The Experience of Neoliberal Education

Bonnie Urciuoli

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781785338632
• eBook ISBN: 9781785338649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

The college experience is increasingly positioned to demonstrate its value as a worthwhile return on investment. Specific, definable activities, such as research experience, first-year experience, and experiential learning, are marketed as delivering precise skill sets in the form of an individual educational package.

Through ethnography-based analysis, the contributors to this volume explore how these commodified "experiences" have turned students into consumers and given them the illusion that they are in control of their investment. They further reveal how the pressure to plan every move with a constant eye on a demonstrable return has supplanted traditional approaches to classroom education and profoundly altered the student experience.

CHAPTER 1
John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education in the Neoliberal Age

PAULINE TURNER STRONG

It must never be forgotten that education is not a process of packing articles in a trunk.

Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays

Experiential education initiatives over the past century are heavily indebted—though often in a general way—to John Dewey’s philosophy of education, as enunciated in his concise Experience and Education ([1938] 1998) as well as a number of other influential works. Interrogating the understanding of experience that underlies today’s experiential education and service-learning programs, as this volume does, is very much in the spirit of John Dewey, who emphasized the importance of a “sound philosophy of experience” grounding anything “worthy of the name education” (115–116). This chapter explores the conceptual origins of experiential learning as well as distortions of Dewey’s thought that have occurred over time, particularly in response to neoliberal accountability regimes, which Marilyn Strathern has aptly called audit cultures (Strathern 2000). This chapter is illustrated with examples from my own experiences as a teacher, administrator, and student, although the other contributions to this volume also provide apt illustrations. I argue that today’s experiential and service-learning initiatives would benefit greatly from tying themselves more explicitly to Dewey’s theory of experience, and evaluating their educational outcomes in ways consonant with that theory. Recent scholarship on Dewey makes this possible by offering correctives to misinterpretations of his educational philosophy and comparing his theories of education and experience to those of other influential figures, including Freire, Gadamer, Herbart, and Lyotard.

Dewey’s Theory of Experience and Education

Experience and Education, an example of Dewey’s pragmatic and experimental theory of knowledge, presents the learner’s subjective experience as both “the means and goal of education” (Dewey [1938] 1998: 113). As Dewey explained: “The philosophy in question is, to paraphrase the saying of Lincoln about democracy, one of education of, by and for experience. No one of these words, of, by, or for, names anything which is self-evident. Each of them is a challenge to discover and put into operation a principle of order and organization which follows from understanding what educative experience signifies” (19). Dewey maintained that quality education must be grounded in, and must give rise to, quality experiences, arguing against the traditionalists of his time who would structure and measure education in terms of information transmitted and skills learned—now often called, following Paolo Freire (1970), the banking concept of education. Not all experiences are equally educative, Dewey stressed. An experience, in fact, can be “mis-educative” if it “has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience” (Dewey [1938] 1998: 13). Dewey offered as examples any experience that engenders callousness, boredom, carelessness, or disintegrated thought. Quality experiences, on the other hand, are those that “live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences” and thus contribute to a “continuity of experience” (17) in which curiosity, initiative, freedom, foresight, and judgment are developed, all understood within a social context. As Dewey put it succinctly in another influential text, Democracy and Education, “The object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth” (Dewey [1916] 1980: 107). This capacity for growth is understood as “that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience” (76). All of this must be understood in a social context for, as Dewey’s adaptation of the Gettysburg Address suggests, he thought of education in our society as necessarily education for active participation in democratic life (Jenlink 2009).

Dewey’s theory of education emphasizes that all experience arises from the dialogical interaction of the principle of continuity—let us call it the familiar—with the principle of interaction—let us call it the strange.¹ In other words, one’s experience in the present involves the interaction between one’s past experiences—the familiar—and the present situation or problem, in all its contingency, unpredictability, and discontinuity with the past (English 2013). A quality learning experience is one that builds on previous experiences and creates a context for more challenging and more complex experiences in the future. As Philip W. Jackson says of Dewey: “When he says that education is a development for experience, he means that the goal of education, its ultimate payoff, is not higher scores on this or that test, nor is it increased feelings of self-esteem or the development of psychological powers of this or that kind, nor is it preparation for a future vocation. Instead, the true goal of education, Dewey wanted us to understand, is none other than richer and fuller experiencing, the ever-expanding capacity to appreciate more fully the living present” (Jackson 1998: 138–139). Education, then, is not primarily a means to an end but an end in itself: “Since growth is the characteristic of life,” Dewey wrote, “education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself” (Dewey [1916] 1980: 58). Or again, “The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education…. The object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth” (107).

