- Aug 2019
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What form will the language of criticism and hope look like if it is to address the everyday lives of people caught in the grip of neoliberal common sense?
Sacred Economics. The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. Climate: A New Story.
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Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?
Attributing this to schools is a pretty stark example of schools as political--in what I'd call an unacceptable direction.
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language of pollution
MWLB
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neoliberal ideology and elements of a fascist politics merge to contain, distract and misdirect the anger that has materialized out of grievances against the government, privileged elites and the massive hardships caused by neoliberal capitalism.
I'd be more granular and attribute the problems to risk-free positive interest bearing debt--usury--and its necessary effect of the conversion of common wealth to private wealth.
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For Fisher, capitalist realism functioned less as a crude form of quasi-propaganda than as a pedagogical, social and cultural machine that produces “a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”
I'm thinking of the argument in Barry Schwartz's Why We Work that impoverished (mentally, emotionally, socially unengaging) forms of work create the very culture of "laziness" and lack of motivation used as arguments against policies like a Universal Basic Income.
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it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it
Teaching history can help here: to combat presentism, to understand that there were different ways of creating a society or a state, to show the myriad forms of the human condition to spark imagination
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to turn education into a business
leads to commodification
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Trump built on a longstanding neoliberal project buttressed by an anti-democratic formative culture in which educational institutions have been used to shape market-based identities, modes of agency and collective subjects bound together by the notion that there is no alternative to an unfair and pernicious capitalist social order.
Per usual, I think this harkens back to a panoply of arguments made by Charles Eisenstein, The Myth of the Separate Self in particular.
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have done everything they can
Disagree. I don't think this pigeon-holing is helpful.
(Which isn't to say I think these groups aren't responsible for grave and pressing harms, only that there's more they could have done.)
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intervening
Intervention evokes questions around default.
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If teachers do not have control over the conditions of their labor
What exactly are those conditions? No thinking that falls short of recognizing at least a global whole has much hope, but no teacher has the kind of control (at least as I think the word is meant here) over whether a mass shooting takes place--but those events reach into and affect classrooms.
Maybe the reason that I'm pushing back is that I want more specificity around what "control" means--and maybe to move in the direction of the language of autonomy support over the language of control.
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while limiting their willingness to believe in something larger than themselves.
I think this is an in-born trait, so I agree with the idea that limits are coming from without.
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neoliberalism has not only achieved dominance
MWLB--personification of an ideology as something that asserts dominance, rather than something that reflects dominance? The whole idea of domination is itself antithetical to mutual agency.
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pedagogical terrorism
Strong language here, I'd say notably so. What work does this do?
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methods such as teaching for the test
I'm hesitant to call this a method. It certainly involves a correspondence, but I don't think method is the right word. It seems to imply something that's stable, where "teaching to the test" is by definition variable depending on the form of that test.
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cut across mainstream party lines.
Following capital ($)? Some resonance here with funding "cuts."
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they have aggressively attempted to turn education into a business, faculty into devalued clerks and students into consumers.
Metaphors We Live By
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instrumentalist
Objectification--The Anatomy of Peace
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