Capitalism in education makes equality and democracy impossible

Barkauskas 14 – N.J. Barkauskas, researcher and scholar studying education theory and policy, 14
("The tension between capitalism and education in a democratic society, by N.J. Barkauskas," AJE
Forum, 10-9-2014, Available Online at http://www.ajeforum.com/the-tension-between-capitalism-and-
education-in-a-democratic-society-by-n-j-barkauskas/, Accessed on 6-28-2017 //JJ)

What is often overlooked is that under a capitalist economic system it is necessary that the majority of
people will fail so that there can be any success at all; a consequence from which the educational system
does not escape.

Lastly, educationadvocates often call for systemic change that allows “all students to succeed”. Such calls
often fail to recognize that in a capitalist social system such change is literally impossible. What is often
overlooked is that under a capitalist economic system it is necessary that the majority of people will fail so that there can be any success at all;
a consequence from which the educational system does not escape. Failureof many is a necessary condition for the
success of any. Necessary failure is in direct contrast with the American values housed under
democracy (valuing everyone’s voice, enabling the success of all) and contrasts sharply with some stated goals of
educational systems (to create an informed populace). In social systems with limited resources, and especially
where money is limited, there will be competition for those resources and financial capital. A capitalist’s
purpose then is to get as much capital as possible through competition; having capital is a direct
measure of success and those who don’t have it are not successful capitalists. Competition for
resources, and success by defeating or surpassing others, is the name of the game and the game is
played just as fervently in the education systems of capitalist countries as it is in their banking sectors[3].

It’s therefore not possible for all students to be successful when they’re competing for things like class
rank, time with the teacher, or attention from their parents. Furthermore, not all schools can be good
schools when they are forced to compete for resources, space, or students. These limits are inherent to
any capitalist system. So instead of blaming teachers and educators for ‘failures’ we might do well to
consider that educational struggles don’t always come from a lack of motivation, ambition, or ability
from teacher OR students. Likewise, success is not always due to student ability, school resources, or even plain hard work. There
just might be legitimate instances where success, as determined by traditional measures, is next to impossible. Here we have the last and
biggest tension between education and capitalism in a democratic society.

Education now only serves capitalist interests and provide them with human capital,
trapping workers at the bottom of society indefinitely
Henry Giroux, Giroux received his Doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon in 1977. He then became professor
of education at Boston University from 1977 to 1983. In 1983, he became professor of education and
renowned scholar in residence at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where he also served as Director at
the Center for Education and Cultural Studies. He moved to Penn State University where he took up the
Waterbury Chair Professorship at Penn State University from 1992 to May 2004. He also served as the
Director of the Waterbury Forum in Education and Cultural Studies. He moved to McMaster University
in May 2004, where he currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public
Interest. From 2012 to 2015 he was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University. 20 10
(“Beyond Dystopian Education”, 10/1,
https://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/10_1/giroux10_1.html, accessed 6/26/17

Public education and higher education are under assault by a host of religious, economic, ideological,
and political fundamentalists. This is true of the United States, but it is also increasingly true elsewhere.
In US public schools, the most serious attack is being waged by advocates of neoliberalism whose reform
efforts focus narrowly on high-stakes testing, traditional texts, and memorization drills. At the heart of
this approach is an aggressive attempt to disinvest in public schools, replace them with charter schools,
and remove state and federal governments completely from public education in order to allow
education to be organized and administered by market-driven forces.i Left unchecked, this movement would
turn schools into “simply another corporate asset bundled in credit default swaps” and valued only for
its rate of exchange on the open market.ii At the same time as public schools face such pressures, a full-fledged assault is being waged on
higher education across North America, Australia and New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and other European countries. While the nature of the assault varies in
each country, there is a common set of assumptions and practices driving the transformation of higher education into an adjunct of corporate power and values.
The effects of the assault are not hard to discern. Universities are being defunded; tuition fees are skyrocketing; faculty salaries are shrinking as workloads are
increasing; and part-time instructors are being used as a subaltern class of migrant laborers. In addition, class sizes are ballooning; the curriculum is being
instrumentalized and stripped of liberal values; research is largely valued for its ability to produce profits; administrative staff is depleted; governance has been
handed over to paragons of corporate culture; and valuable services are being curtailed. The
neoliberal paradigm driving these attacks
on public and higher education disdains democracy and views public and higher education as a toxic
public sphere that poses a threat to corporate values, ideology, and power. Since the 1950s, colleges and universities
have been seen by many to be democratic public spheres dedicated to teaching students to think critically, take imaginative risks, learn how to be moral witnesses,
and procure the skills that enable one to connect to others in ways that strengthened the democratic polity. It is for these very reasons that higher education is
increasingly under attack by the concentrated forces of neoliberalism. Self-confident
critical citizens are viewed as abhorrent by
conservatives who remember the campus turmoil of the sixties. Citizens who take their responsibility to
democracy seriously now pose a dire threat to corporate power. Unsurprisingly, these same individuals daily
face the suspicion of the new corporate university that appears willing to conceive of faculty only as
entrepreneurs, students only as customers, and education only as a mode of training.iii Welcome to the
dystopian world of corporate education in which learning how to think, be informed by public values,
and become engaged critical citizens are viewed as a failure rather than a mark of success. Instead of producing
“a generation of leaders worthy of the challenges,”iv the dystopian mission of public and higher education is to produce robots,