Whether in the form of outdoor programs such as Outward Bound, peace education programs, study abroad programs, or service-learning, contemporary experiential education departs explicitly or implicitly from Dewey’s theory of experience. I use the term “depart” here in two senses: experiential education takes Dewey’s emphasis on experience as its point of departure, but at the same time its contemporary forms often entail a significant departure from the spirit of Dewey’s philosophy. Insofar as experiential education is an outgrowth of Dewey’s pragmatic theory of experience (Garrison and Neiman 2003), it emphasizes a student’s active experience and experimentation, coupled with reflection (English 2013) and personal transformation. As Fairfield (2009: 8) puts it, Dewey understood the learning process in terms of “the gradual formation and transformation of the self,” all within a cycle of learning in which new experiences are integrated with familiar experiences in order to form a new conceptual framework that is, in turn, transformed as students encounter unfamiliar experiences. (Fairfield usefully compares this cycle to Gadamer’s hermeneutics.)² The role of a teacher in this model of learning is to facilitate a salutary, open-ended progression of experiences and to guide the student in reflecting on experience. To the extent that this process is rationalized into predictable, measurable bits of learning, however, contemporary experiential education is a dramatic departure from Dewey’s ideas, because Dewey’s notion of experiential learning was highly individualized, depending as much on the familiar, idiosyncratic structure of experience that the student brings to learning as on the new, challenging experiences that the student encounters.

In other words, just as Dewey’s educational theories were in tension with the traditional education of his day, there is a clear tension between Dewey’s concept of learning “of, by and for experience” and many contemporary neoliberal applications of experiential education. Those of us engaged in humanities education today often find ourselves thinking and acting experientially when devising and teaching programs of study, but forced to assess learning in terms of what Lyotard calls “the mercantilization of knowledge” (Lyotard 1984: 51). In mercantile accountability regimes, as a recent review put it, “The new theoretical emphases are on statistics and the countable, on observation and testing, on the useful and on ‘what works.’ Its new watchwords are skills, competences and techniques, flexibility, independence, targets and performance indicators, qualifications and credentials, learning outcomes” (Blake et al. 2002b: 8). Apart from usefulness, flexibility and independence (which Dewey understood in quite expansive ways), these neoliberal watchwords are far from Dewey’s philosophy of learning.

Pragmatism is grossly misunderstood when it is reduced to discrete skills and immediate, measurable outcomes; for Dewey, the desired outcomes of quality educational experiences are those that result in the transformation and growth of the experiencing self. The implications for evaluating and defending experiential education programs are profound: discrete, short-term measures are highly inadequate ways to gauge the long-term growth of the experiencing self. At the same time, Dewey’s philosophy of experience points toward more satisfactory approaches to evaluation, particularly in the emphasis on the values of usefulness, flexibility, independence, and reflection that are found in both Dewey’s philosophy and in contemporary accountability regimes (Shore and Wright 2000). With respect to reflection, we should turn also to Dewey’s philosophy of aesthetic experience. In Art as Experience Dewey developed the idea that aesthetic experience is a particularly “full and intense” kind of experience, one that “keeps alive the power to experience the common world in its fullness. It does so by reducing the raw materials of that experience to matter ordered through form” (1934: 138). As intensified experience, art has the power “to perfect the power to perceive” (338) and to offer a “community of experience” (109). Connecting his theory of art to his theory of experience, Dewey wrote, “It belongs to the very character of the creative mind to reach out and seize any material that stirs it so that the value of that material may be pressed out and become the matter of a new experience” (196–7). It follows that aesthetic experience is particularly valuable in developing the capacity for growth.

In the following pages I briefly discuss two educational experiments in which I have been involved—the Free Minds Project for adult learners and the Difficult Dialogues seminars and forums for traditional freshmen—in order to suggest that Dewey’s concept of quality educational experiences points toward modes of designing and evaluating experiential educational initiatives that are far more consonant with humanistic understandings of socialization, enculturation, and agency than are the measurable outcomes and performance indicators of the neoliberal age. Just as Dewey resisted the mechanistic, objectivizing, and homogenizing tendencies of his own time, today’s proponents of experiential education should resist those tendencies in our time through developing and defending narrative and ethnographic forms of evaluation that do justice to the transformative effects of quality educational experiences.

Experiment 1: The Free Minds Project

I have been involved in developing and teaching in the Difficult Dialogues and Free Minds programs through my role as the director of the University of Texas Humanities Institute. The Free Minds Project offers adults who have faced barriers to beginning or completing a college degree the opportunity to reflect on their experiences and explore their intellectual potential through participating in a free, multidisciplinary humanities course that is taught in a community setting two evenings a week over the course of an academic year. A partnership between a research university, a community college, and a nonprofit organization (now the primary sponsor), the Free Minds Project brings together educational and social service organizations to help adults build more reflective and more fulfilling lives for themselves, their families, and their communities.

The Free Minds Project is based on Bard College’s Clemente Course in the Humanities, an initiative founded by the late sociologist Earl Shorris and recognized in 2014 with a National Humanities Medal (Cheney and Newell 2016; National Endowment for the Humanities 2014; Shorris 1997, 2000, 2013). Clemente courses bring a multidisciplinary humanities curriculum to adults living in underserved neighborhoods and in prisons, aiming to provide a space for intellectual development and critical reflection that are typically absent in these environments. Whereas most educational efforts for such populations aim to build skills directly transferable to the workplace (if they exist at all), Clemente courses seek to transform students’ experience through stepping back and considering the works of such canonical authors as Plato, Shakespeare, Frederick Douglass, Virginia Woolf, and Sandra Cisneros. These programs, the Free Minds Project included, also offer some of the social support necessary for nontraditional students to succeed, such as child care, access to social workers, and a supportive intellectual community.

