Abstract
In recent years the prevalent opinion among educational policy makers is that academic institutions should be guided by the same principles as any other business unit. Corporate speak has pervaded the regulatory documents as well as management practices. The governing rule seems to be the ubiquitous accountability to guarantee “functional quality”. The European Qualification Framework and its national equivalents have been intended to secure this end and create educational transparency in the era of enhanced mobility within the EU countries. However, the use of economic principles does not seem to translate easily into product quality (students’ professional expertise and concurrent intellectual capacities), hence the growing criticism of measurement-oriented schooling [e.g., Biesta, 2010; Potulicka, 2010]. Invoking the concept of “sowing and reaping” put forth by van Lier (The ecology & semiotics of language learning. Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2004) in his ecological stance to education as well as the reflections of the Critical School, the article presents reflection on the consequences of neoliberal policy in education with a particular focus on the so-called L2 philological courses at Polish universities. Overall, commercialized language education is presented as falling short of expectations in social and academic terms as well as subverting dominant pedagogical reflection on autonomy in language teaching, reducing language teaching to mere skill training.
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Notes
- 1.
The word “critical” may be used here in its different meanings: axiological—construed as protecting the smaller and the weaker to keep the ecological balance healthy; Marxist—“taking social inequality and social transformation as central”; critical thinking—based on humanist-cognitive egalitarianism; social relevance—evoking constructivism and contextualization, and problematizing practice—finding theoretical support in postoccidentalism and anarcho-particularism (see Lankiewicz, 2015, p. 79).
- 2.
Interestingly, even the services are referred to as products. Suffice it to notice how neoliberal ideology is reflected in the language use of the banking system. Banks no longer offer loans, instead their agents significantly use the term “product” offering credit services to their potential clients. For “creeping linguistic neoliberalism” see Mirowski (2013) or Holborow (2015).
- 3.
- 4.
The use of parenthesis is intentional here to underscore the doubtful nature of reality in the postmodern era.
- 5.
This Foucauldian term “is a neologism that combines ‘government’ and ‘mentality’ to study the links between the ways governments manage people’s actions through techniques of domination and the ways people conduct their own behaviour through techniques of the self” (Bori & Petanović, 2016, p. 155).
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Lankiewicz, H. (2018). Is There a Place for “Sowing” in Second Language (L2) Education at the University Level? Neoliberal Tenets Under Scrutiny. In: Pawlak, M., Mystkowska-Wiertelak, A. (eds) Challenges of Second and Foreign Language Education in a Globalized World. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66975-5_17
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