technocrats, and compliant workers. There is more than a backlash at work in these assaults on public and higher education: there is a
sustained effort to dismantle education as a pillar of democracy, public values, critical thought, social responsibility, and civic courage. Put more bluntly, the
dystopian shadow that has fallen on public and higher education reveals the dark side of a
counterrevolution that bespeaks not only an unfettered mode of corporate sovereignty but the
emergence of an updated form of authoritarianism. During the Cold War, US officials never let us forget that authoritarian countries
put their intellectuals into prison. While political imprisonment is not yet pervasive in the US or other capitalist

democracies, the majority of critical intellectuals today are destined for conformity, if not poverty if they
work in the academy. Too many academics fear the threat of being fired or denied tenure for being too
critical, and an overwhelming number of them are relegated from the beginning to an intolerable state
of dire financial distress and existential impoverishment. Education within the last three decades has
diminished rapidly in its capacities to educate young people to be reflective, critical, and socially
engaged agents. Despite all attempts to degrade the value and purpose of education, the notion of education as the primary register of the larger culture
persists. Yet, under a neoliberal regime, the utopian possibilities formerly associated with public and higher

education as a public good capable of promoting social equality and supporting democracy have
become too dangerous for the apostles of neoliberalism. Critical thought and the imaginings of a better
world present a direct threat to a neoliberal paradigm in which the future must always replicate the
present in an endless circle in which capital and the identities that legitimate it merge with each other
into what might be called a dead zone. This dystopian impulse thrives on producing myriad forms of
violence—encompassing both the symbolic and the structural—as part of a broader attempt to define
education in purely instrumental, privatized, and anti-intellectual terms. It is precisely this replacement of
educated hope with an aggressive dystopian project that now characterizes the current assault on public
and higher education in various parts of the globe extending from the United States and the United Kingdom to Greece and Spain. In light of this dystopian

attempt to remove education from any notion of critique, dialogue, and empowerment, it would be an understatement to suggest that

there is something very wrong with American public and higher education. For a start, this counterrevolution
is giving rise to the commercialization of education, punitive evaluation schemes, harsh disciplinary
measures, and the ongoing deskilling of many teachers that together are reducing many excellent
educators to the debased status of technicians and security personnel. Additionally, as more and more wealth is distributed
to the richest Americans and corporations, states are drained of resources and are shifting the burden of such deficits on to public schools and other vital public
services. With 40 percent of wealth going to the top 1 percent, public services are drying up from lack of revenue and more and more young people find themselves
locked out of the dream of getting a decent education or a job, essentially robbed of any hope for the future.

The Capitalist Class oppresses the worker class through means of education
Dave Hill, Professor of Education Policy at the University of Northampton, For twenty years he was a
regional political and trade union leader. He recently completed a study for the International Labour
Organisation on the impacts of neoliberal education policy on equity, democracy and workers’ rights.
2010 (“Class, Capital and Education in this Neoliberal and Neoconservative Period”, 4/22,
http://libr.org/isc/issues/ISC23/B1%20Dave%20Hill.pdf, accessed, 6/26/17, EVH)

