Language, Education and Neoliberalism

Critical Studies in Sociolinguistics

Mi-Cha Flubacher, Alfonso Del Percio, Mi-Cha Flubacher, Alfonso Del Percio

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783098705
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This edited volume presents an empirical accountof how neoliberal ideas are adopted on the ground by different actors in different educational settings, from bilingual education in the US, to migrant work programmes in Italy, to minority language teaching in Mexico. It examines language and education as objects of neoliberalization and as powerful tools and sites through whichideological principles underpinning neoliberalsocieties and economies are (re)produced and maintained (and with that, inequality and exclusion). This book aims to produce a complex understanding of how neoliberal rationalities are articulated within locally anchored and historical regimes of knowledge on language, education and society.

1Language, Education and Neoliberalism

Alfonso Del Percio and Mi-Cha Flubacher

Introduction

On May 3, 1981, The Sunday Times published an exclusive interview with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in which she was asked to elaborate on the measures taken by her cabinet to counter the economic recession. Competitiveness, she argued, was the key to economic recovery and job creation. To take advantage of expanding world trade, Thatcher noted, national industries needed to boost productivity and become more flexible. Then, it would be important to appraise and pay labor based on output. Moreover, workers should be liberated from the unionist structures and their feelings of loyalty to their employers fostered, while their cooperation with, and sense of responsibility to, their own companies should be promoted. Instead of blaming the government for increasing unemployment rates, Thatcher claimed that individuals needed to make the best of what technological change and industrial restructuration had to offer. She made an argument for a more effective and less monopolistic and bureaucratic state apparatus capable of supporting the British industry in transforming into a flourishing, efficient state able to compete with any other company across the globe. ‘Economics’, she concluded, ‘are [just] the method. The object is to change the heart and soul of the nation’ (Butt, 1981).

Language and education played a major role in the societal transformations that the British prime minister had in mind. In order to get at the ‘heart and soul of the nation’, i.e. to promote an ideological reorientation of the British public and to change people’s attitudes and behaviors, Thatcher launched educational reforms that would produce the type of self-responsible, flexible and productive citizens needed for economic recovery. Pupils, especially, had to make headway in mathematics and science while also improving their English skills – i.e. in written and spoken English as well as in knowledge of literature. British schoolchildren should learn to articulate well, to give their thoughts and views appropriate expression, to develop the specific communicative qualities that would make them desirable for employment in local businesses and industries and, finally, to prepare themselves for technological change (Keay, 1987). Thatcher’s educational reform also encompassed a redefinition of the privileges traditionally enjoyed by the ‘educational establishment’ in terms of unionism, salaries, training and performance assessment as well as the application of market logics to every domain of Britain’s educational apparatus (Edwards, 1989; Wilby, 2013).

The social and economic changes promoted by Thatcher were informed by neoliberalism, a political economic philosophy developed and promoted by a ‘thought collective’ that has been traced by historians to the networks of intellectuals in Europe and North America after World War I (Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009). These intellectuals aimed to oppose the rising tide of collectivism, state-centered planning, and socialism that, in their view, had caused the Great War (Lemke, 2001). In order to counter the dominance of Keynesian politics and to avoid the dangers of alternative paradigms propagated by the Soviet Union, this group of intellectuals argued for the institutionalization of neoliberalism, i.e. they envisioned a society based on a political economic philosophy that preserves individual freedom through the protection of private property and that posits a competitive market as the key logic underpinning every domain of social life (Plehwe, 2009). Indeed, private property was considered the prerequisite for decentralized power and individual freedom. Freedom of choice – on the part of the producer, worker and consumer but also in terms of every individual’s capacity to choose and plan their own lives independently – was therefore also seen as a source of democracy and an imperative for the efficient and satisfactory production of goods and services. Moreover, proponents of neoliberalism believed a stable and predictable legal and institutional state apparatus, i.e. the ‘rule of law’ (cf. von Hayek, 1944), constitutes an integral component in ensuring an effective competitive order (Ganti, 2014; Lemke, 2001; Plehwe, 2009). If these intellectuals shared classical liberalism’s belief in the regulatory forces of the market, one of the main ways their philosophy differed from the older ideology was the assumption that a ‘good’ and ‘just’ society does not occur naturally, but instead requires an organized political effort (Rose & Miller, 2008), i.e. a redefined mode of governmentality that – by extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social actions – reorganizes the relationship between the state, capital, property and individuals and that has as its main goal the maintenance of ‘freedom’ and competition (Brown, 2015).

