The Gig is Up: Combating the Meanings of Education Proffered by Science, Technology, and Global Capitalism

It's Too Late, or Is It? Colleagues in the academy seem to have a fascination with conceptual analysis and the term education. Debates are held, papers are written, and symposia take place within which definitions are articulated, modified, and offered again. Whether the point is to provide narrative, stipulative, descriptive, or programmatic definitions, they matter little to the larger point: the quest for the meaning of "education" continues. In their turns, schooling and training are contrasted with education in order to help clarify the differences in scope, purpose, and meaning of the various terms. The concepts are often qualified in discussions of literacy, socialization, and democracy, but why? Why are we still asking these questions? More to the point, why are we still asking these questions in light of the fact that the term is already operationalized and defined for us? I submit that "education" has gone through a perverse ideological transformation: we recollect meanings of the term that no longer hold. Indeed, the concept education is introduced in very particular ways such that, over time, nobody notices the changes in the concept (Feyerabend, 1975). Education for democratic engagement or civic responsibility is quaint, but no longer the point, if it ever was. Education as preparation for college might make the Committee of Ten recur to our minds, but even current tracking for college has less to do with learning traditional subject matter and more to do with competitive test preparation. Indeed, education now seems to mean training and this training is of a very particular kind: students are prepared for a future life as neo-classical homo economicus. The meaning of education has already been decided, in other words, when economists snake their way into positions of power and influence. The discourse then, the talk about education, ceases to be about anything other than human resource production, privatization, profit maximization, and the like. Such privatization, maximization, and production has many forms and we are given plenty of so-called "choices" in determining or deciding the label we wish to use to indicate our branded-reality (knowledge industry, school-to-work transitions, global economy, workforce readiness, school-business partnerships, ad infinitum), but it all boils down to neo-classical economic theory as the engine driving the discourse that characterizes and determines what education means and how it operates to construct the reality of our lives. Economics 101 I want to clarify this point by distinguishing between two forms of economics. According to Gordon Bigelow, neoclassical economics and "post-autistic" economics are significantly different, with neoclassical economics currently the overwhelming economic view propagated in free-market cultures and imposed on schools (Bigelow, 2005). Neoclassical economics tends to downplay the importance of human institutions, seeing instead a system of flows and exchanges that are governed by an inherent equilibrium. Predicated on the belief that markets operate in a scientifically knowable fashion, it sees them as self-regulating mathematical miracles, as delicate ecosystems best left alone. (34) (1) Accordingly, neoclassical economics positions itself as a science and claims objectivity in order to reify its standing and exert its power. When William Jevons made the case, in 1871, that economics was akin to physics, he elevated economics to an objective and value-free realm (Jevons, 1871). The problem, as Bigelow points out, is that "the laws of Newtonian mechanics, like any basic law of science, depend on the assumption of ideal conditions--e.g., the frictionless plane. In conceiving their discipline as a search for mathematical laws, [neoclassical] economists have abstracted to their own ideal conditions, which for the most part consist of an utterly denuded vision of man himself [sic]" (Bigelow, 2005, 37). …