Neoliberal and neoconservative policies aimed at intensifying the rate of capital accumulation and extraction of surplus value comprise
an intensification of ‘class war from above’ by the capitalist class against the working class. One major aspect of
this is the fiscal policy of increasing taxes on workers and decreasing taxes on business and the rich. Of course, some people don’t like trillion dollar tax handouts to
the rich. These oppositionists have to be denigrated, scorned, and controlled! This is where neoconservative policies are important. On the one hand they persuade
the poor to vote (right-wing Republican) for a social or religious or anti abortion or homophobic or racist agenda against their own (more Left-wing, more Democrat,
or further Left) economic self-interest. The class war from above has a neoliberal, economic element. It has also embraced a
neoconservative political element to strengthen the force of the state behind it. In Andrew Gamble’s words, it is The Free Economy and the Strong State (1999), a
state strong on controlling education, strong on controlling teachers, strong on marginalizing oppositional democratic forces such as local elected democracy, trade
unions, critical educators, critical students. Moreover, neoconservatism aids in the formation of a state strong on enforcing the neoliberalization of schools and
society. Despite the horizontal and vertical cleavages within the capitalist class (Dumenil and Levy, 2004), the architects of neoliberal and neoconservative policies
know very well who they are. Nobody is denying capitalist class consciousness. They are rich. They are powerful. And they
are transnational as well as national. They exercise (contested) control over the lives of worker-laborers
and worker-subjects. If there is one class that does not lack classconsciousness, the subjective appreciation of its common interest, and its relationship
within the means of production to other social classes, it is the capitalist class. Members of the capitalist class do recognize that they

survive in dominance as a class whatever their skin colour, or dreams, or multifaceted subjectivities and
histories of hurt and triumph; they survive precisely because they do know they are a class. They have
class consciousness, they are ‘a class for themselves’ (a class with a consciousness that they are a class),
as well as a ‘class in themselves’ (a class or group of people with shared economic conditions of
existence and interests). The capitalist class does not tear itself to pieces negating or suborning its class
identity, its class awareness, it’s class power over issues of ‘race’ and gender (or, indeed, sexuality or
disability). And they govern in their own interests, not just in education ‘reform’, but also in enriching
and empowering themselves – while disempowering and impoverishing others – the (white and black
and other minority, male and female) working class.
The alternative is to view the school environment as a site of the commons— only this
disconnects schools and the market
Cody 13 - Anthony Cody, Spent 24 years working in Oakland schools, 18 of them as a science teacher at
a high-needs middle school. A National Board- certified teacher, he now leads workshops with teachers
on Project Based Learning. He is the co-founder of the Network for Public Education ("Interview with
David Bollier: Viewing Education as a Commons," Education Week - Living in Dialogue, 3-9-2013,
Available Online at http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-
dialogue/2013/03/question_1_can_you_explain.html, Accessed on 6-21-2017 //JJ)

Question 1. Can you explain what is meant by "the commons"? Economists and politicians have long assumed that there are
really only two sectors for governing things and "adding value" -- the state and the market. Markets are seen as
the vehicle for economic progress while the state deals with governance and everything else. It is becoming increasingly clear, however,

that there is another sector - the commons - that is at least as important to our lives and well being. The
commons consists of those many resources that we share - the atmosphere, water, public spaces, the
Internet, scientific knowledge, cultural works, and much more - as well as the social systems and rule-
sets that we use to manage them in fair, sustainable ways. It bears emphasizing that the commons is not
just the resource itself, but the resource plus the community and its self-organized rule-sets, norms and
enforcement of rules. In a broader sense, education and child-rearing are types of commons -- but I'll
get to that a minute. For decades, the prevailing economic wisdom was that a commons inevitably results in the over-exploitation of the resource - a
"tragedy of the commons," as popularized by biologist Garrett Hardin in a famous 1968 essay. The late Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom debunked this idea over the
course of decades. She documented how self-organized commons can be effective and durable in managing farmland, fisheries, forests, irrigation water and other
resources. It has since become clear that the commons is also behind the success of open source software, Wikipedia, academic research, blood banks and
community gardens. This just scratches the surface of the topic because over
the past decade an international movement of
commoners involved in diverse realms -- farming, fisheries, forests, water, urban spaces, software,
digital culture, community life, and other areas -- has taken root and started to expand. Much of this
activism is about defending resources that are being appropriated and commodified. Much of it is
dedicated to building new models of self-provisioning that are fair, inclusive, participatory and
sustainable. In other words, the commons is emerging as a new worldview, social ethic and political tradition that actually
has a long history, and is now being rediscovered. Question 2. How have the commons been eroded or lost in the past? One of the great

