Learning from the neo-liberal movement: towards a global justice education movement

Abstract

This commentary suggests that a countermovement for educational and social justice must learn from the dominant global neo-liberal movement and its successes in creating institutions and knowledge-making processes and networks. Local struggles for educational justice are important, but they need to be linked to a broader educational justice movement. Such a movement itself has to be seen as part of a struggle for genuine democracy.

Keywords:

• neo-liberalism
• education
• global
• social movement
• critical pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Professor Kenneth J. Saltman teaches in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies PhD program at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He is the author most recently of The Failure of Corporate School Reform (2012), The Politics of Education: A Critical Introduction (2014), and Toward a New Common School Movement (2014).

Notes

1. A number of scholars have been mapping the neo-liberal movement globally including Helen Gunter, Stephen Ball, Fazal Rizvi, Joel Spring, and Michael Apple. Christopher Whittle, a pioneer at privatising and commercialising public education in the USA and UK, announced in 2009 at the American Enterprise Institute that he envisioned a global private industry in education with concentrated ownership by a small number of very large corporations. The WTO and the World Bank are actively involved in framing education as a private industry. The paper in this special issue ‘External technical support for school improvement: critical issues from the Chilean experience’ provides an important example of the way that the earliest neo-liberal education experiment in Chile stitches together commercialization with punitive ‘accountability’ policy.