a new kind ofimperialism epitomised by the structural adjustment programmesforced on most poor countries via the World Bank or the IMF.These were a kind of arms-length, or, in a different sense, arms-free imperialism. Control and subjugation was effected not by theoccupation and repression of aggressor armies but by financialloans from banks, themselves awash with petro-dollars invested by

the oil-producing mega-rich states, on condition that anyindigenous state services or nationalised industries were openedup to privatisation and control by western usually NorthAmerican businesses.

Whether it is Zambias copper industry, Tanzanias water supply,Ghanas schools or the continental need for affordable drugs tofight malaria, most of Africa seems to have been subject to thisprocess since the 1980s, reversing or smashing the political hopesborn of the flight by force or consent of traditional Euro-imperialists since the 1960s.

The US had finessed this strategy in its dealings with CentralAmerican nations such as Nicaragua and Cuba in earlier phases ofthe C20th, using local strongmen like Somoza and Batista to runUS-friendly political operations whilst keeping the locals quiet. Itsfiscal stranglehold on Europe was enshrined with the post-warMarshall Plan, insisting on an easy ride for US products in markets

whose infrastructures were systematically restored with dollarsand policed by military bases along the Iron Curtain. Any numberof client regimes is now in place around the world prepared to dothe US Presidents bidding.

Yet, of course, the return of traditional methods of imperialistpower such as the occupation and repression in Iraq caused bythe relentless international competition for the accumulation ofcapital first described by Bukharin ninety years ago - has speltsuch insecurity and crisis that, at the time of writing, we do not yetknow the full consequences for either the peoples of the region orthe leading aggressors.

But of direct relevance to this discussion is an aspect of theneoliberal method that Harvey calls accumulation bydispossession (p 160-5), a typically parasitic rather thanregenerative process. That is to say most fiscal energy withinneoliberalism has not actually produced what could be called freshwealth, rather a re-distribution or re-valorisation of existingwealth.

For example, Harvey maintains that the average daily turnover offinancial transactions in international markets was worth 2.3 billiondollars in 1983 and 130 billion by 2001. Of a total 40 trillion dollarsfor the whole of 2001 Harvey insists that a mere 2% - 80 billion were used to support new trade or productive investment. Thischurning, the repetitive trade on accounts without adding any realvalue, spawned phenomena such as hedge funds, which spreadbets on the volatility of future stock market commodity prices tothe personal accumulation of multi-million dollar riches byfinanciers.

Personnel in London finance houses would enjoy a collective bonusin the region of 8.8billion as 2006 ended with hundreds ofindividuals pocketing a handy 1M certainly a Xmas toremember for those few wise men! Many fewer can expect suchlargesse since the emergence of recession during 2008.

Governments and states have played their part in this by opening

up new fields for capital accumulation in their own public utilities(water, telecoms, transport, housing, health, pensions, prisons)asset-stripping public land, buildings and amenities whilstderegulating labour rights and environmental protection. Muchurban open space is now privately owned and policed.

Such are the priorities that the education system in all areas ofeconomic development will want to justify, sustain and replicate,even if the emphasis may be differently balanced or moresophisticated per region.

In Massindi, northern Uganda, finding enough funds to build a

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robust, hygienic latrine for six-hundred students and a dormitoryfor the girls who have fled the outlying war-torn districts, so thatthey can be taught in silence in classes of fifty by an occasionalteacher, is progress. In New Orleans, USA, reclaiming any form ofpublic-sector provision would be a triumph right now. In Cubastopping the encroachment of either the Catholic Church or free-marketisation on to the state system will be a challenge for thepost-Castro era. In Nechells, Birmingham, England getting schoolclass sizes down to 24 with well-paid, well-qualified teachers in

schools offering good food, plenty of drinking water and a sociallyengaging, test-free curriculum, would be progress.

Inside The Mind Factory

Canadian academic Alan Sears has produced a particular analysisfor that nation under a title that gives us a graphic idea of whatneoliberalism can mean for education.

Re-Tooling The Mind Factory: Education In A Lean State traces theways in which publicly funded Canadian institutions have seentheir staffing downgraded and over-worked. Their resource costsare now subject to lowest-price tender and their intake of studentsprioritised on ability-to-pay criteria. Academic industrial relationshave developed along traditional class lines.

Lean production is based on three key principles: theelimination of waste associated with older massproduction methods; the introduction of new forms ofworkplace organisation and labour discipline; and thepolarisation of the workforce. (Sears p.7)

UK education workers will certainly recognise the point aboutpolarised workforces. Whilst strike days are one lamentably lowreflection of conscious resistance presently, the incidence ofstress-related sickness levels in education, indeed sickness levelsgenerally, is symptomatic of workplace attrition. 1 in 5 UK workersreported stress related ill health for a Health & Safety Executivestudy in 2004-5, with education and health workers registeringhigher than average incident rates.iii

Bullying is increasingly an orthodox management method, not adeviant aberration. Incessant performance micro-management andtarget setting are the stuff of persistent headaches if not waking

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nightmares and mental breakdowns. Its the same for kids inrespect of governmental Standard Assessment Tests. More andmore parents of primary age children report bed wetting, loss ofappetite, even clinical depression amongst kids. But is that justanecdotal and accidental?

In Sears chapter on Children of the Market, he highlights thissimultaneous inter-relation of a commercialised enterpriseorientation and hard-line disciplinary approach in its impact on

students.

The reorientation of education towards the market is oftencouched in the language of choice, innovation andrelevance. Yet it is integrally connected to a newdisciplinary regime that emphasises compulsion, uniformityand retrenchment. (p.191)

This couldnt be more true of the blazered, boot camp regimes inthe Blairs brave new school world. Mossbourne Academy inHackney has a hair-length policy for boys which forbids both No.1crops and pony-tails. Whilst the idea of education as a factoryprocess may seem alien to someone for whom a single classroomor building is a sign of real hope in Jenin or Kigali this isnevertheless an unpalatable truth of what has been outlinedabove, whereby the state withdraws from many aspects of theeconomy and slims down its sphere of operations, in favour oflocal market relations permeated by trans-national capital.

And the idea of a mind factory, when factories are more associatedwith the manufacturing process of goods transformed from rawmaterials, than a means of life-dependent learning, gives us a clueto the ruthlessness with which all aspects of life under capitalismcan be exploited.

modern childhood could be seen as inherentlysubversive in an era of lean production, a current of radicalresistance to rationalisation. It is a barrier to intensificationin the workplace (particularly of womens labour) and anideological obstacle to the generalisation of the lean ethos.

