Katharyne Mitchell’s book Making Workers looks at the social and economic influences on school systems. In arguing that schooling reflects the imperatives of the economy, she tills ground broken by Bowles and Gintis decades ago. But her focus is school systems in an era of neoliberalism - in which global economic forces dominate.
The line taken by Mitchell, and earlier by Bowles and Gintis, is that school systems tend to be ineluctably brought into line to serve the needs of capitalism (although she does flesh out some case studies of resistance to what are otherwise seen as inexorable and irresistible forces).
The “correspondence” between economy and education isn’t total: we are inured to indictments of schools’ failure to equip workers with the right kinds of oven-ready skills. In response, we remind ourselves of the broader purpose of education - to prepare critical, creative individuals able to function as more than simply well-disciplined workers.
The rallying cry against instrumentalism is that of a liberal education. But Mitchell shows us that the ideological underpinnings of our economy are also “liberal” - or at least neoliberal. Strangely, both sides claim inspiration from the same philosophical spring.
A brace of new books invites us to look more critically at what “liberalism” has left us with. In The Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla asserts that the very success of liberalism (defined as a progressive set of ideas rather than a political party) has created its own crisis. The growth of identity politics, reflecting an overemphasis on individualism, has resulted, he says, in a hollowing out of society. Somewhere along the line, he says, we lost a sense of community cohesion, identity, relationships and responsibilities.
Various trends in education have carried this “liberalising” agenda forward, including personalised pathways, early specialisation, trigger warnings, no-platforming policies and fluid gender identification. The empowerment of pupils as rights-bearing individuals would appear to sit in opposition to another set of trends: top-down control of schools and a narrowing of education’s purpose. But as Patrick Deneen argues in Why Liberalism Failed, both individualism and the centralised state have grown in tandem. Indeed, in the UK, both flourished willy-nilly under Blair, Thatcher and their ideological heirs.
On this view, other apparent contradictions turn out to be two sides of the same coin. It suits the purposes of neoliberalism for subjects to identify and assert themselves as atomised individuals swimming in a sea of “choices”, as long as they know their ultimate place in the economy. The liberal focus on individual rights to assert identity (through mode of learning, choice of pathway, gender) is certainly no threat to free market, neoliberal ideology and economy.
Schools are fractals of society, and diversity is a welcome part of that, but we should contest the corrosion that comes from seeing any society or community as an aggregation of autarkic individuals, free to choose their personal but not their economic identities. The other side of the coin of individual freedom is not dog eating neoliberal dog, it is the idea that individuals do not exist in isolation. Schools perform a vital role in promoting some of the more endangered liberal values.
Kevin Stannard is director of innovation and learning at the Girls’ Day School Trust. He tweets @KevinStannard1
