Education, Equality and Justice in the New Normal

Global Responses to the Pandemic

Inny Accioly, Donaldo Macedo, Inny Accioly, Donaldo Macedo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350225770
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350225794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Written by leading scholars and activists from Brazil, Chile, Greece, Italy, Malta, the UK, and the USA, this book shows how vitally important education is in addressing the complex social and political problems which have been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. The growing protest and demonstrations worldwide, including the Black Lives Matter and environmental movements, have served as platforms to unmask the embedded racism, sexism, classism, and discrimination which are rooted in neo-colonial forms of exploitation. People are recognizing the intensification of the genocide of black youth, indigenous peoples, peasants and traditional communities in the global ghettos. The rising level of conscientization reached through these protests and demonstrations makes it clear that critical educators must refuse the return to neoliberal "normality" after pandemic. The chapters cover the tensions and contradictions that fuel debates in education concerning social distancing, collective illness, increasing social and economic inequality and privatization reforms. The contributors argue for social and environmental justice, the importance of educators and teacher unions, the role of environmental education, the need to guarantee cultural diversity and the strengthening of ancestral cultures. The book includes chapters by Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman and Henry A. Giroux and a Foreword by Antonia Darder.

1

Moving Beyond the Slow Death of Neoliberalism to a Life-Centered Education

An Introduction

Inny Accioly and Donaldo Macedo

The chapters in this volume invite policymakers, activists, educators, school administrators, and others to consider the role of education as central to the ever-increasing and complex social problems that have been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic crisis. We deeply believe that the coronavirus pandemic and its educational and societal ramifications cannot be comprehended through an amorphous approach that reduces the danger that we face worldwide to biology and medical threats alone. The editors and the contributing authors challenge readers instead to engage in critical analyses of how multiple countries address the economic, political, biological, and educational crises in which the coronavirus became the flashpoint that unveiled how capitalism, particularly through neoliberalism and its “Godification” of the market, had been exploiting and ravaging the planet to the degree that could only lead to its eventual unsustainability. That is, what became clear is that the market-centric response arising from this savage variant of capitalism has been unable to stop the spread of the virus, failing even to “grapple with a deadly pandemic of animal origin that has killed more than a million people, infected 63 million more [so far], and thrown millions more out of work.”¹ Thus, in order to fully understand the architecture of the current pandemic and prevent future catastrophes, we need to move beyond the historical amnesia that offers selective views of reality, interpreted almost always from the dominant developed nations’ perspectives and imposed through their rigid control of education and a compliant media. Under neoliberalism, these institutions are charged primarily with domesticating the mind of citizens rather than providing the necessary critical tools that would enable them to make the necessary linkages in order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of reality. The ability to make linkages would also enable individuals to answer Amy Goodman’s question posed to Noam Chomsky in this volume: “How did the United States—the richest country in the world—become the worldwide epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, with one person dying of COVID-19 every 47 seconds?” (Goodman and Chomsky 2021: this volume, p. 15).

What we cannot deny is that market solutions to social and health problems have not been able to effectively stop the coronavirus and its subsequent ravages—ravages that have had disastrous adverse impacts on nonwhite and lower-class populations and dependent economies. From Brazil to India and the United States, socially and economically disadvantaged ethnic groups have had a higher mortality rate due to the coronavirus contagion. African Americans and Latinx communities in the United States, especially those trapped in inner-city ghettos and lower-class whites who have been sentenced to generational cycles of poverty, experience both higher rates of contagion and death and less access to quality health care and education. This is due to the grave economic inequality birthed by policies that promote market deregulation, state welfare provisions for the business class, and the hollowing out of the social contract, and systemic racism.

The spread of human misery throughout the world has been not just triggered by the coronavirus contagion, but by policymakers worldwide who have embraced Milton Friedman’s neoliberal edict that claims “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” (Friedman 1970). As this suggests, private enterprise’s main preoccupation is not only to increase shareholder profits but also to hijack the state’s social responsibility—its safeguarding of the public good—and in doing so enshrine a kind of leadership that abdicates any ethical and moral responsibility for the general public. Hence, neoliberalism of the type embraced by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan was imposed on the citizens of their respective countries and on dependent economies under the rubric of “free trade,” which “cleverly hides, or seeks to cloud over, an intensified new edition of that fearful evil that is historical capitalism, even if the new edition is somewhat modified in the relation to the past versions” (Freire 1998: 114).

