On Personal and Political Ghost Stories

Abstract

Is it becoming a ghost story, this vision of education as nurture of selves in the interest of the public good—education as the playing out of our unknowable obligations to others? The ideologies of the individualism that serve capitalism— meritocracy, competition, both knowledge and technology in commoditized form, and the distorted notion of accountability shaped by these—increasingly shape our students’ understandings of themselves as disconnected from politics and, increasingly, as a set of measurable and technical competencies to be rewarded by consumption.