1
Capitalism and Global Education Reform
Steven J. Klees
Introduction
Capitalism and education have been intertwined for a long time. Mass schooling developed within a capitalist world system. While the dominant discourse saw mass schooling mainly as a force for progress and development, revisionist historians pointed to how education served capitalist ends by maintaining stratification and inequality (Katz, 2001; Spring, 1973). The 1970s saw a slew of studies that elaborated and documented how education was too often reproductive of a very unequal social order (Bowles & Gintis, 1977; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Carnoy, 1974). With the onset of neoliberal capitalism in the 1980s and subsequent years, many studies have examined the problematic nature of associated educational reforms (Apple, 2006; Bale & Knopp, 2012; Hill & Kumar, 2009).
In the modern postâWorld War II era with increasing forces of globalization, educational reforms have traveled around the world. There is a large research literature on policy borrowing in education (SteinerâKhamsi & Waldow, 2012). In the 1960s and 1970s, the flow of reforms was characterized by considerable diversity and idiosyncratic and local differences. Starting in the 1980s, however, global education reform has become much more uniform. The Global Education Reform Movement, or GERM, as Pasi Sahlberg has called it, has given us a oneâsizeâfitsâall set of education policies for the world â narrow versions of accountability, excessive testing, an ideology of competition and choice, and increased reliance on business and the private sector (Sahlberg, 2015; Verger, Novelli, & Altinyelken, 2012).
This chapter reflects on some aspects of this history, focusing mainly on the neoliberal era. It begins by looking at an earlier period which established two underlying refrains of the neoliberal era: schools are failures and it is the fault of the teachers. This is followed by looking at the dominant discourses used to support these and other capitalist themes. Next, it examines two of the chief purveyors of these discourses and reforms: US foundations and the World Bank. Then, one of the main neoliberal reforms posed is considered: the privatization of education and other social services. This leads to the fundamental issue of what is wrong with capitalism. To conclude, we look briefly at what might be done, both about capitalism and about education.
Schools Are Failures and Teachers Are to Blame
Immediately following World War II, in the US and elsewhere, there was often a sense of optimism about modernization and development in general and about the role of schools in particular. Warâtorn countries could recover and newly independent nations could progress without having to repeat the long, slow transformation of the industrialized world. Education would be a great contributor to rapid progress everywhere.
As early as the 1960s, there was already disillusionment with the lack of rapid progress in both developed and developing nations.1 In education, in the US this was reinforced by the Coleman Report (Coleman et al., 1966), which collected and analyzed nationwide data, concluding that student achievement was primarily determined by family background, not school resources. In the 1970s, this was seconded by another major study by Jencks et al. (1975), which reported the lack of impact of education on income and employment as well as on student achievement. Despite significant criticisms of both studies and their conclusions, they have been used to this day to support a more tempered and pessimistic view of the potential of schooling to effect change.
This tempered view of the impact of schooling has coâexisted with a call for sweeping reform of education as a way to improve both the achievement and life chances of children. This was very much evident in the 1983 US federal governmentâsponsored report, A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). The report ushered in the attack on teachers and schools that has characterized the neoliberal era, and not just in the US. A Nation at Risk argued that the US was lagging behind other economies in the early 1980s, most notably Japan, and that the culprit was our educational system. The opening lines of the report said:
As one wag said at the time, it was a repeat of Sputnikâs instigation of educational reform in the 1950s to compete with the Soviet Union â but, instead, it was as if Japan had launched a Toyota into orbit and the US schools once again were blamed for falling short. Of course, if the US educational system was in any way to blame for poor economic performance, perhaps the focus should have been on the nationâs business schools where shortârun profits were emphasized over longârun performance.
This mixture of critique of public schools and attack on teachers has been characteristic of the neoliberal era, not just in the US, but worldwide. I do not mean to single out the Coleman Report and A Nation at Risk as the cause of this critique and attack, although they were influential. More accurately, I see them as harbingers of changing times. Globally, they were reflections of a number of underlying dominant discourses.
Dominant Discourses
Even in todayâs neoliberal era, it is recognized that capitalism is faced with significant problems, what some have called the âtriple challengeâ: job creation, poverty elimination, and inequality reduction (Motala & Vally, 2014).2 The dominant response to these problems has given us one principal answer to all three problems: the lack of individual skills. This response has been embedded in a number of intersecting and overlapping global discourses.
The mismatch discourse goes back at least to the 1950s, and probably long before that. In it, education has been blamed for not supplying the skills business needs, that is, education is blamed for the mismatch between what education produces and what business wants. Unemployment, in general, is put at educationâs door, more broadly arguing that education is not teaching what the economy needs. It is, unfortunately, true that many children and youth around the world leave school without the basic skills necessary for life and work. But the mismatch discourse is usually less about basic skills and more about vocational skills. The argument, while superficially plausible, is not true for at least two reasons. First, vocational skills, which are often contextâspecific, are generally best taught on the job. Second and, fundamentally, unemployment is not a worker supply problem but a structural problem of capitalism. There are three or more billion unâ or underâemployed people on this planet, not because they donât have the right skills but because full employment is neither a feature nor a goal of capitalism.
Underlying this mismatch/skills discourse is the human capital discourse (Klees, 2016a). In the 1950s and earlier, the neoclassical economics framework that underpins capitalist ideology and practice could not explain labor. While the overall neoclassical framework was embodied in mathematical models of a fictitious story of supply and demand by small producers and consumers, it was not clear how to apply that to issues of labor, work, and employment. Instead, in that era, labor economics was more sociological and based on the real world, trying to understand institutions like unions and large companies, and phenomena like strikes, collective bargaining, and public policy. The advent of human capital theory in ...