In other words, while we are not living in the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons such as the Rockefellers, Carnegie Mellon, and other members of the cabal whose private wealth increased in proportion to their unfettered and ruthless business practices, the absence of an ethical and moral compass in the neoliberal economic framework that has enabled the world’s richest people, in some instances, to quintuple their fortune. This continued during a global pandemic, while the poor lower classes, and particularly nonwhites, scrambled to not go hungry or avoid eviction so as to adhere to policymakers’ mandate to avoid the coronavirus contagion by sheltering in. Consider the obscene increase of personal wealth during the pandemic exemplified by Elon Musk, the owner of the Tesla car company and SpaceX enterprise, who “has quintupled his net worth since January [2020] . . . adding 132 billion to his wealth and vaulting him to the No.2 spot among the world’s richest with a fortune of about $159 billion.”² The real difference between the old Gilded Age and the New Gilded Age ushered in by neoliberalism is that the new billionaire class is more numerous and has exceedingly more political power. As blatantly stated by Elon Musk himself, when questioned about the United States’ long history of exacting coups d’état in foreign democratic elections that are not in line with US foreign policy goals, he irreverently replied: “we will coup whoever we want. Deal with it.”³

The Slow Death under Neoliberalism

The pandemic emerged in the midst of the slow death of the social contract which was brought on by neoliberal laissez faire approaches to government which, since the 1970s, have led inexorably to increasing deregulation, massive tax cuts for billionaires, and the pauperization of the lower classes. Hence, we need to situate the analysis of the current pandemic within a more comprehensive view of the intersecting factors that gave rise to the coronavirus pandemic in the first place, and how these factors interacted to produce the political context that has propelled the worldwide rise of the ultra-conservative right and its lethal racism (in Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, among other countries). The widening of the wealth inequality gap had, in fact, triggered a wave of street protests that preceded the pandemic, and notably a labor dispute in France that paralyzed the country. In most developed nations and developing countries such as Brazil, draconian cuts to education and health-care services, and divestment in housing, have led the world to unprecedented turmoil, particularly when austerity measures dictated by the world’s oligarch class and their governing managers have been implemented. As Amy Goodman and Noam Chomsky make abundantly clear in their contribution to this volume, we must avoid the fragmentation of interconnected factors so as to comprehend the inevitable linkages between weak environmental policies, foreign policies, the imperative of profit maximization, and the pandemic. The making of linkages by policymakers, educators, and health-care workers is necessary to effectively address the coronavirus pandemic. Health-care policy cannot be conceived in a silo, as it is intertwined with other policies, including US foreign policy, as Chomsky points out in his answer to Goodman who asked what would happen if President Donald Trump were to be reelected:

[i]t means that the policies of the past four years, which have been extremely destructive to the American population, to the world, will be continued and probably accelerated. What this is going to mean for health is bad enough. It will get worse. What this means for the environment or the threat of nuclear war, which no one is talking about but is extremely serious, is indescribable. (Goodman and Chomsky 2021: this volume, p. 15)

Chomsky’s insightful analysis indicates that the future of humanity is not only linked to the coronavirus pandemic, but rests on the sustainability of the planet itself. For example, a “2015 study by Karesh and his colleagues found that land-use changes like deforestation, urban sprawl, and road building are the leading drivers of pathogen spillover from wildlife to humans.”⁴ The eruption of the coronavirus is not the first pandemic to be experienced within the last century (think of Ebola, Zika, yellow fever, among others), neither will it be the last one, unless policymakers worldwide radically shift paradigms from one in which “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” to one in which the political goal is to reverse the atrocities of neoliberal austerity measures and the shifting of wealth from the middle- and lower-class populace to the oligarch class, as Trump successfully did during his presidency.

Instead of expanding the economic inequality which has had a disastrous impact on both the health-care and the educational system, the paradigm reversal must also fight for the right to the basic elements necessary to sustain livelihood with dignity—a right that has been historically denied to a very large segment of world population, especially nonwhite lower-class communities, women, and LGBT people from countries that are considered underdeveloped as well as indigenous peoples. With respect to the latter, the negation of the right to survival is coupled with the erasure of their history, which can be understood also as an attack on biodiversity, since indigenous communities the world over play important roles in preserving diverse species and ecosystems. As pointed out by Katu, Sánchez, and Camargo in this volume, we are experiencing an “ecogenethnocide” (Katu, Sánchez and Camargo 2021).

Western policymakers need to comprehend that indigenous struggles for land and territory—which often go against the interests of agribusiness and mining—have aimed to prevent capitalist greed from leading humanity to the social, environmental, and climatic collapse we are experiencing now under the coronavirus pandemic. Take, for instance, the manifesto of the Yanomami and Ye’kwana peoples from Brazil:

Hey, look at me. We see you. We tried to show you. You never bothered to learn our language. You were always looking down. We’ve been warning you since the beginning. The land is alive. This land can’t be owned. This land is us, all of us. You wanted the stones, the gold, your shiny things, titles, flags, profits. You called that progress. We tried to teach you. But you’ve always been so greedy, too primitive, too savage to understand. Now you still bring curses over the Yanomami: illnesses. And once again, we are dying because of it and all indigenous land is being turned into ashes and mud. Five centuries. You never looked up to discover what we were holding in place: the sky itself. Your cities can see it. Your crops can see it. Your kids can see it. We can see it in your lungs. Take a deep breath, open your eyes and look up. Can you finally see it?⁵

According to the Yanomami tradition, “the falling sky” would be the image to describe the present time, and humanity is not free from suffering future successive pandemics. Scientific analyses of the dynamics of epidemics are cautioning against the wholesale commodification of nature, as they relate the increased occurrence of viruses to the global food production chain, the growing genetic monocultures of animals, and the profitability of multinational corporations, which carry out intensive exploitation of natural resources and land grabs extending into the last of primary forests worldwide. Simply put, “the functional diversity and complexity these huge tracts of land represent are being streamlined in such a way that previously boxed-in pathogens are spilling over into local livestock and human communities.”⁶