unacknowledged problems of our time is that countless commons are now being converted into
tradeable market commodities - a process that is often called "market enclosure." Enclosures enshrine
price as the ultimate measure of value, trumping more qualitative, intangible values that may be
ecological, social or long-term. For example, global investors are now seizing millions of hectares of farmland, pastures and waterways in Africa,
Asia and Latin America with the help of complicit governments. By the logic of the market, this is enormous progress because it puts "wastelands" to productive use
in the market and boosts Gross Domestic Product. But
for the commoners involved, the market takeover of common lands
is a simple act of dispossession. It also has devastating consequences for the natural environment. The
logic of enclosure takes place in many different realms. It occurs, for example, when biotech companies
patent the human genome (20% of it is now privately owned) and seeds that traditional peoples have
shared for centuries. Enclosures occur when Hollywood and publishers use copyright law to prevent the sharing of works that is essential to creativity
and culture; and when corporations, with the active collusion of government, are given free use of the public's broadcast airwaves, taxpayer-funded scientific and
pharmaceutical research, public lands and countless other resources that belong to us all. The
language of the commons is valuable
because it gives us a way to recognize the proper limits of markets - and to recognize the highly
generative powers of commons and commoners. The commons is no "tragedy"; it is, rather, a different
way of managing resources and creating value. It's time that we recognized these unheralded systems for stewarding our shared
resources and nurturing our social commitments to each other. The commons is not just a "nice thing" or a synonym for the

"common good." It is a hardy system of self-governance that can manage resources in ways that are
effective, participatory and fair -- and thus experienced as socially and politically legitimate. It's relevant to bring up the
commons because there are some nasty enclosures currently going on education. These enclosures of
public schools are generally described as "privatization," but I think that term is too anemic for describing what's going on. There
is of course a private power grab and a conversion of our shared wealth to serve market purposes. But it
is equally a dispossession. We "commoners" are forced to relinquish certain social roles and identities.
Instead of being active stewards of our public schools -- something that we must actively be involved
with and support -- enclosures force us to become "consumers" of what "the market" offers us, or to do
without. Enclosures in higher education consist of corporate research "partnerships" with universities, in which the corporations essentially commandeer the
research agenda, dictate many terms of the research and how it may be used, and leverage publicly funded resources for private, corporate purposes. It may also
consist of treating student bodies as captive cohorts to be advertised to or given educational loans at exploitative interest rates. At the K-12 levels, enclosure may
consist of the imposition of corporate-promoted educational curricula; marketing to students via sports, textbooks and student events; and educational priorities
Enclosures
that suit the market-oriented interests of corporate leaders, such as school vouchers and "competition" as a way to improve school performance.

bring with them a pathology that most markets entail, however. Their success often stems from
"externalizing" as many costs as they can onto the community, students or future generations, so that
the business enterprise can become more "efficient" and "productive." This is how markets routinely
function -- by generating externalities. It is why industry does not take adequate account of the long-
term health of nature. Enclosures of public schools are doing the same thing. They exclude those
students who are more difficult or costly to teach -- the low achievers, those with learning disabilities,
and those who may not fit in. They regard students (or their parents) as "consumers," not as co-producers and
collaborators in the educational process. Learning that cannot be measured in clear metrics (and therefore which cannot be a basis for market competition) are
regard as secondary or inconsequential. The
shared commitments of a community to each other, or the need for
inclusiveness and social equity, are not seen as important because, as in any market, we are all
"individuals." These are just a few reasons why the market paradigm is inappropriate as a regime for understanding the challenges of education and
managing public schools. It's important to note that the privateers are not operating in a vacuum. They are making headway because the schools themselves have
become bureaucratized and are not necessarily responsive to people. They are seen as offering a "consumer service," and for many frustrated parents, that is more
attractive than trying to reform city school systems that are often remote, bureaucratic and politically captured. Enclosures
can succeed only
because there is often little genuine "commoning" going on in school governance. Commoning consists
of the social practices by which commoners set their own rules and take responsibility for governance
and results. In the void of citizen engagement and responsibility, it is easier for officialdom and big
money to consolidate their power and enclose the commons of public education for their own
(corporate-minded) purposes. Dissatisfied with government? Citizenship is ineffective? Then the answer -- say privateers -- is to become a smart
consumer and privatize the schools! The only apparent choices are "the system" or "the market." I think something is conspicuously missing from this conversation:
becoming a commoner is more likely to solve the problem than anything offered up by either the market or government. I
think we need to imagine
and develop better forms of commoning for the real-life governance of public schools.