Resistance is not futile

Resisting Neoliberalism in Education – Local, National and Transnational Perspectives, edited by Lyn Tett & Mary Hamilton ISBN 978-1447350057, hardback, Bristol: Policy Press and Bristol University Press, xx+270 pp. 2019.

Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer

Divided into 16 chapters, the 35 authors of the edited volume Resisting Neoliberalism in Education discuss the colonisation of education by the ideology of neoliberalism. Lyn Tett and Mary Hamilton focus on adult education (part 1), school education (part 2), higher education (part 3) while also offering a national perspective (part 4) and a transnational perspective (p. 5). Their book has no conclusion discussing ‘what can we learn from all this?’. Nonetheless, Kathleen Lynch’s forward starts by emphasising that there is a ‘myth that there can be equality in opportunity without equality of conditions’ (p. xvii). Schools are stratification institutions that, overall, increase inequality. When the mere existence of books in a household can be linked to potential achievement at school, some students are clearly at an advantage even before entering our rigid school system. Many indicators show an overall decline in social mobility. This is more marked the more neoliberalism holds sway. Today, more than during the 1970s (before neoliberalism) for example, schools make sure that working class students remain in the working class (Wills, 1977).

The second point Kathleen Lynch makes is that our societies are governed by ‘three major institutions of ideology: the media, religion and education’ (p. xvii). The role of the media is to mass manufacture consent (Herman & Chomsky 1988). Just as Ford perfected the mass-manufacturing of motor cars, Rupert Murdoch has perfected the mass-manufacturing of public opinion and adjacent voting patterns. Murdoch is one of the world’s foremost Merchant(s) of Truth (Abramson 2019). Apart from the USA, Poland, Ireland and a few other places, religion is in terminal decline, at least in many OECD countries. One is inclined to argue that religion has been replaced by consumerism as the key institution capable of pacifying society (Marcuse 1964; Klikauer 2018). Finally, there is education as a transmitter of ideology. The book shows how this works.

Tett and Hamilton start the introduction to the book by emphasising that ‘the role of critical intellectuals is to re-problematise the social reality of the present and to foster critical awareness of alternatives’ (p. 1). This is the

Resistance is not futile Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer exact opposite of what neoliberalism wants, namely TINA: there is no alternative to the present system of neoliberal capitalism. To achieve TINA, neoliberalism in schools and universities fosters ‘competition rather than collaboration among practitioners and among students. It creates a lowtrust environment where professionals (and students) have to be monitored and assessed by external yardsticks’ (p. 2). The same regime is applied by university managerialists to control academics. They too are in competition (grant applications, internal promotions, bidding to teach classes that are seen as good, etc.) with each other. Much of this creates a low-trust environment in which managerialists rule by playing off academics against each other.

One of the key external yardsticks for schools is PISA (OECD, 2019). At universities, managerialists use more elaborated instruments such as The impact factor fetishism (Fleck, 2013). At schools, such external yardsticks are spiced up with the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) ideology (Klikauer 2019) while in university it is the relentlessly enforced demand to publish in A-level journals. Such demands are often issued by ex-academics turned apparatchiks who never or rarely publish in A-level journals and hence have become apparatchiks and managerialists. Much of this reflects on one of the better definitions of management ever delivered. It came from none other than Corporal Klinger in the US TV series MASH. Klinger said, ‘management is when those you can’t manage those who can’ (Klikauer 2007, p. 138).

Next to the OECD’s PISA ranking that focuses on the three skills capitalism needs (mathematics, science and reading), ‘schooling is dominated by the requirement to produce good tests, exams and inspection results’ (p. 6). Key to the understanding what schools are about are the first three words in the above quote – schooling is dominated. Indeed, schools are institutions of domination (Illich, 1971; Bowles & Gintis, 1976). Still, neoliberalism (externally) and managerialism (internally) remain obsessed with tests and exams. These are not for students but are directed against students (Robinson 2010). Testing and ranking also mark a ‘shift from humanist

perspectives to a focus on neoliberal and value for money approaches’ (p. 13). The idea behind this is to ‘reduce the person…to human capital, not as a life to be lived, but as mere economic potential to be exploited’ (p. 41). For neoliberalism, it is human capital, for managerialism it is the balanced score card that seeks to assign a profit value to each employee – profitability narrowed down to the individual. Common to both is that a human being has no value in-itself – only value in the function it performs for capitalism.

Like any function in capitalism and in corporations, workers, like students are assessed, ranked and defined by someone above you. In schools, such ‘an outcomes-based curriculum and standardised assessments can limit [a] teacher’s professional discernment’ (p. 58). This idea is not that it ‘can’ but that it ‘will’. Under an outcomes-based curriculum, school teachers and university lecturers become mere instructors delivering the textbook contents set up by for-profit corporations that publish textbooks. Simultaneously, teachers and lecturers have been confined to a rigid top-down system managed like a Ford factory. Management (that knows better) tells teachers and lecturers what to do. Early management theorist Fayol (1916) called it the chain of command. These kinds of ideologies are camouflaged by managerialism’s buzzwords like engagement and empowerment (e.g. www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator).

