Democracy for Breakfast: Unveiling Mirage Democracy in Contemporary Africa

Chapter 6 - Unveiling Neoliberal Thought Control: Education

239 Chapter 6 Unveiling Neoliberal Thought Control: Education Overview Educational relations are critical elements of our humanity and sociability. In a globalized neo-colonial world, an insidious and often debilitating crisis of knowledge construction and legitimation does not only continue to undermine African local and indigenous knowledge systems, but it also perpetuates a neo-colonial and oppressive sociocultural science educational system that debilitates the social and cultural identity of the indigenous African student. In this vein, education becomes the frontline in class warfare by the corporate capitalist rich against the working class/peasant poor. It is therefore a key sector in the neoliberalization of social policy and the neoliberal political economy of states. The assault on public education, teachers, and their unions has been evolving over the past decades in Africa as part of the neoliberal restructuring of the global capitalist economy, but the current crisis of capitalism has accelerated this assault. This crisis is a moment of danger but also an opportunity, not only to defend public education, but also to reshape it as part of the struggle for a new social order based on African liberation. Introduction Access to education is not only a fundamental human right, but also a key factor in reducing poverty and child labor. If every child left school with basic reading skills, 171 million people could be lifted out of poverty. Education is also essential to the process of promoting democracy, peace, tolerance and human development around the world. Despite this, one in six adults is illiterate, and at least 72 million children-the majority of them girls-are not enrolled in school. Millions more are taught by untrained, underpaid teachers in overcrowded, unhealthy, poorly equipped classrooms. 240 Around 54 percent of out-of-school children are girls, yet studies have shown that women who are educated have greater earning potential, are less vulnerable to HIV infection, have fewer and healthier children, and are more likely to send their own children to school. Providing every mother in sub-Saharan Africa with a secondary education would save the lives of 1.8 million children. Seventy percent of the children not enrolled in school live in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia. Hope is fading for the Millennium Development Goal of achieving universal education by 2015, as the global financial crisis has put poor African governments under pressure to cut public spending, and aid commitments from rich countries continue to fall short. Today, less than three percent of all humanitarian aid is devoted to education. Why? Neoliberal Attack on Education Neoliberal globalization, or what can be called the latest stage of predatory capitalism, is part of a broader project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital. It is a political, economic and political project that constitutes an ideology, mode of governance, policy and form of public pedagogy. First, as an ideology, it construes profit-making as the essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and an irrational belief in the market to solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations. Second, as a mode of governance, it produces identities, subjects, and ways of life free of government regulations, driven by a survival of the fittest ethic, grounded in the idea of the free, possessive individual, and committed to the right of ruling groups and institutions to accrue wealth removed from matters of ethics and social costs. Third, as a policy and political project, neoliberalism is wedded to the privatization of public services, selling off of state functions, deregulation of finance and labor, elimination of the welfare state and unions, liberalization of trade in goods and capital investment, and the marketization and commodification of society. Finally, as a form of public pedagogy and cultural politics, neoliberalism casts all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality. 241 One consequence is that neoliberalism legitimates a culture of cruelty and harsh competitiveness and wages a war against public values and those public spheres that contest the rule and ideology of capital. It saps the democratic foundation of solidarity, degrades collaboration, and tears up all forms of social obligation. Under the regime of neoliberalism or what is also known as casino capitalism, education matters only to the extent that it promotes national prosperity and drives economic growth, innovation, and transformation. But there is more at stake here in turning the institutions of...