The struggle continues... A short piece of mine on the Australian government's thousand-cuts approach to university education has just been published on the New Matilda website, you can find it here: Uni Cuts.
A longer piece about neoliberalism in education has just been published too:
Raewyn Connell, "The neoliberal cascade and education: an essay on the market agenda and its consequences," Critical Studies in Education, 2013, vol. 54 no. 2, pp. 99-112. Here is the abstract:
Education has been powerfully affected by the rise of a neoliberal political, economic and cultural agenda. The Australian experience since the 1980s is outlined. Educators
need to understand neoliberalism, and also to think about the nature of education itself,
as a social process of nurturing capacities for practice. Education itself cannot be commodified; but access to education can be. Markets require a rationing of education, and
the creation of hierarchies and mechanisms of competition. Hence, the redefinition of
schools and universities as firms, and the striking revival of competitive testing, as well
as the expansion of public funding of private schools. Teachers are placed under performative pressures that tend to narrow the curriculum in schools, and make the sector’s
workforce more insecure. Even the knowledge base of education is impacted, with technicization of professional knowledge and a growth of cultural fakery around education.
Bases for alternatives exist, but have not yet found institutional articulation.
Keywords: education as commodity; education systems; markets in education;
neoliberalism; standardized testing; teacher accountability