It is the very idea of the ‘neoliberal discourses [to] deprofessionalise teachers’ (p. 70) at schools and lecturers at universities (Klikauer, 2017). This makes 85 per cent of schooling very boring and there is a reason for that. It prepares people for working life which is also 85 per cent boring. Human beings need to be conditioned to accept the way of capitalism. They need to believe that it is normal –even natural– to sit at a desk and look at a computer eight hours a day, five days a week for up to 50 years of their lives. When you think of it, this is quite an achievement. To round up the entire system, capitalism fills us with cheap consumer goods in the belief that two plasma TVs makes you happier than one (deGraaf et al., 2005). Meanwhile at schools, universities and workplaces, boredom and dullness reign. This is a ‘dullness that is situated in predictability and universality – the day after day of the same pedagogy regardless of what is to be learnt. Dullness is located in unadulterated textbooks – or PowerPoint presentation-based learning that fails to connect with students’ existing understandings and experiences’ (p. 75). Dullness is set to continue as it pleases school and university managerialists, overseers and ‘inspectors’ (p. 76). The same dullness is found in standardised testing. Unfortunately, only ‘20 per cent of parents…refused to submit their children to [such] standardised tests’ (p. 90). In other words, the media apparatus that engineers mass compliance and acceptance of such tests seems to work rather well. Still, those who refuse such tests often organise ‘effective grass-roots [and]

vol. 62, no. 1, 2020 social media-based social movements’ (p. 90). It is not at all surprising that ‘nationwide, 45 per cent of opt-out activists were teachers’ (p. 96). Perhaps it is a case of: the more you know about standard testing, the less you want it done to your children.

While this might be a mild form of institutional violence directed against children, in the USA ‘African-American, Indigenous, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans, immigrants and Latino communities’ can experience worse (p. 104). In the USA, ‘institutional violence targets even young children’ (p. 105) ‘for the purpose of social control and deculturalisation’ (p. 107). Forms of institutional violence continue in higher education where ‘processes of neoliberalisation [damage] pedagogic possibilities’ (p. 121). ‘Rather than a feature of public life, the privatisation of university funding has encouraged tertiary education to become a private affair’ (p. 123). Under managerialism, there is a ‘rebranding of students into customers [and] librarians [into] information officers’ (p. 125).

Just like almost anything neoliberalism can reach, ‘higher education is now a global industry that is estimated to contribute around £73 billion’ to the UK’s GDP per year (p. 137). With that, the move from humanist education to a money-making entity has largely been completed. Like in many privatised and semi-privatised industries, ‘the intensification of the pace of work and job insecurity has increased [while] new forms of accountability and surveillance [have increased]’ (p. 137) – largely for those at the receiving end of the equation. For some academics this even means ‘being forced into smaller offices [and] shared offices’ (p. 139) or being placed into so-called open plan offices (Stillman, 2018) with only the dean and a few selected henchmen of her or his personal entourage occupying real offices. Consequently, many academics ‘do an awful lot of writing at home’ (p. 140). The university – from Latin universitas means whole – is no longer the whole assembly of scholars. It ceases to exist. Managerialism triumphs.

Meanwhile, key performance indicators (KPIs) enforce the managerial system onto academics engineering output and impact factors measured in citations, the h-index and the i10-index (scholar.google.com.au/citations). It enforces ‘useless writings [meaning] writing you do not want to do’ (p. 144). Others would call it bullshit writing (Graeber, 2018). The impact of managerialism is a rather recent phenomena because ‘academics have not traditionally seen themselves as an exploited workforce’ (p. 146). To this there are two answers. Marxists would tend to think that the moment profits come in, surplus value must be created, and exploitation exists. NonMarxists would tend to think that exposing academics to rigid control systems to increase work is exploitation. Common to both is alienation. Increasingly, academics feel alienated at universities.

Much of this is ideologically disguised by presenting a university as an ‘entrepreneurial university’ (p. 157) which means ‘free education for everyone’ (p. 159) is eliminated just as ‘direct democracy is a way of making decisions’ (p. 159). Instead of democracy, managerialists reign. Such universities are deliberately underfunded [which assists managerialists in establishing a climate in which] marketised terms (p. 161) have achieved definitional power. Consequently, people are now ‘human capital [an ideology that has] become the main driver of adult education’ (p. 188). This means that ‘personal development [has become a mere] by-product’ (p. 189). Much of this comes under the general idea of seeing a ‘labour force [purely as being able to deliver] ‘the highest rate of return’ (p. 190). This works in private universities as well as in so-called “as-if ” universities. These are state universities run by managerialists under managerialism.

Much of this indicates a move ‘from a progressive humanist educational practice to a narrowly defined practice of skills training’ (p. 205). It is a move from education to training. As they say you can train a dog, but you cannot educate a dog. When educational managerialists move education to training, they convert human beings into dogs applying Pavlov and Skinner. What this means has been shown in one of the most exquisite documentaries ever made – Human Resource Social Engineering (HR, 2010). This thinking has even shaped education with ‘the objective of employability [no longer] dedicated to the objective of active citizenship’ (p. 235).

While the book highlights the pathologies of education under the regime of neoliberalism, it also contains a raft of ideas on the book’s main title Resisting. In the Afterword, Lyn Tett and Mary Hamilton say that they have ‘identified ten key ideas’ on resistance (p. 253). Resistance means an acute awareness that resistance takes place in an ‘hostile environment’ (p. 253; cf. Klikauer, 2017). The second issue for resistance is to ‘prioritise a learner’s perspective [while] harnessing communication technologies’ (p. 254). Resistance also means an ‘explicit sharing of core values [while] fostering creativity’ (p. 255). The authors also suggest ‘collaborating with new groups’ and encourage the creation of ‘a knowledge commons’ (p. 256). Finally, there should be the ‘promotion of education as a common good’ (p. 256) and the ‘use of education research itself as a resource for making changes’ (p. 257). In short, Mary Hamilton and Lyn Tett’s edition makes a most insightful contribution to our understanding of neoliberal education as well as how to resist it.

Thomas Klikauer is the author of Managerialism (Palgrave MacMillan. 2013) and 450 other publications. He teaches PhD and MBA students at the Sydney Graduate School of Management, Western Sydney University, NSW, Australia. Contact: t.klikauer@westernsydney.edu.au

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