Neoliberalism, Cities and Education in the Global South and North

Kalervo N. Gulson, Thomas C. Pedroni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415717878
• eBook ISBN: 9781134914432
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Across the world, cities are being reshaped in myriad ways by neoliberal forms of globalization, a process of urban restructuring with significant implications for educational policy and practices. The chapters in this collection speak to two complementary but analytically distinguishable aspects of the interplay between education, globalization, cities, and neoliberalism. The first aspect relates to the macro relationships between these powerful global forces on the one hand, and cities and their schools on the other. In particular the book considers the stratifying dynamics that exacerbate already existing inequalities related to race, ethnicity, language, class, and gender—inequalities entailing differential access to the city's various resources. The second aspect deals with the cultural politics, and logics, of these changes in the city. This recognises that globalization is not simply imposed on the city, but rather becomes insinuated into its fabric through the actions and the agency of local actors and social movements. Against this backdrop, the chapters document how the educational politics of urban contexts in the United States, India, Canada, South Africa and Brazil should be understood as sites in which neoliberal forms of globalization are localised, reproduced, and potentially contested.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

Contesting global neoliberalism and creating alternative futures

David W. Hursh and Joseph A. Henderson

Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA

Neoliberal policies, in spite of their considerable damage to economic equality, the environment, and education, remain dominant. In this paper, we suggest that neoliberalism has remained dominant in part because the power elite who benefit from the policies have gained control over both public debate and policy-making. By dominating the discourse and logic regarding economic, environmental, and education decision-making, neoliberal proponents have largely succeeded in marginalizing alternative conceptions. We then use critical theory and critical geography, or ‘historical geographic materialism’, to situate communities, cities, and countries within different scales and networks and analyse current neoliberal policies. Environmentally, neoliberalism elevates the market and profit above considerations of climate change and environmental sustainability. Educationally, learning is valued primarily in terms of its contribution to economic growth. Finally, we engage in the more complicated question of what kind of world we want to live in, remembering that rather than a self-perpetuating neoliberalism in which individuals are responsible only for themselves and all decisions are supposedly made by the market, we have responsibility for our relationships with one another and our built and natural environment.

Neoliberal economic and education policies have had, we will argue, devastating consequences for economic equality, the environment, and education. For example, global inequality between the rich and the poor has increased (Jomo & Baudot, 2007), the impact of climate change on the environment will be with us for centuries (Hansen, 2009; McKibben, 2010; Orr, 2009), and educational reforms have focused on efficiency and accountability at a cost to improving learning (Hursh, 2008; Ravitch, 2010).

In spite of these failures, neoliberal economic and political policies remain dominant. Therefore, in this paper we begin with a brief description of neoliberalism and provide evidence for its harmful effects on economic equality, the environment and education. Then, given the negative consequences of neoliberalism, we suggest why neoliberalism has remained dominant. Neoliberal policies, we note, are promoted by those who are the most powerful, and who can, therefore, control public debate and present neoliberalism as both the inevitable evolution of capitalism and as a technical and apolitical response to economic and political issues. By dominating the discourse and logic regarding economic, political and environmentaldecision-making, neoliberal proponents have largely succeeded in marginalizing alternative conceptions.

We then suggest that neoliberalism can best be analysed through an approach that combines critical theory and critical geography, or what Harvey (2009) describes as ‘historical geographic materialism’ (p. 232). In particular, we want to situate communities, cities, and countries within different scales and networks; that is, no place can be understood without situating it within its spatial connections of unequal economic and power relations, and larger and smaller scalar hierarchies that include city, country, and globe.

For example, if we want to understand recent education reforms in Chicago, we need to understand how reform efforts, like Chicago’s Renaissance 2010, fits into efforts of the political and corporate elite to remake Chicago into a global city. Chicago’s education reforms need to be examined within the context of the global finance and real-estate boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s and the desire of the corporate and political elite to literally capitalize on a then expanding real-estate market to attract the more privileged classes to Chicago both as residents and tourists. The growth in centre-city condominiums, retail stores, and tourism downtown are visually reflected in the sculpture Cloud Gate (AKA ‘The Bean’) at Millennium Park (see images of Cloud Gate on-line; Hursh, 2008; Lipman, 2004; Lipman & Hursh, 2007). At the same time, the neighbourhoods of the poor and people of colour are being razed, the residents displaced, and their homes replaced by upscale, and more profitable, housing.