Education reform aims to constrain childhood and todevelop a more instrumental and rationalised approach toyoung age. (Sears p.194)

But his critique is accompanied by glimpses of alternativestrategies. Drawing on the pedagogic writings of German dramatistBerthold Brecht Sears maintains an illuminating riff on thetheatrical nature of education in his chapter entitled LearningFreedom.

Most importantly, this requires that learners take anactive role. Students in a classroom resemble a traditionaltheatre audience in that both are cast in the role of passiverecipients of knowledge emanating from the front of theroom. Brecht sought to create a new form of epic theatrethat would challenge the audience to analyse. (p248)

The student arrives at the classroom door as a humanbeing who needs to know, play, explore and feel. Yet onceshe or he crosses that threshold, her or his own need toknow is subordinated to someone elses idea of what sheor he needs to know. The potential for joyful, self-activeeducation is radically reduced by the asceticism of theclassroom.(p252)

The most obvious spaces for Brechtian pedagogy arethose associated with movements for social change. This is

important as these spaces often use the classroom modelin the educational activities.

Infuriatingly, active learning which Sears goes on to promote -has become incorporated in the UK as yet another stick with whichthe besuited ranks of school improvement commissars beatbeleaguered teachers, important though it is to get away from a charismatic authoritarian model of teaching. But there is greatvalue here in his re-assertion that the very ground of teaching issuch a vibrant ideological battlefield.

Sears does not go as far as Scottish writer Pat Kane in elaborating

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directives of achievement targets and associated financial penaltiesin respect of state or county level schooling. Staff in each schoolhave become terrified to fail on their AYP score for AdequateYearly Progress. Five years later the New York Times of 20November 2006 had the headline Schools Slow In Closing GapsBetween Races, with comprehensive educational data to showthat both ethnic and class divisions have gone untouched byBushs reforms.

In the UK a government Green Paper entitled Every ChildMatters in 2003 preceded a Children Act in 2004 whichamalgamated previously discrete local school, social and welfareservices, and subjected them to a centralised funding stream,whilst claiming that each extended school in every community willrepresent a delegated packaging of those services - as well ashealth, careers and consumer rights - to the benefit of all. Thecontradiction here is that between a highly idealistic conception which has widespread progressive support and a rigidcentralisation of control and financing. Frustration thereby breedscynicism.

But Hill reminds us that national and international legalframeworks are developing to ensure international accessibility tothe privatised market in educational services. One salient area isemployment policy via attacks on workers rights and conditions,their pensions and on trade union rights.

Capitals Intent

Hill outlines three schemas to describe capitalist interest ineducation.

The first plan of capital is to produce and reproduce a work forceand citizenry and set of consumers fit for capital. This has twofunctions, an ideological function and a labour-training function.These comprise socially producing labour-power for capitalistenterprises. This is peoples capacity to labour their skills andattitudes, together with their ideological compliance and suitability

for capital as workers, citizens and consumers.

The second plan is to smooth the way for direct profiteering fromeducation. It is about how capital wants to make direct profitsfrom education. So, in some countries, core teaching services areprivatised the school/college itself becomes privately owned. Orits peripheral services are privatised both within institutions(services such as catering, security, reprographics) and nationally.Examples are student fees or loans for staying on at school in

England, or for attending community colleges in the United States,being run by private corporations rather than by the local ornational state.

Privatisation of schools, the growth of the private sector inschooling and further education, and the setting up of nationally-owned or foreign-owned or franchised chains of schools ishappening in a number of countries. The growth of this privatesector is occurring in developed states, but it is occurring on alarger scale in those highly-indebted nations subject to harshstructural adjustment.

Hillsthird plan of capital is a series of national capitalist plans fordomestically based national or multinational edubusinessesoperating globally. These are clearly of most significance andthreat to those poorer nations of the world lacking the tax-raisingpowers and stable civil service required to fund and administereducation (and other) services publicly.

With a worldwide education industry valued at $2 trillionannually (UNESCO, 2000, p.16), it is not surprising thatmany investors and edupreneurs are anxious to seize theopportunities to access this untapped gold mine(Shugarensky & Davidson-Harden, 2003, p. 323).

It is not just national edubusinesses that are involved itis large multi-activity national and global capitalistcompanies (Mahoney et al, 2003; Rikowski, 2005).

The interaction between and relative importance of Hills three

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descriptions will vary around the world. Countries such as Ghanaare certainly reeling from the rape of its young families by privateeducation businesses promising to out-perform the minimal statesystem, charging for every conceivable service item. Whether it ismost important to make direct profits or to secure an appropriateworkforce and body of consumers for capitalist goods, will dependon local historical factors, not least the relationship of certainnations to the trading, industrial and military power blocks, andthe degree of organised resistance.

Does this fit the UK experience?

Whitfield (p.10) summarises New Labours neoliberal rationale inpublic service policy quite like Hill, as follows:

1. Competition drives down costs.2. The private sector is more efficient than the public sector.

3. Competition helps to limit producer power (by which they meantrade union power.)4. Individual choice in public services will improve the quality ofservices.

5. It is essential to provide choice for the middle class who willotherwise opt out of public services, which will be reduced to

residual services.

6. Choice will reduce inequality because market forces are a moreequalising mechanism than political voice, which the middleclasses have traditionally used to benefit most from publicservices.7. Local authorities and public bodies should be restricted to

commissioning in order to create the space for the private sectorto develop more innovative ways of delivering services.

Readers employed in or reliant on UK public services will recognisemost if not all of these contentious maxims being passed off dailyas self-evident truths by the DCFS apparatchiks. Active unionmembers will have encountered the abusive, sometimes vitriolic,

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denunciations of our demands as abuses of producer power. Yetsome of these points are undeniably factual.

We no longer, for example, have Local Education Authorities orSocial Services. We simply now have Local Authorities withobligations to commission and monitor, but not provide, separateSchools Services and Childrens-and-Families Services.

One incidental casualty of this change is that Special Schools tend

to end up classified as Childrens and Families NOT SchoolsServices institutions, meaning that provision for the disabled anddelicate and most needy students begins to function on a medicalrather than educational model, and takes a step further away fromthe possibility of their inclusion in mainstream schools.

The mantra about choice and diversity in local services has beenespecially shrill during Parliamentary debate around schooladmissions policies, and the variety of entry selection ruses thatschools have devised, during the passage of the 2006 EducationBill, but is also recurrent in wider debates about multi-culturalismin education, the role of faith schools and the under-achievementof working class and Afro-Caribbean boys. Less prominent isresearch published by the National Union of Teachers emanatingfrom its sister organisation in Sweden showing that the impact ofchoice and diversity in schooling there has definitively led togreater segregation by class and ethnicity.vi

But having itemised its rationale what is the actual result ofLabours grovelling to world neoliberalist dogma?

Richard Hatcher from the University of Central England commentsthat as the export value of manufacturing, farming and someservice industries declines, the governments policy is that Britainshould become a market leader in exporting a new internationalbusiness: privatised education services. Hatcher suggests that theBritish governments intention may be to foster and promote theprivate education industry until it is strong enough to competeinternationally. He further suggests that the attempt to develop aworld class education system is not for the benefit of our children

but to maintain global businesses in the future (Hatcher, 2001).

There is some evidence that this is happening. After all, in theslipstream of its own and US imperialism, the English language isincreasingly the lingua franca of world business andcommunications. Malaysia, for example, has deemed that all itsstate educational services will work in English henceforth, and hastendered a contract for consultancy on questions of pedagogy andschool curriculum design which has been won jointly by two UK

and one Australian university schools of education. However, whilstthis is a trend for income generation by some Higher Educationinstitutions it remains a minority aspect overall.

Schools have been transformed in a number of ways in the Blairera in a seamless progression from his Tory predecessors.For example, the UK government has matched every 50,000 thatany secondary school can get committed to their budget by aprivate sponsor, to establish itself as a Specialist School. This ismeant to encourage a diversified provision of schools offeringgreater choice to parents, but in reality most schools continue abroad and balanced curriculum whilst grateful for the finance toemploy a few more staff. The Excellence in Cities programmeencouraged federations of schools to come together aroundparticularly successful ones.

Local authority support services (such as maintenance and

building, architects and surveyors, health and safety, finance,personnel services), are more and more out-sourced. ThePrivate Finance Initiative (PFI) has replaced direct publicinvestment with private investment in new building projects,whereby the Local Authority sets itself up as an arms-length bodysharing the investment risk with developers, who retain ownershipof the resultant buildings and lease them back for school use. It isnow common for these private partners to sell on their assets forsubstantial short-term rewards.

The UK Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme is anationally administered and funded programme of regeneration

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and replacement of school buildings. But these Trojan Horseprojects are expected to be done on a PFI basis and to include CityAcademy proposals. BSF actually represents the most thoroughstrategic privatisation route for capitalist interests becausecurricular control as well as material ownership of buildings andland passes from the local authority to Local EducationPartnerships with built-in controlling majorities from the privatesector. This fattening up of the local herd prior to sending tomarket is disappointingly being lapped up by the short-term glitz

of new glass palaces.

The City Academies are the most contentious and radical moveyet made by the UK government towards the liberalisation ofeducational provision, mainly at secondary level. For a promise of2M rarely actually paid any business entrepreneur can attainownership of a school, its staff, land and equipment, run it outsidenational pay and conditions regulations, and shape its owncurriculum. The governments target is for 200 such CAs by 2010,46 of which were up and running in September 2006.

Because City Academies are only answerable to the DCFS inWhitehall, and not their respective Local Authorities, centralgovernment will soon become the single biggest direct provider ofschools in the UK. (Remember this every time a politician talksabout giving powers back to local communities.) The salutaryexample of Paddington Academy in central west London, whichopened in September 2006 in near-derelict buildings with an ad

hoc curriculum, primitive resources and a thoroughly demoralisedstaff, should take the wind out of many of the spinmeisters sails.Thus the unelected Labour Education Minister responsible, LordAdonis, refused to be interviewed by BBC 2s Newsnight on 7November 2006 when this scandal was exposed.

In fact funding agreements are currently being re-written underpressure of such criticisms. Schemes in Manchester, Birmingham,Nottingham and elsewhere involve a grubby compromise wherebylocal authorities claim to be the main sponsoring force with apower to insist on a shopping-list of vetoes which will make theirAcademies virtual public comprehensives. The obvious question

then has to be asked, why bother? The only pathetic answer isbased on sheer spineless deference to party dogma.

Some Academies are scandalously ineffective. Some promote anethos of fundamentalist Christianity. Others have cheated theirway to apparent academic success by inventing courses which areclaimed to have parity with normative General Certificates ofSecondary Education. Others skew their admissions policy toensure they get the brightest sparks to guarantee fastly improving

exam success. Some are being imposed on existing good schoolsthough the stated aim is to save failing schools. OFSTEDs newregime meanwhile ensures, in a manner akin to insider trading inthe City, that there is a steady stream of schools causing concerntherefore ripe for an Academy makeover. One or two are actuallyproviding stable, effective learning where it was previously absentbecause they have managed to retain their staff and had increasedfunding.

But the fundamental political message of the government, thatprivate sponsors know best how to provide for historically deprivedcommunities educational needs, has just not been proven and hasto be opposed. It is also interesting to note that the model for CityAcademies, the Charter Schools in the United States, has beenshown in the federal governments own data to perform less wellthan the public school system in terms of academic achievement.vii

This is being complemented by the new right of state-funded

schools to establish a foundation with a foundation to governthemselves, comprising private individuals drawn from thebusiness, charity, faith or other sectors such as higher education,who would assume full control of that school or federated group ofschools. These will be the Trusts. These schools will be Academy-lite, given private management without the suitor having to evenlay down the deposit asked of Academy sponsors.

The situation in UK further and higher education is similarlymodeled on increased private management of public funding.

But it becomes a debilitating tactical mistake by its opponents, in

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the face of these developments, to accuse the government ofoutright privatisation. That is just not true.

Profit is not made. Parents are not, for example, being chargedadmission fees to attend any of these schools or charged for theexams their kids are entered for. In one sense, this is moreoutrageous than a full-blown form of privatisation because privateinterests are not being required to risk any of their own equity;simply being handed increasingly generous public funds to play

with.

We must also recognize here that not-for-profit private companiesare a well-established feature of public life, especially in the arts,outside Europe and particularly in North America. Tooley lists whythis may be so for educational provision in varying countries:

The moral reason: for-profit education is seen as anoxymoron, or is, at least, less desirable than not-for-profit

For-profit education is illegal Education companies or institutions wish to have the

benefits of being not-for-profit foundations, including notpaying taxes, and being able to receive donations whichcompanies can set against taxation

Big companies wish to use their funds in a philanthropic

way and avoid taxes, so set up not-for-profit educationalinstitutions. (Tooley p 96)

As a whole these measures could be seen as means of softeningup the education service to business control. Rikowski evensuggests that anydegree of private involvement acts as a profitvirus that once it is infected by private company involvement,then it will inevitably become liable to the regulations of theGeneral Agreement for Trade in Services (GATS), and opened upto free trade in services by national and by multinational capital(Rikowski, 2003, 2005; see also Hill, 2005b).

This is a misleading analysis simply because, whilst the intentionsmay lie in that direction, the element of UK economic privatisationis still minuscule. It is important to re-state that entities such as

Specialist Schools, City Academies and Trust Schools remainpublicly funded, despite becoming privately managed or controlled.They are not fee-charging, voucher receiving or able to generateprofits by the core provision of education, even if peripheral profitsmay, nevertheless, be generated by the sale or development ofland or the extensive use of premises for non-educationalfunctions. Space does not permit a full exposition here but it is tothe general theory of state capitalism rather than one of unfetteredfree-market dynamics that theoreticians should look for

explication.

So what do these UK sponsors gain ifnotprofits?

Firstly, individual and corporate figures benefit in other ways fromtheir apparent altruism in putting money into these schools, inmuch the same way as certain crazy people sink millions intofootball clubs. They do it for prestige. The scandal currentlyrevealing that a number of City Academy sponsors have beenoffered honours in return for large loans to the ruling Labour Partyprior to the last UK general election is part of the answer.viii

So it is best to see the small investment made by some privatesources in the governments various education reforms, as akin tothe funds that any sizeable company would write off as marketingand publicity costs, or even research and development. Its moreabout self-branding and profile building than raw and immediateprofit-accumulation.

Secondly, some companies will take up sponsorship of schoolsclose to their areas of manufacture as a long-term personnelrecruitment strategy. Honda has co-sponsored Swindon CityAcademy. Astro-Zeneca is interested in sponsoring some DevonHigh Schools as future Trusts. In such cases these localcompanies would clearly have much more performance-relateddata to access than normal for any student wishing to graduate toemployment in those companies.

Thirdly, the largest single prospective sponsor of UK CityAcademies is the United Learning Trust, which is a charity front for

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Church of England business interests. Whilst ULT has taken aninitial amicable approach to union recognition and participation inthe early stages, its cover has been blown by the aforementionedscandal at Paddington. Many socialists in education are rightlyworried that a new network of exclusive, faith-based schools willimpact negatively on multiculturalism.

We should not presume that the free-marketeers are having it alltheir own way. The Confederation of British Industry in the UK has

expressed frustration with the progress of privatisation of serviceson a local authority level. By 2005 only 9 out of 104 had beenhanded over to private groups such as Capita, Amey, Nord Anglia,Serco and CEA. In its analysis entitled The Business of EducationImprovementof February 2005 it bemoans the fact that:

The failure to develop the market beyond the initialintervention process stemmed, in part, from the apparentstigma associated with public-private partnerships. Therewas also an underestimation of the cultural and politicalresistance from local authorities to a change in their rolefrom providers to commissioners of services. (CBI p.21)

But we shouldnt get smug either about this evidence of a currentcul-de-sac for CBI companies, largely because many of thespectacular failures such as Atkins in Southwark, south London,were more of their own making than as a result of popular revolt.Other failures have also been despite, not because of, local

political support from ruling councils. The CBI will now be lookingto BSF as the route in to profit-potential for its members. Inaddition, the newly-empowered UK private inspection serviceOFSTED is explicitly raising the bar on criteria for issuingimprovement notices and serious measures status on schools,and setting unfeasibly short periods to make changes, so as toboost their susceptibility for acquisition by Trusts. I believe thatsuch rigging of the market is akin to insider trading in the City.

However, it is also true that the policy of many more localauthorities beyond these nine has been sufficiently sceptical to godown the CBIs preferred road. Some laudable authorities such as

two London boroughs like Harrow and Barking/Dagenham haveuntil the last local government elections been defiantly pro-comprehensive school and pro-public service.The fightback against City Academies specifically has been morevibrant even though too many Academies are still getting startedwithout local communities really knowing. The industrial responsefrom trade unions has been better. For example, the NationalUnion of Teachers anti-City Academies Campaigning website ispublicly accessible and very useful to anyone wishing to start a

campaign.ix

UNISON has produced some devastating critiques ofPFI. Such opposition has become a major lever in the growingfissures between the TUC and the Labour Party.

Yet moves to make school and college courses more vocationallyrelevant are a con because you simply do not need many skills tostack shelves in a superstore or warehouse, work in a call centreor retail outlet, labour agriculturally or in transport especially ifimmigrant workers are encouraged to do the job at cut-pricewages anyway. What you do need is bottomless deference and anability to stay on your feet for long hours.

Teacher, trade unionist and writer Martin Allen contends that:

Firstly, theres no evidence that the vocational educationcourses that have become established in English schools at16 plus (now 14 plus) which Ive taught for the last 10years contribute anything at all to employability in a

technical sense or even that employers take themseriously. I think theyve been used for control purposes.Also in an era of mass participation at post-16, theyvebeen used to divide learners and reinstitute class divisionswithin and between schools and colleges. I think that thisis essential because of the collapse of traditionalmanual/non manual divisions in the occupational structure.

Also, Id argue that a major problem for advancedcapitalist countries, is over education rather than lack ofskills. In other words these societies are credential or certified societies. Because of the collapse of real

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employment opportunities for young people and becausethe YTS schemes of the 1970s/80s produced trainingwithout jobs many kids have stayed in education, evengone into HE, for purely instrumental reasons. Yet, asemployment opportunities become increasingly polarised,more and more qualifications secure less and less. Sograduates downsize into routine work. Those aiming forroutine work get pushed into fast food, and so on. Somepost-colonial, third world countries have also suffered

from this process as their education systems haveexpanded faster than their economies (Zimbabwe in the1980s for example) but its mostly a first worldcontradiction.x

None of the proposed new 14-19 Diplomas reach anything like thequality of equivalent apprenticeships once provided for still sorely-needed skills in, for example, plumbing, electrics, and building.The UKs major employers scrapped these at Margaret Thatcherand Norman Tebbits behest during 1986 when the Conservativesintroduced the long-gone New Technical and VocationalEducational Initiative (NTVEI) in schools. In that one fell swoop UKcapital passed on to the public purse the costs and responsibilitiesof core trade skills provision. The continuity of generations ofworking-class skills transmitted through apprenticeships wasaborted overnight.