Coupled with this alarming situation are larger population sizes and densities, the deprivation of the living conditions of the poor, overcrowded public transportation systems, the destruction of public health systems and their subsequent privatization, increasingly intensive workloads, and the ever-increasing defanging of labor rights. Such factors contribute to depressing the biological and the political immune response, and facilitate greater rates of transmission and mortality of the viruses, especially among the most marginalized, as the coronavirus has so abundantly demonstrated. Thus, we should not be at all surprised that the nonwhite lower-class populace throughout the world has suffered the most under the coronavirus contagion.

Even though there is a growing concern among scientists about global warming (now called euphemistically climate change), the neoliberal rationality that prioritizes profit over global sustainability continues its attempt to make people believe that the high technological advances so far achieved by humanity seem natural. This ideological naturalization process is always used for the benefit of the minority ruling class, while the rest of the world’s population, particularly individuals concentrated in poor countries, are subjected to historical exploitation in order to satiate capitalism’s unparalleled greed. Indeed, neoliberalism is not satisfied with extracting profit from labor alone, but justifies and accelerates a neocolonial framework designed to exploit, devalue, and dehumanize the majority of the oppressed worldwide. For this reason, it behooves those who consider themselves agents of change at this current global crossroads to engage in what Henry Giroux and Ourania Filippakou, in their chapter, call “coronavirus pedagogy”—an engagement that provides educators, activists, health-care workers, and others with the necessary critical tools to understand what the pandemic can teach us:

The pandemic has made clear that market mechanisms cannot address the depth and scope of the current crisis. The failure of neoliberalism not only reveals a profound sense of despair and moral void at the heart of casino capitalism, but also makes clear that the spell of neoliberalism is broken and as such is in the midst of a legitimation crisis. The coronavirus pandemic has made clear that the neoliberal notion that all problems are a matter of individual responsibility and that each of us are defined exclusively by our self-interest has completely broken down, as the effects of neoliberalism’s failure to deal with the pandemic unfold in shortages in crucial medical equipment, lack of testing, and failed public health services, largely due to austerity measures. (Giroux and Filippakou 2021: this volume, p. 31)

Rather than raising concerns that matter in times of the coronavirus pandemic, neoliberal apologists for market solutions go to extreme delusional lengths to make unreality seem normal. For example, the Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, perversely argues that the lack of access to sanitation systems for millions of Brazilians should be viewed favorably to the degree that it strengthens their immunity to the coronavirus; allegedly, the poor and the homeless develop antibodies to every virus, so “they never catch anything. You see some bloke jumping into the sewage, he gets out, has a dive, right? And nothing happens to him.”⁷

Far from slowing the neoliberal onslaught, growing awareness of the fact that 2 billion people now live in nations plagued by water problems, and the prediction that around two-thirds of the world could face water shortages in four years, fomented the greed of the stock market speculators who, in early December 2020, targeted agribusiness to introduce water as a traded commodity on Wall Street Market while most of the world was experiencing a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic.⁸

The terrifying implications of the neoliberal premise that still guides many body politics worldwide—the premise stated by President Ronald Reagan in his inaugural address in 1981 that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem”⁹ —were exposed by the pandemic and the failures of most states to protect their people. Even a key institution of neoliberalism, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), now recommends that, in 2021, economies should “resist tightening fiscal policy too early and instead ensure continued support for health care, individuals, and firms. In economies constrained in their ability to spend, a reprioritization of spending may be warranted to protect the most vulnerable.”¹⁰ However, it is not possible to say categorically that we are foreseeing the end of neoliberalism. What we can scientifically document is that the coronavirus pandemic has unveiled neoliberalism’s total failure to support life on this planet. Even before its fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Moving Beyond the Slow Death of Neoliberalism to a Life-Centered Education: An Introduction
• 2 Chomsky on Trump’s Disastrous Coronavirus Response, Bernie Sanders, and What Gives Him Hope
• 3 Militarization in a Time of Pandemic Crisis
• 4 The “New Normal” in Education Is Ultra-Neoliberal: In Defense of the Strategy that Breaks with the Time Continuum
• 5 Xenophobic Europe: Racist Policy toward Refugees
• 6 Coronavirus Pandemic and the “Refoulement” of Refugees and Asylum Seekers
• 7 Neoliberal Recrudescence versus Radical Transformation of the Reality in Italy: What and Why Must We Learn from the Coronavirus Pandemic?
• 8 The Lost Generation? Educational Contingency in Viral Times: Malta and Beyond
• 9 Lessons from Teacher Organizing: Disputing the Meaning of Teaching and Teachers’ Work During the Coronavirus Pandemic in Chile
• 10 Environmental Education: For a Critical Renovation alongside the Traditional Peoples
• 11 Resisting and Re-Existing on Earth: Politics for Hope and “Buen Vivir”
• Afterword
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright