Abstract
Australian education has been re-shaped over the last three decades by a market agenda, promoted by both major parties and business organizations. It is important to understand the nature of neoliberalism in general, to understand why it has impacted education, and an outline of global neoliberalism is given. It is also important to think about the nature of education itself, as a social process of nurturing capacities for practice. Education itself cannot be commodified; but access to education can be. For markets to work, there must be a rationing of education, hierarchies and mechanisms of competition. Hence the redefinition of schools and universities as firms, and the striking revival of competitive testing culminating in the MySchool website, as well as the expansion of public funding of private schools. Teachers are placed under performative pressures that tend to narrow the curriculum in schools, and make the sector’s workforce more insecure. Even the knowledge base of education is impacted, with technicization of professional knowledge and a growth of cultural fakery around education. So far, no happy ending to this saga is in view.
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Acknowledgments
This chapter draws on, but revises, material from three previously published papers: “Why do market ‘reforms’ persistently increase inequality?” Discourse, 2013, vol. 34 no. 2, 279–285, “The neoliberal cascade and education: an essay on the market agenda and its consequences”, Critical Studies in Education, 2013, vol. 54 no. 2, 1–13, and “Good teachers on dangerous ground: towards a new view of teacher quality and professionalism”, Critical Studies in Education, 2009, vol. 50 no. 3, 213–229. I am grateful to the editors and reviewers of those journals. I am grateful to Nour Dados, my colleague in a current study of neoliberalism.
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Connell, R. (2015). Markets All Around: Defending Education in a Neoliberal Time. In: Proctor, H., Brownlee, P., Freebody, P. (eds) Controversies in Education. Policy Implications of Research in Education, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08759-7_16
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