Open Society

Not to be confused with 20th-century social progressivism, neoliberalism is a political and economic model that "intends to remove the buffer of social welfare as a governmental function in the belief that the market operates most efficiently and effectively without regulation" (Lakes & Carter, 2011, p. 107). On the surface, laissez-faire economic structures have little to do with education. However, its associated values, discourses, and policies have had such an effect on education, especially the humanities, some deem it a full-blown crisis. These effects are summarized in Lakes's and Carter's (2011) "Neoliberalism and Education: An Introduction".In the neoliberal risk society, young people have to "chase credentials" (Jackson and Bisset 2005), 196) to gain security in future education or workplaces. Failure to achieve is deemed one's own fault, and "human beings are made accountable for their predicaments" (Wilson, 2007 p. 97). Anxieties are heightened by the rapid changes in neoliberal policies such as job outsourcing, corporate downsizing, and international trade agreements that benefit only a few. Faced with choices about educating their children in a political environment, parents are often uninformed, misinformed, and fearful--fueled by media speculation about failing schools, incompetent teachers, and school violence. Under pressure, parents are easily attracted to schemes that appear to satisfy multiple objectives, such as discipline, protection, and greater academic achievement.Some critics go even farther, claiming "Neoliberalism encourages... suppressing teaching of critical thought that would challenge the rule of capital and keeping learners compliant while at the same time warranting that educational spaces maintain the ideological and economic reproduction that benefits the ruling class" (Oladi, 2013). The Nation's interview with Noam Chomsky explores the roots of neoliberalism and details why he believes it to be a dehumanizing and anti-democratic form of social and political control—essentially, the antithesis of humanities education.

In addition to the systemic and social issues caused by neoliberalism, it has come to affect our actual relationship with knowledge. Instead of advocating for knowledge for its own sake (Arnold, 2006) or as a means to gain access to the forms of discourse that grow and maintain power (Foucault, 1977), it leads to blunt instrumentalism—or "the belief that makes knowledge merely a means to a practical end, or the satisfaction of practical needs" (Dewey et al, 2007 p. 170). Considering "neoliberalism rejects the very idea of not-for-profit and insists that all values must be measured by the market, the humanities appear valueless" (Shumway, 2017, p. 10) this orientation towards knowledge has been especially damaging to the enrollment in Humanities programs, its social standing within academia, and general societal attitudes towards its pursuits.

Education is seen more as an access route... not so much toward the enhancement of... learning and thinking as towards obtaining through education the best possible credentials for individual socioeconomic advancement. Education is seen not so much as a means of helping society but of helping one obtain the best that society has to offer socially, economically, and culturally. (p. 62) The goals of neoliberal models of education are reflective of and built for the market rationality that created them. It is about competition. It is about ownership. It is about the individual above all else. YouTuber Sophie Dodge's (2016) video "Neoliberalism & Education" provides a general overview of neoliberalism's effects on education explaining how, in addition to reflecting its values, it also played a role in normalizing and promulgating market-driven attitudes.

Grades don’t prepare children for the “real world” — unless one has in mind a world where interest in learning and quality of thinking are unimportant.  Nor are grades a necessary part of schooling, any more than paddling or taking extended dictation could be described that way.  Still, it takes courage to do right by kids in an era when the quantitative matters more than the qualitative, when meeting (someone else’s) standards counts for more than exploring ideas, and when anything “rigorous” is automatically assumed to be valuable.  We have to be willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, which in this case means asking not how to improve grades but how to jettison them once and for all.

*  Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.  A “grading orientation” and a “learning orientation” have been shown to be inversely related and, as far as I can tell, every study that has ever investigated the impact on intrinsic motivation of receiving grades (or instructions that emphasize the importance of getting good grades) has found a negative effect. *  Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task.  Impress upon students that what they’re doing will count toward their grade, and their response will likely be to avoid taking any unnecessary intellectual risks.  They’ll choose a shorter book, or a project on a familiar topic, in order to minimize the chance of doing poorly — not because they’re “unmotivated” but because they’re rational.  They’re responding to adults who, by telling them the goal is to get a good mark, have sent the message that success matters more than learning. *  Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.  They may skim books for what they’ll “need to know.” They’re less likely to wonder, say, “How can we be sure that’s true?” than to ask “Is this going to be on the test?”  In one experiment, students told they’d be graded on how well they learned a social studies lesson had more trouble understanding the main point of the text than did students who were told that no grades would be involved.  Even on a measure of rote recall, the graded group remembered fewer facts a week later (Grolnick and Ryan, 1987).