Education and "The Market"

As a lot of the other blogs are ably tackling the questions of literacy and ideology in this week's readings, I thought I would use mine to discuss something that came up in Gee's breakdown of the recent history of education. In particular, I wanted to talk about Gee's discussion of the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980's and the "market-driven approach" to education that resulted (27). He discussed how the purpose of education became churning out knowledge workers, technical workers, and service workers in order to satisfy a capitalistic economic system. He correlates this drive with the resultant emphasis on standardized testing and curricula and the stratification of school systems, with schools in privileged communities getting access to resources and an "elite" education and an emphasis in poorer communities on learning "the basics" (30).

For me, this called to mind how this market-driven approach manifests itself everywhere, even in practices within ISU and our department in specific. I've often heard that the way to justify particular elements of our curriculum is to tie them in some way to our students "professionalization" or to imply that the skills they are learning in our English classes will help them be more effective workers in other disciplines. While I don't think there's anything wrong with tying our educational practices to our students' future careers (as it would be nice for them to leave school and get jobs to ensure their survival), I always bristle a little at the notion that our job is to discipline students to participate more effectively in the capitalist system. I think the particular problem is that instead of talking about how to empower our students to challenge the status quo, how to make our students better critical thinkers, better problem-solvers in their interpersonal relationships, or even kinder, more altruistic human beings, there is an implicit institutional mandate to focus on how to make them better workers. It's not the kind of thinking that would be present in our university mission statement, but I hear it discussed all the time, even as a graduate student and I have to assume it is discussed even more often by faculty and the administration.