Some UK Conclusions

The commercial education business sector is still a tiny part of theBritish economy. The traditional capitalist interest remains as thereproduction of human capital, not the profitability of theedubusiness sector. True, the increasing emphasis on competitionand choice has also brought with it a hidden curriculum ofmarketisation with an especial place for entrepreneurial talentamongst the so-called gifted and talented minority of students.(Whitty 2000) But its largely about students being made to knowtheir place, and their eventual market price.Education retains as its prime function for UK PLC the ideological

and political preparation of (mainly) young people for the widerneoliberal world. This needs saying repeatedly as many opponentsof Blair over-prioritise the economic threats as opposed to theideological tensions. Why else do issues about school uniform anddress codes (vividly coalescing around the hoodie and hijab/niqaqbdebates), student behaviour generally, the nature of contemporarychildhoodxi, the role of faith groups in the management of schools,even the quality of food and a perceived drive to dumb-downcurricula all remain such hot potatoes in discussion about

schoolings purpose and provision from nursery to university? Theyare highly ideological and political rather than economic mattersrequiring a highly ideological and political response.

In sketching a broad picture of educations place in the world of1977 an essay by Quentin Hoare asserted an important argumentmuch missed today that:

Social democracy has always tended to considereducation as a social service similar in kind to housing ormedicine; in other words, as a good which should beshared more equally, and which can be increased in apurely quantitative way. This view, however, overlooks thevery special ambiguity of education. For on the one hand,it represents a vital human need common to all societiesand all people in some form, and as basic as subsistence orshelter. On the other hand, it is a fundamental componentof the power structure in any society the means whereby

assent is secured to the values and privileges of thedominant class. Education, in fact, is the point at whichvital needs and power structure immediately intersect. It isthus never neutral or innocent, as the other socialservices can sometimes be. Houses are houses, and themore of them the better; but education is never justeducation it is the assimilation of a social order. (ed.Hoyles p.35)

In other words it has been the technicisation of educationalprocesses under Blair that has probably been his regimes mostdeadening impact, an illusion that if we concentrate on the howof

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teaching and its monitoring, evaluation and quantification that weare making progress, policing it with OFSTED and othersurveillance mechanisms but denying as far as possible debate onthe whyof it all. This is exactly what Philip Pullman was getting atwhen he floated the idea of delight and responsibility. Literacy perse cannot be divorced from why humans use literacy skills.

Thus the most progressive of technicists such as Black and Wiliamat Kings College see their projects ofAssessment for Learning and

Learning To Learn recuperated from their radical potential towardsyet another diktat for school managers to berate staff with.

During his reign Blairs own uncompromising rationale was quitesimply and repeatedly stated that the UK needs to look to aknowledge economy to replace an engineering and manufacturingeconomy, and provide the unique selling point of commoditiesmade by our entrepreneurial whizz-kids.

Culture Minister Tessa Jowell regurgitated this mantra to aconference entitled Exciting Minds in Manchester on 27 November2006, quoting, as if it were a miraculously correct prophecy,Churchills 1944 speculation that;

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.She went on to somewhat contradict herself by claiming that 1.8Mworkers in creative industries earn only 4% of UK export income in2006, even though she claimed that the value of (unitemised) UKknowledge industries had grown from 27bn in 1995 to 76bn in

2006.

Therefore, the playground logic goes, we need some smart kidsworking in Creative Partnerships coming through to run CoolBritannia plc. This simplistic thinking does not allow for awkwardquestions such as why is most manufacturing trotting off to areasof the world withpoorrecords of educational achievement, and notFinland, say, or Cuba?

And because Blairs vision is essentially elitist and undemocratic itis in daily contradiction with a global and social justice model ofeducation based on workers real lives, avowedly and practically

politically engaging, which we could be implementing.

To be more specific, Hoare goes on to challenge what hecategorises as four key prevailing theories of education beforepositing a revolutionary version cast as an alternative to each.

1. Contra conservatism, the development of criticalreason should develop students questioning attitude to allexisting reality.

2. Contra romanticism, the social character of humanityshould reject both pre-social and individualised notions ofidentity and human nature.

3. Contra rationalism, it would insist on the active natureof learning, and contest mechanistic ideas of thetransmission of fixed skills and ideas.

4. Contra the (social) democratic tradition, it would bedialectical.it would fuse analysis of the total system with a strategyfor transforming it a socialist theory of education with aprogramme for educating socialists. (ed. Hoyles p.49)

Despite its authors association with a political current over fond oftransitional programmes at the time, and also, seemingly,conflating teaching with the building of a revolutionary party,

Hoares speculation nevertheless rewards scrutiny.

Today, social democratic tears over the plight of inner-citydeprivation are shed out of fear of class revolt, or mere anarchyand chaos, not for anything like Hoares revolutionary missionstatement or any true egalitarianism.

The Department for Education and Skills own Five Year Strategydocument of July 2004 showed the issue as starkly as it couldpossibly be drawn (DfES p16). Between five and sixteen years ofage the poor do increasingly worse at school whilst their economicbetters do increasingly better, such that the achievement gap

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widens year-on-year. The graphic is unequivocally entitled, Theinfluence of social class on early development. So, lets keep thatother class in order seems to be the New Labour motto withAnti-Social Behaviour Orders or prison if the SATs dont stun theminto acquiescence first. So, in yet another philosophical sleight ofhand spun by ministerial speechwriters, we have authoritarianismmasquerading as care.

As a flavour of this, some of the missionary zeal espoused by City

Academy leaders most wedded to their cause is almost colonial inrhetoric. For example;

local government were happy for generations ofchildren of our predecessor schools to be taught inbuildings which were rotting, with the most limitedresources in the country and with no opportunity for thedevelopment which children in more middle class areashave taken for granted for years. It is only now with thetrue social conscience which has founded the Academiesinitiative and the staff across the country who have beenbrave enough to take a stand against endemic socialinjustice that we are able to start to give our children andstaff the quality of learning and teaching environmentwhich they rightly deserve.xii

As parent activist and comprehensive school champion MelissaBenn reminded a sympathetic audience on 25 March 2006,

referring to the then Minister for Education:

Ruth Kelly talks about the urban poor more than MotherTheresa.xiii

You only have to ask why the government refuses to takethe one single simple step which could improve school educationfor all, in every school, and which would have teachers, parentsand kids united in acclaim; guarantee a class size limit by law.

Cuban schools manage to educate kids in classes of 20,often with two qualified teachers on hand, despite that nations

dire problems with trade, housing, transport, food, incomes,democracy and security. Scottish schools are instigating a 20maximum figure for lower secondary Maths and English by 2007 with a concomitant expansion in teaching training places sinceSeptember 2005.

But even in the national context of a declining number of

kids in the coming decade and Gordon Browns promises to fundschools to the same levels as the private sector, Labour has not

tolerated the prospect of reducing the base unit number by, say,20% from 30 to 24 per class.

Instead Labour spins its showroom City Academies,delivering at best only to a minority, as if they constituteexcellence for all. Despite tons of egalitarian rhetoric Labourrefuses this one single reform that would spell undoubted progressfor all kids, especially as UK birth rates suggest a general (thoughnot uniform) reduction in children. One logical deduction is thatthey actually relish the prospect of raising revenue by closingthose schools suffering from falling rolls; a process which might beexacerbated if new faith schools open simultaneously.

They do allow themselves to talk about something woollylike Personalised Learning. This is the catch-phrase the politicianswill robotically bounce back with if you push them on the questionof smaller class sizes. But few of them know what it means. AngelaEagle MP admitted as much when put on the spot by a teacher

during a TUC education conference on 17 March 2006. The moreadept snakeoil peddlers will say that it is up to every school to useits budget to set class sizes as it wishes. We will come to a moreacceptable interpretation later, to be found in Professor StephenHeppells work.

But a market fetish with choice and diversity means thatLabour refuses to acknowledge that something so simple couldraise the quality of life for all kids and education workers. In factLord Adonis visited Finland in September 2006 and dismissed whathe found, claiming that the country was too small a comparison tomake with the UK not a problem for him when invoking the

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minority Charter School provision in the USA. The truth is morelikely to be that Finland has the highest achieving school studentsin the world because they are educated in a system Adonisdespises; it has no selection, privatisation or exams, starts formaleducation at age seven, insists on highly-qualified staff andprovides nutritious free meals daily.

This elementally simple recipe for good public schools

would also make redundant the armies of self-appointed but well-

anointed School Improvement Professionals, experts who delight inrevealing the apparent complexities of good schooling which theyalone can decipher!

Indeed, in reflection of the topsy-turvey nature of partypolitics presently, it is ironic that some of the more radicalcurriculum reform proposals which challenge the governmentsproscriptions are to be found emanating from business sources.The C21st Society, for example, employs ex-headteacher JohnAbbott as one of its educational gurus and his book The UnfinishedRevolution celebrates the pedagogic strategies developed by alargely left-wing movement for child-centred schooling in the1960s.

The Royal Society for Arts has developed a core skills or competencies course, entitled Opening Minds, which eschewsdiscrete subject areas at secondary school level, and fosters muchgreater control of topic-focused content at local level whilst

validating all stages of progress by students towards theirachievement.xiv In delineating an aim for their proposals the RSAasserts that:

Education is not a business in the normal sense ofthat word (although the principles of good businessmanagement are relevant to it). Schooling must beconcerned with the broad development of young peopleinto well-adjusted, happy and contributing members ofcivil society, and its functions go well beyondinstrumental

If young people are not persuaded that their schooling isof value, then educations essential function of transmittingthe common culture and values of society is at risk as wellas our chances of meeting the needs that young peoplehave themselves identified. (RSA p7)

So whilst we may well want to contest quite what the RSA regardsas common culture, and bemoan their imminent sponsorship of aCity Academy, these proposals appear to make excellent

pedagogic sense, being student-centred, democratic and inclusive.After all it was the anti-communist libertarian musician FrankZappa who insisted that:

Your mind is like a parachute. It doesnt work when itsclosed.

Such contradictions are most graphically embodied by theDepartment for Culture Media and Sports Creative Partnershipsinitiative. Using 150m of funding to deprived areas of the UKmanaged by the Arts Council since 2002, professional groups andindividuals have been matched with willing schools to enhance allareas of the curriculum at all levels. Proving that curricula centrednot on the quantitative model of micro-assessed outcomes of SATsand exams, but on a collective, creative, student-centred responseto real lives in real places, a few lucky schools have undertakensome breathtaking projects.

For example, the Cap-A-Pie theatre group have done amazingwork based on Waiting For Godot with Clavering Primary Schoolin Hartlepool. On the otherhand, some excruciating CreativePartnership projects, such as Hotshots on Merseyside, fetishisemarket forces and idolise entrepreneurial saints like Jamie Oliver,Steve Jobs, Bob Geldof, Lance Armstrong and Richard Branson, tocon kids into thinking that their new ideas are the key to aneconomic fortune if put out to market.

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The Global Picture

The predominant focus above on the northern hemisphere servesto highlight the sophisticated machinations that neoliberalism has

to resort to in justifying its project of marketising public serviceswhere they have been developed by many previous generations.For all the well-documented reasons to do with histories ofcolonialism, culminating most notably in Africas case with WalterRodneys How Europe Underdeveloped Africa of 1972, southernhemispheric aspects of this question are both more stark and moreurgent.

It would appear that the relative importance of direct profit takingby capital is already more significant in many highly indebted andpoor nations.

Current worldwide spending in education is estimated ataround 2,000 billion dollars ... more than globalautomotive sales (Santos, 2004, p. 17). According toSantos, capital growth in education has been exponential,showing one of the highest earning rates of the market:1000 invested in 1996 generated 3405 four years later(Santos, 2004, pp. 17-18, cited in Delgado-Ramos andSaxe- Fernandez, 2005).

Santos continues:

that is an increased value of 240%, while the LondonStock Exchange valorization rate accounted on the sameperiod for 65%. Other 2004 data indicate that, currentcommercialised education, incomplete as it is, alreadygenerates around $365 billion in profits worldwide (Hill2004, pp. 17-18).

These are indeed remarkable prognostications which will no doubtbe common knowledge amongst traders on the worlds stockexchanges. For those of us at the most elemental level ofdefending or establishing universal access to a minimal level ofsocial provision as of right, this could be quite frightening news.Yet in a number of states governments simply request privatecompanies to fill the gaps where public schooling does not reallyexist. Hill notes that;

Private schools have mushroomed at all levels, from pre-school to postgraduate studies. There are an estimated56,000 private institutions currently operating in Pakistan,providing education to about 6 million students(Government of Pakistan, 2004). The government hasresolved to increase private-school enrolment from 15% to40% by 2010 under the Education Sector Reforms project,which is being funded by all major donors, including theWorld Bank (Government of Pakistan, 2002,p. 34). Inother countries, such as Haiti, public provision is of suchpoor quality that the effect is the same effectiveschooling is left to private companies some not-for-profit

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(such as some religious schools), others very much forprofit. Increasingly, for example in Latin America, theprofits from for-profit schools flow not only to nationalcorporations, but also to United States chains and brandsof schools.

Alex Molnars Commercialisation in Education Research Unit(CERU) in the Education Department of the University of Arizonaseems, quite literally, as if it is an oasis of North American critical

thinking. For example, his latest and sixth No Student Left Unsoldexamines eight types of school commercialism, with most showinga year-on-year increase (Molnar et al, 2004).

These include;1. corporate sponsorship of school programmes of studyand whole schools; e.g. in universities the corporateprofessorship2. exclusive agreements agreements giving marketersexclusive rights to sell a product or a service on school or districtgrounds; e.g. Channel One TV in a quarter of USA classrooms3. incentives the use of commercial products or services asrewards for achieving an academic goal;4. appropriation of space the selling of naming rights oradvertising space on school premises or property;5. corporately sponsored educational materials;6. actual privatisation the private ownership of publicly fundedschools and/or their services

7. semi-privatisation with private management of publiclyfunded schools, often as public charter schools8. private for-profit school involvement in voucher programmes.

As for the impact of some of these developments in the USA, inschools or the other environments frequented by kids, I wrote inHands Off Our Schools (Grant 2004) that;

The St. Louis Zoo houses the Monsanto Insectarium andthe Anheuser-Busch Hippo Harbor. In Bostons ScienceMuseum, the exhibitions are giant structures built fromLego and KNex toys. The childrens hospital at University

of California Los Angeles was renamed Mattels ChildrensHospital, and Hasbros got an equivalent on the East Coast.Indeed, almost anywhere one finds children, there areattempts to market to them, whether its at doctors officesor nature centers. The jewel in the marketers crown ofcommercial infiltration has been the nations publicschools.

Channel One has an audience in schools second only to

that of the ratings topping annual Super Bowl. The ten-minute daily news bulletin of typically tabloid values isaccompanied by two minutes of ads. Contracted to arounda quarter of US middle and secondary schools in return fortheir use of video monitors and equipment, marketershave as near as they will ever get to a captive audience.Any other form of ads can be declined, but not if you aresat at your desk watching a monitor with no sound controlto silence its messages, selling the usual junk food, softdrinks, toys, video games. (p.30)

As for vouchers, they are the ultimate free market mechanism fororganising publicly funded education. Schools receive no directstate funding but are wholly dependent on parents who do. Withpseudo-cash in hand parents can kick-off a bidding war betweenschools, whose strengths become as much to do with theirmarketing expertise as pedagogic qualities. Schools are unable toplan ahead never knowing whether the fee-replacement cheque

will actually arrive.

Though once a kite flown by Margaret Thatchers in-house guru SirKeith Joseph in the UK during the early 1980s, the practical chaoswhich a full-blown voucher system would create has meant that ithas remained only in isolated examples in North and South. Onesimple problem is that for feckless or desperately poor recipients ofa voucher, its potential as counterfeit collateral with creditors isimmense. Many very poor kids simply wouldnt get to schoolbecause the vouchers had disappeared into the hands of loansharks or regular thugs, even with the most rigorous ofsafeguards!xv

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Nevertheless, pressures mount to take education in this direction.Hill notes that the General Agreement for Trade in Services (GATS)coming out of the WTO is a major global lever towards this goal.

Grieshaber-Otto & Sanger (2002) argue that the discourseof the GATS serves as a major potential force in essentiallyenshrining or entrenching neoliberal educational policies. Itsets out supranational and binding legal mechanisms and

serves to act as an enforcer for the corporate rights ofprivate education providers. As Shugurensky & Davidson-Harden (2003,p. 322) point out, these agreementsrepresent an intensified stage of the neoliberal agenda foreducation, as it plays out in the global arena in forms ofregional and local policy and practice.

Also promoting the cause of free trade are organisations such asthe International Chamber of Commerce and the Institute ofDirectors in Britain, the European Round Table (ERT) andmultinational organisations such as the Partnership for EducationalRevitalisation in the Americas (PREAL), which, in its own words, isa partnership of public and private organizations (PREAL, 2004).

The World Bank, international monetary credit rating agencies andthe Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development (OECD)are also significant bodies. In addition, there are regional free-trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade

Agreement (NAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA),the Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR) and the EuropeanUnion (EU).

James Tooleys work has been sponsored by the Institute ofEconomic Affairs, which has the stated mission to improveunderstanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society withparticular reference to the role of markets in solving economic andsocial problems. Perhaps we should remember the warning of ex-agent Philip Agee in his 1977 exposure CIA Diary: Inside theCompany, that most political organisations containing the wordfreedom, or concerned with a free society, can be presumed to be

a CIA front!

So Is Neoliberalism Working In Education?

In one sense the answer to this is yes - daily. The followingunedited press release from arms producer BAE Systems based inHampshire, southern England on 10 November 2006 just aboutsums up the utter moral degradation of the Blair regime.

UK AND INDIAN SCHOOLS FORM ECONOMY

BOOSTING EDUCATION PARTNERSHIP

Teachers from primary and secondary schools in Brough have been to visit teachersfrom schools in Bangalore, India to finalise arrangements for a new partneringinitiative, designed to give students in both countries a better understanding of scienceand engineering. Improving education links between the two countries will encouragegreater economic collaboration and provide opportunities for the UK to benefit fromthe huge expansion of the Indian economy.

The UK India Education & Research Initiative is being led by the British Council - theGovernment department responsible for the UKs international cultural links and theDepartment for Education & Skills.

BAE Systems, which operates a site in Brough, is championing the scheme. TheCompany has close ties with the Indian economy and its growing defence sector,mainly through provision of Hawk advanced jet trainers to the Indian Air Force.

Following the initiatives launch earlier this year at a Downing Street reception

attended by Prime Minister Tony Blair, BAE Systems has pledged over 100,000 overthe next three years.

Dick Olver, Chairman of BAE Systems, said: "BAE Systems invests heavily ineducational initiatives which promote science and engineering to students of all ages,from primary schools though to our universities. This UK-India initiative is an excellentopportunity for us to share our experience in giving students a better understanding ofscience and engineering, and in helping to strengthen education links between the twocountries."

Four schools local to the Companys site at Brough will partner with schools inBangalore, where BAE Systems partner Hindustani Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) is based.

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Isabel Peirson, head teacher of Brough Primary School, said: Both primary andsecondary schools are participating and the initiative will be delivering curriculumbased activity around citizenship and linked to a better understanding of science andengineering.

At the Downing Street launch the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said: Increasinglyeducation is crossing national boundaries as it prepares our young people for careersin the global economy. I am passionate about raising standards in education in ourcountry, but that means we must be willing to learn from the best in the world. Itmeans sharing experience and knowledge.

BAE Systems is building on its established relationship with HAL around the HawkContract where HAL technicians already spend periods at the Companys site atBrough, learning about how its engineers build and maintains the Hawk aircraft.

About BAE Systems

BAE Systems is the premier transatlantic defence and aerospace company deliveringa full range of products and services for air, land and naval forces, as well asadvanced electronics, information technology solutions and customer supportservices. With 86,000 employees worldwide, BAE Systems sales exceeded GB15.4billion (US$28 billion) in 2005.

For more information please contact:

Scott Hailstone, BAE SystemsTel: +44 (0)1252 384725 Mob: +44-(0)7793 423 [email protected]

We are accustomed as public servants to ask questions about theopen cheque for imperialist warmongering in Afghanistan and Iraq,compared to the incessant scrutiny of every penny spent inschools, but when a better understanding of science andengineering for the children of Brough, Hampshire, can only begained from witnessing corporate killers at work, with the PrimeMinisters approval, we have ideological outrage to add to oureconomic anger.

So neoliberalism is permanently hard at work, as incessantly as

any shark, but is it succeeding?

The World Bank, one of the main global levers for privatisation,has proclaimed in respect of education that:

The virtues of the private sector, especially compared tothe public system, include: (a) internal efficiency andmanagement almost no waste, lean organizational chart,better decision-making flow, less discontinuity of

administration, agility in crisis solution, betterstudents/teacher ratio; (b) flexibility to hire/fire teachers,determine their salaries according to market values andcost levels; and (c) flexibility to adapt quicker to labourmarket needs and thus change curricula ... Privateinstitutions are often accused of getting excess profits andpaying inadequate attention to quality ... although therehas never been a systematic demonstration of theirexistence. (World Bank, 1991, p. 69)

In challenging the efficiency of neoliberalism in actually doing whatit claims to do, by way of reviving the rate of profit and therebyimproving the wealth of all through a trickle-down process,Callinicos (p.22-4) draws on work from the Center for Economicand Policy Research. Its comparison of the pre-and-post Volckerdecades, using several indicators such as growth of income perperson, life expectancy and infant mortality rates, suggests thatneoliberalism isntactually delivering the goods!

Callinicos borrows this table for illustration of annual economicgrowth rates across key world regions.

Region 1961-80 1985-98

OECD 3.8 2.3

Latin America 5.1 3.2

Sub-Saharan Africa 4.2 2.1

East and South-East Asia 6.8 7.5

South Asia 3.6 5.6

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Specifically on education and literacy the CEPR analysis claims thatsince the advent of neoliberalism, The rate of growth of primary,secondary, and tertiary (post-secondary) school enrolment wasslower for most groups of countries By almost every measure ofeducation, including literacy rates, the middle and poorerperforming groups saw less rapid progress in the period ofglobalisation than in the prior two decades. The rate of growth ofpublic spending in education, as a share of GDP, also slowedacross all groups of countries.

Yet, as Callinicos continues to explain, the IMF and others withinthe so-called Washington consensus claim that it will takeneoliberalism to go much furtherto achieve its lasting benefits, notreturn to a more regulated and paternalistic form of capitalismcharacteristic of the pre-Volcker era, or even, conversely, anoverthrow of capitalism itself. The danger for Washington is thepolitical and military over-reach that is currently being practiced inthe Middle East, even though they have plenty of ageing hardwareto trash in order to keep military order books ticking over.Meanwhile, as an anti-war placard described it on a protest marchthrough Santa Barbara, California early in 2004 Aint shittrickled down yet!

Harvey confirms this with a table showing mean global per capitagrowth rates from 1960-2003, by year and decade (p 155). Thestarting aggregate growth rates are around 3.5%. Since 2000 ithardly touches 1%, even though this is a mean for a range which

goes from the spectacular (China 10%) to the tragic (Russia 3.5%). So whilst neoliberalism, in general, isnt working, thereslittle chance of an honest admission of that!

So there is a case for insisting that neoliberalism has notgenerated greater capital accumulation at all but simply rarified itsdistribution, whilst exacerbating the social chasm between thehaves and have nots or have-mores to use Bushs unfunnyjoke. This would confirm what much of our own common sensetells us - from our local streets to insurrectionary Nepal,murderous Baghdad or impoverished Buenos Aires. Anecdotally, interms of the resultant quality of public services following

deregulation and diversification, UK citizens need look no furtherthan their rail and bus services for daily tales of outrage aboutprices, reliability and comfort!

Harvey calls this what it simply is class war. He insists that themass of the population has either to resign itself to overwhelmingand ever-increasing upper class power, or respond to it in classterms.

And it is this stubborn refusal of neoliberalisms casualties to diequietly that is our main source of hope. Few of these neoliberalsorties are going unopposed.

One plan was the so-called Bolkestein Directive, the EUs draftservices directive seeking to open up trade in services. Thisdirective sought to expose almost all services to market-basedcompetition. Though public-education services were specificallyexcluded, the draft directive would have applied to peripheralservices supplied to schools and, like the GATS, it was unclearwhere the line between public and private services would bedrawn.

Under the country of origin principle, a company providingservices would follow the rules and laws of the country in which itwas based or established, rather than the country in which theservice was provided. An education multinational from the UnitedStates could, for example, establish itself in Latvia, simply by

registering its presence there. It would then be able to trade in therest of the EU, such as Britain, whilst conforming only to Latvianlaw on matters such as health and safety, employees rights orenvironmental protection. Latvia, not the country where theservice was provided, would be expected to send inspectors toensure compliance with its laws.

Critics say the draft directive would encourage social dumpingsince companies would have an incentive to opt for establishmentin the least regulated EU member requiring the lowest standards.The directive would have been quite a blow to national levelregulation, as it would tend to make services available in the least

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regulated way, rather than bringing all services operators up tobest standards (Malins, 2005).

QuickTime and a

TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressare needed to see this picture.

EU Internal Market Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, said he wascommitted to re-introducing the directive in some form during hisfive-year term, which ends in 2009. With 70% of economic activityin Europe being in services, you dont have to have a degree ineconomics to know that if you can open up the services marketyoure going to have an impact on economic activity and we needincreased economic activity in the EU (McCreevy, cited inMcLauchlin 2005). However, concerted pressures fromorganisations affiliated to Education International, culminating in a

European-wide trade union protest in Strasbourg on 14 February2006, did much to take the sting out of this plan. Morespectacularly the French government attempt to liberaliseemployer rights over post-graduate employment opportunities wascompletely rebuffed by a concerted and united student militancyduring March and April 2006. Starting with the occupation ofRennes University, a majority of French universities followed suit.xvi

Greek primary school teachers were on national all-out strikeagainst their Tory governments attempts to emulate Blair for twomonths in a dispute which is still simmering into 2007. Mexicanteachers centred on Oaxaca have been at the forefront of fatalconfrontations with their state over pay and academic rights in

2006.

Inside the heart of the beast, it looks like the emblematic collapseof Enron may have been as much a radical wake up call as thedevastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina for those US citizenspreviously content to export their nations democratic values toforeign lands. Bushs got a good hiding in 2006, but will re

on delight and responsibility:

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