Thatcher was not the only politician influenced by neoliberal philosophy. Neoliberal ideas are believed to be at the root of several reform agendas that, with the support of persuasive economic advisors as well as bastions of neoliberalism such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or the World Trade Organization (WTO), have been implemented since the late 1970s by various governments around the world (Harvey, 2005). For instance, neoliberalism has been argued to be the main motor in propelling the transition from a so-called ‘socialist economy’ to a ‘market economy’ (e.g. in Eastern Europe, South America and Asia) (Hemment, 2012; Kalb, 2009; Musaraj, 2011) and has also contributed to reforms of education systems in a variety of national contexts. In turn, these education reforms were put in place by neoliberal governments to cope with economic recessions, inflation and unemployment (Dunk, 2002; Morgen, 2001). Neoliberal ideas were furthermore implemented to fight the causes and effects of various financial crises (Mercille & Murphy, 2015; Streeck, 2013) and to manage societal demands for social justice, cultural and economic revitalization as well as for empowerment and redistribution (Berrey, 2015; Muehlmann, 2009). Finally, investments in neoliberalism have also been enacted by non-governmental organizations, public institutions and stakeholders in civil society who have recognized in neoliberal ideas a powerful mode of thinking that facilitates access to forms of capital such as visibility, prestige and recognition and that, in certain cases, has even opened the door for challenging positions of marginality and systems of exclusion (Kamat, 2004).

Studying Neoliberalism

Since the end of the 1990s, neoliberalism has represented one of the core themes of social scientific research around the world. Scholars from different fields and disciplines have employed the concept to respond to the social and political need to better understand the rapid changes that, in recent decades, have affected individuals and societies in many countries and in various political contexts. Yet, and despite its tremendous popularity in explaining the push and pull factors of a transforming world, neoliberalism as a concept seems to mean different things to different scholars; as a result, research on neoliberalism has taken many different directions (Allan & McElhinny, 2017; Chun, 2016; Ganti, 2014; Ong, 2006; cf. the discussion by McGroarty, this volume).

When surveying the body of work that references neoliberalism, Ganti (2014), for instance, identifies four major lines of investigation. First, neoliberalism is viewed as a set of economic reform policies that are concerned with the deregulation of the economy, trade and industry as well as with the privatization of state-owned assets (Harvey, 2005). Second, neoliberalism is seen as an economic development model that defines different roles for labor, capital and the state with powerful economic, social and political repercussions (Boas & Gans-Morse, 2009). Third, the concept is construed as a discourse, or an ideology, that values market exchange as an ethic in itself and that informs the choices and actions of individual, state and corporate actors (Bourdieu, 1984, 1998; Treanor, 2005). Fourth, neoliberalism is regarded as a technology of governance that extends and disseminates market values to all institutions and social activities, and that influences individual conduct by interpellating each member of society as an entrepreneurial self in every sphere of life (Brown, 2014; Foucault, 1980; Gershon, 2011; Rose & Miller, 2010).

By engaging with and responding to this critical scholarship of neoliberalism, this edited volume aims to produce an empirically grounded account of the ways in which neoliberal ideas – as a mobile, transnationally circulating logic or body of knowledge (Ong, 2006) – are selectively adopted on the ground by different actors in different educational settings and national contexts. It furthermore examines how these ideas affect organizational structures, actions, processes and individual behavior, and demonstrates how they challenge (or sometimes reproduce) the dynamics of inequality and exclusion.

