The Gift of Education: Education Beyond Economism

Abstract

This chapter confronts the ways that education has been largely overtaken by economic language and logic, and it suggests an alternative. It begins by criticizing educational economism across the political spectrum and then draws on the work of Marcel Mauss to propose rethinking of educational provision and obligation. The fiscal right has championed economism in the form of neoclassical economics or neoliberalism. This is the dominant economism applied to education, and it drives educational policy, curriculum reform, school practice and culture, and pedagogical ideals while redefining public education through the lens of private business. As part of a broader social logic, right-wing economism applies business ideals and categories to schooling by using such terms as competition, choice, efficiency, consumption, and accountability to describe educational policy, and in so doing, shifts the public and democratic possibilities of schooling to the realm of the private and the for-profit. Neoliberal education applies a managerialist logic of rationalization, imagining schooling as a business enterprise, describing public education as a private market, thinking of knowledge as commodities, and proposing an entrepreneurial vision for teachers who are expected to compete for grants and for merit pay, and for students who are offered money for grades.