Clemente courses honor the experiential knowledge that adults bring to the classroom, transforming that knowledge through opportunities for critical reflection, creative writing, and engagement with a range of classical humanities texts. A Free Minds classroom typically consists of twenty to twenty-five students, most of African American and Latino backgrounds, each of whom has a low to moderate income. Students have included minimum wage workers, government employees, veterans, first-generation Americans, retirees, the formerly homeless or incarcerated or addicted, and many single mothers. Some of these students have never set foot in a college classroom before; others have tried but not been able to achieve success in college. Some are prevented from enrolling in traditional college courses because of debt accrued during previous enrollments (Griffith 2016).

Now in its twelfth year in Austin, Texas, Free Minds reports a strong record of success in developing adult learners’ continued capacity for growth. The program’s graduates have gone on to earn associate’s and bachelor’s degrees, to receive promotions, and to become more active participants in their children’s education. A 2010 survey of Free Minds graduates found that 77 percent had enrolled in other college classes, 83 percent used skills gained in the Free Minds classroom in the workplace, and 90 percent believed the program had a positive impact on their children (Foundation Communities 2018). Several graduates sit on nonprofit boards in the community, including the advisory board of the Free Minds Project. Many alumni stay involved with Free Minds, which offers them monthly workshops and mentoring opportunities.

Nevertheless, as an anthropology and American history professor in the Free Minds Project, I have found that such measurable outcomes pale in comparison to the less quantifiable impact of the program on students’ lives. Among the Free Minds Project’s measurable goals are to improve critical thinking skills in 75 percent of students, as measured by pre- and post-class surveys and faculty evaluation in one-on-one conferences; to improve written communication skills in 75 percent of students, as measured by writing rubrics; to improve self-confidence and self-efficacy in 75 percent of students, as measured by pre- and post-class surveys; and to inspire continued college enrollment of 60 percent of students within two years of completing the program, as measured by alumni impact surveys and college and university records. The foundations and institutions that support Free Minds require these kinds of measures, good examples of the new accountabilities that Strathern (2000), Shore (2008), Wright (Shore and Wright 2000), Lampland and Starr (2008), and others have analyzed. As is the case for many quantifying practices, the focus on measurable outcomes threatens to have a distorting effect on the program. Most importantly, this focus makes most visible an aspect of the program that is not necessarily central to the mission of Free Minds: starting students on a path toward graduation from college. While continued enrollment in college and, ultimately, graduation is an ultimate goal for some students who enroll in Free Minds, many students—and the program—consider enhancing students’ subjective experience of themselves and their world as a worthy goal in itself. Moments of learning in class—such as when a student ties his own experience as a learner to that of Frederick Douglass, or writes and recites her own “This I Believe” essay (Allison and Gediman 2006)—and moments of application outside of class—such as when a student feels inspired to take her family to a theater performance or an art museum—are better understood through a qualitative analysis of experiential learning than through the metrics of audit culture.

Some Free Minds students complete a college degree, but even if they do not they leave Free Minds experiencing themselves as lifetime learners. If, as John Dewey believed, “the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth” (Dewey [1916] 1980: 107), there are many ways in which Free Minds students can continue to enlarge their capacity for growth, only one of which is inside a college classroom. Indeed, given Dewey’s emphasis in Democracy and Education on the importance of education for citizenship in a democratic society, we might argue that the participation of Free Minds’ alumni in a neighborhood association, a union, a social movement, or the Parent–Teacher Association could be an even more important indicator of the importance of Free Minds in creating a capacity for growth than college enrollment or completion. Furthermore, a continued capacity for growth can be enacted only over the long term: How do Free Minds alumni exhibit an increased capacity for growth over the course of their lifetimes, and over the lifetimes of their children? How does this continued capacity for growth affect the families and communities of alumni? Answering these questions adequately requires narrative accounts or ethnographie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Neoliberalizing Undergraduate Experience
• Chapter 1. John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education in the Neoliberal Age
• Chapter 2. Undergraduate Research in Veblen’s Vision: Idle Curiosity, Bureaucratic Accountancy, and Pecuniary Emulation in Contemporary Higher Education
• Chapter 3. Empathy as Industry: An Undergraduate Perspective on Neoliberalism and Community Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania
• Chapter 4. Dirty Work: The Carnival of Service
• Chapter 5. No Good Deed Goes Uncounted: A Reflection on College Volunteerism
• Chapter 6. From Service-Learning to Social Innovation: The Development of the Neoliberal in Experiential Learning
• Chapter 7. High Hopes and Low Impact: Obstacles in Student Research
• Chapter 8. The Experience Experts
• Chapter 9. Moral Entanglements in Service-Learning
• Chapter 10. Engineering Success: Performing Neoliberal Subjectivity through Pouring a Bottle of Water
• Chapter 11. Caught between Commodification and Audit: Concluding Thoughts on the Contradictions in U.S. Higher Education
• Index