This book focuses on language and education, as both factors play a crucial role in forms of change that people and institutions want to induce when they invest in, implement and enact neoliberal ideas. At issue is an examination of language and education both as objects of neoliberalization and as powerful tools and sites through which neoliberal societies and economies are (re)produced and maintained. The overall aim of the publication is to take into account changes and continuities in how neoliberal modes of reasoning conceptualize, invest in and govern language and multilingual selves. Consequently, this volume aims to produce a complex understanding of how neoliberal rationalities are articulated within locally anchored and historical regimes of knowledge on language, education and society. In addition to Foucault’s (1977, cf. also Martin Rojo, 2016) understanding of knowledge formation as productive and, at the same time, constraining, this book discusses the multiple, disparate and sometimes contradictory social and political tactics, strategies and projects that neoliberal ideas serve. It also presents an empirical analysis of how neoliberal thinking influences the unequal access people have to valued resources and how it affects the maintenance (or contestation) of legitimacies, inequalities and relations of domination.

The Resignification of Language, Education and the Self

This edited volume unites 10 original contributions in the field of language, education and neoliberalism that document a range of educational sites in different national and regional contexts (Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Switzerland, the UK and the US). The chapters span governmental, non-governmental and corporate settings, secondary schools, vocational education, higher education and corporate education service providers. Despite using different terms to designate neoliberalism – for some, neoliberalism is an ‘ideology’, an ‘order’ or a ‘discourse’ while others prefer to call it ‘politics’ or a ‘policy’ and still others call it a ‘logic’, a ‘turn’, a ‘philosophy’, a ‘force’ or, as in this introduction, a ‘rationale’, a set of ‘ideas’, a ‘theory’ or a ‘mode of governmentality’ – that stand for different epistemological lines of thinking about and discussing neoliberalism (for a discussion of the different approaches to neoliberalism adopted in this volume cf. McGroarty, this volume), the various contributions in this book share an interest in the multiple circumstances under which neoliberal rationales are tied to educational apparatuses and that therefore affect the way people make sense of, and invest in, language and multilingualism.

The resignification of education

Some of the activities and practices documented in the chapters intersect with current restructuring efforts in education that are expressed via processes of the marketization and internationalization of higher education, via changing modes of governmentality of professional routines and practices of language instruction and via the commodification of language and multilingualism. Other contributions focus on how the neoliberalization of language and education correlates to histories of nationalism, imperialism and (post)coloniality as well as to histories of political activism and social mobility, while also demonstrating how language and education become entrenched in processes of disciplining and regulating the multilingual self.

From an analytical standpoint, the authors of the various contributions explore the empirically observable processes through which neoliberal ideas affect language and education. This focus involves locating the documented investments in, and effects of, neoliberalism in specific circumstances, agendas and strategies that are enacted by specific persons or institutional stakeholders occupying unequally valued positions in society. Addressing the processual nature of neoliberalism also implies challenging perhaps too-readily made assumptions about the status of neoliberalism in current societies and its inevitable colonization of language and education. Moreover, this approach involves a commitment to a nuanced account of the complex and sometimes unexpected links between language, education and neoliberalism on the one hand and, on the other, the consequences that neoliberal rationales have on freedom, equality and emancipation.

One of the processes carefully documented in the different chapters in this volume concerns the ways in which neoliberal rationales have been employed in different national contexts to govern, organize and justify the reform of educational settings according to maxims of competitiveness, efficiency and profitability. Along the lines of critical scholarship in applied linguistics (Block et al., 2012; Holborow, 2015) and linguistic anthropology (Allan & McElhinny, 2017; Urciuoli, 2009) but also in the sociology of education (Peters et al., 2009; Saunders, 2010; Wilkins, 2010), authors in this volume have noted that educational institutions located in varying national contexts have become increasingly subjected to processes of internationalization, privatization and financialization, exposed to the logics of the free market and to the commodification of their services (Gao, this volume), and regulated by a so-called audit culture that imposes a logic of numbers and control on every activity (Hadley, this volume).

These changes have brought about not only a precarization of labor for employees in education, including teachers, curriculum coordinators and administrators who are asked to produce and guarantee quality and excellence under increasingly unstable and fluctuating work conditions (Luke, this volume). The neoliberalization of education has also raised issues about who (and under which conditions) can gain access to education. In certain cases, this has led to a de-responsibilization of the state for education (Zimmermann & Flubacher, this volume).

Neoliberal education reforms furthermore affect the objectives and structures of educational programs. The authors in this book argue that educational institutions – while intrinsically dedicated to the creation of equality and pr...