We then specifically relate neoliberalism to current environmental and educational policies. Environmentally, neoliberalism elevates the markets and profit above all other considerations, therefore exporting the costs of environmental damage, whether toxins in the environment or the greenhouse gases responsible for anthropocentric climate change, to be borne by others. In education, the corporate and governmental elite who value learning only in terms of its contribution to economic growth use high-stakes tests to ostensibly assess and hold accountable teachers and students and yearn to privatise education so that profits might be gained.

Finally, given how neoliberalism exacerbates inequalities, damages the environment, and undermines education, we argue that we must develop alternatives to neoliberalism. In response, we propose that we engage in the more complicated question of what kind of world we want to live in, remembering that rather than a self-perpetuating neoliberalism in which individuals are responsible only for themselves and all decisions are supposedly made by the market, we have responsibility for our relationships with one another and our built and natural environment. Harvey (2009), for example, poses the overarching question of how to organize society, and suggests that we ask ‘the questions of what kind of daily life, what kinds of relation to nature, which social relations, what production processes, and what kinds of mental conceptions and technologies will be adequate to meet human needs and desires’ (p. 247). More urgently and pointedly, given the current crisis regarding climate change and environmental sustainability, it is imperative to ask, as Orr (2002) suggests:

How do we reimagine and remake the human presence on earth in ways that work over the long haul? Such questions are the heart of what theologian Thomas Berry (1999)calls ‘the Great Work’ of our age. This effort is nothing less than the effort to harmonize the human enterprise with how the world works as a physical system and how it ought to work as a moral system. (p. 3)

These questions assume that we should have a say in the kinds of lives that we want to live, what we want to do, how we want to relate to one another and the built and natural environment around us, and the purpose of our educational institutions, including schools, cultural centres, and the media.

The rise of neoliberal economic policies and the current crisis

Neoliberal ideals and policies have largely replaced the social democratic Keynesian ideals and policies that, in the USA, were initiated by Franklin Roosevelt in the mid-1930s and endured in the USA until the late 1970s. Roosevelt implemented Keynesian economic policies in which the federal government increased spending to rebuild the country as a means of providing employment and increasing consumer demand. Roosevelt also promoted workers’ rights through unions, and improved child and family welfare by implementing social security and other regulations protecting individuals. Lastly, he signed into law regulations on banking, finance and other industries to save capitalism from its own self-destructive tendencies and reduce the frequency and extent of financial crises (Krugman, 2009).

However, because of the way Roosevelt’s social democratic policies empowered the working class and poor, the power elite resisted (Hedges, 2010) and desired a return to the unregulated markets that had previously prevailed. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, Hayek (1960) and others in the Mont Pelerin Society, and Milton Friedman (1952, 1962) at the University of Chicago, expounded on the ideals of a classical economic liberalism, committed to personal freedom from governmental interference, economic principles in which markets regulated themselves, and government limited to military defence.

The first opportunity for neoliberals to put what they preached into practice arose in 1973 when the Chilean army under General Augusto Pinochet, with US support, overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. In consolidating his power after the coup, Pinochet relied on economists from the University of Chicago, well versed in Friedman’s neoliberal theory, to work with his own economists, who together were known as ‘the Chicago Boys’. Pinochet aimed to strengthen businesses and weaken workers’ rights and welfare by reducing social spending, and privatizing education and other social services (Collins & Lear, 1995).

As in Chile, the global push for neoliberalism was a response to the democratically achieved gains by workers, women, and people of colour after World War II in which they were able to extend their personal and political rights for education, housing, health, workplace safety and the right to vote (Bowles & Gintis, 1986, pp. 57–59). With the growth in the welfare state, the number of governmental jobs increased and, with racial discrimination more difficult, more African Americans and more people of colour gained decent paying positions. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, the income gap between Whites and people of colour and between men and women decreased at a significant rate (Hacker, 1993).

But, the increasing cost of education and other social services, along with the increasing strength of labour, cut into corporate profits, and, consequently, the corporate and governmental elite, along with academic economists like ‘the Chicago Boys’, began to push neoliberal policies. Neoliberals, claiming as we shall show, that neoliberalism represented the apex of capitalism, sought to restore higher rates of profit by deregulating finance, transportation and other economic sectors, privatizing, where possible, the public sector, including penal institutions, the military and education, and disciplining workers by reducing barriers to global trade and, therefore, exporting jobs to cheaper labour markets. However, as we shall show, reducing worker protections and cutting wages undermined economic growth as measured by the Gross Domestic Product (in itself a dubious measure of economic and human welfare, see Speth, 2008; Stiglitz, Sen, & Fitoussi, 2010) and have contributed to the current economic recession.

Neoliberalism began to be institutionalized at the national level with the elections of Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While both Reagan and Thatcher are often linked to neoconservative efforts to reinstate conservative social values, it is in the establishment of neoliberal economic policies that they had their greatest impact. Reagan reduced public spending, attacked and dismantled unions, and deregulated numerous industries including airlines and communication (Harvey, 2005, pp. 23–27). Thatcher attacked unions, particularly the coal miners, dismantled or rolled back commitments to the welfare state, privatized public enterprises such as the railways and housing, reduced taxes, encouraged entrepreneurialism, and worked to create a climate favourable to free enterprise. Together, Thatcher, Reagan, and their corporate supporters aimed to restore higher rates of profit through policies emphasizing ‘the deregulation of the economy, trade liberalization, the dismantling of the public sector [such as education, health, and social welfare], and the predominance of the financial sector of the economy over production and commerce’ (Vilas, 1996, p. 16).

Globally, neoliberal policies have been imposed on developing countries through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Their policies used the ideal of free trade to open up markets to multinational corporations often to the detriment of local production, especially in agriculture (Shiva, 2000), and scaled back government spending on social services, if not privatizing them (Jomo, 2007). Consequently, in many developing countries the role of government has been diminished to guaranteeing minimum standards and welfare and creating conditions favourable for capital investment, leading to what some have described as the hollowing out of the state (Clapham, 1996). As Harvey (2006) writes:

the fundamental mission of the neoliberal state is to a create a ‘good business climate’ and therefore to optimize conditions for capital accumulation no matter what the consequences for employment or social well-being. This contrasts with the social democratic state that is committed to full employment and the optimization of the well-being of all its citizens subject to the condition of maintaining adequate and stable rates of accumulation. (p. 25)

While the primary aim of neoliberalism is to restore corporate profitability over the welfare of its citizens, proponents claim that giving free reign to corporations andunleashing individuals to pursue their own economic self-interests is the best way to ensure economic growth and, therefore, to provide for an improved standard of living for those in developed and developing countries and for the poor worldwide. However, as Jomo (2007) and Berry and Serieux (2007) write, since the rise of globalization and neoliberalism in the 1970s, economic growth has slowed and the ‘income inequality has worsened in most countries in the world in recent decades’ (Jomo, 2007, p. xix). Even in the USA, long held up as the exemplar of capitalist development, under neoliberalism household income has grown only because of the rise of two-worker households, men earn less than their fathers did, and, as measured by the Gini coefficient, income inequality has grown (The Economist, 2010).

We need to remember that countries and regions differ, and that the population of many countries, particularly those in Sub-Saharan Africa, are poorer. James Ferguson, in Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (2006), writes that:

many of the poorest African countries have put in place IMF-sponsored reforms (chiefly, opening markets and privatizing state assets) that were intended to produce a flood of capital investment. But the result for most has not been a boom in foreign investment. More often, it has been a collapse in basic institutions (including major industries as well as social infrastructure such as schools and health care) and an explosion of official illegality. (p. 35)

Jomo and von Arnim (2008) write that neoliberal globalization has had an especially negative impac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Neoliberalism, cities and education in the Global South/North
• 1. Contesting global neoliberalism and creating alternative futures
• 2. Neoliberalism, urbanism and the education economy: producing Hyderabad as a ‘global city’
• 3. Urban shrinkage as a performance of whiteness: neoliberal urban restructuring, education, and racial containment in the post-industrial, global niche city
• 4. Contesting the city: neoliberal urbanism and the cultural politics of education reform in Chicago
• 5. Porto Alegre as a counter-hegemonic global city: building globalization from below in governance and education
• 6. Mini schools: the new global city communities of Vancouver
• 7. Neoliberal governmentality, schooling and the city: conceptual and empirical notes on and from the Global South
• Index