Teachers Are Rising Up to Resist Neoliberal Attacks on Education
Teachers Are Rising Up to Resist Neoliberal Attacks on Education
By Henry A. Giroux,
Truthout
Hannah Arendt once argued that, “Thinking itself is dangerous to all creeds, convictions, and opinions.” In the current political climate, the institutions that nurture critical thinking are similarly seen as dangerous and threatening to our increasingly authoritarian social order. These institutions include public and higher education along with almost any form of progressive media.
As a result, purveyors of neoliberal ideology and policy have been working relentlessly to undermine public education in order to define it in strictly economic terms. Taking an instrumentalist approach obsessed with measurement and quantification, they have aggressively attempted to turn education into a business, faculty into devalued clerks and students into consumers.
Fortunately, teachers and students are refusing to participate in the destruction of US education. The historic strike initiated on January 14 by 33,000 teachers in Los Angeles — the nation’s second-largest school district — is the latest evidence of a nationwide trend in which public school teachers and students have increasingly gone on strike and engaged in walkouts.
A Wave of Resistance Against Neoliberal Approaches to Education
This wave of resistance has emerged to counter the neoliberal market-driven approach to education, which historically has cut across mainstream party lines. Market-driven reforms have been supported since the Reagan administration by every president and by every established political faction since the 1970s.
Refusing to promote the relationship between education and democracy, critical thinking and active citizenship, and rejecting the connection between education and social and political change, the advocates of neoliberalism have weakened the power of teachers, attacked teachers unions, reduced teaching to training, and implemented a full-fledged attack on the imagination through methods such as teaching for the test and cutting back on funding for the most basic necessities of schooling. Public schools have been transformed into charter schools or sites that aid in the criminalization of poor Black and Brown students. Neoliberal leaders have, moreover, sought to strip schools of their anti-authoritarian and egalitarian potential to teach students to live as critical and informed citizens in a democracy. ...........(more)
https://truthout.org/articles/teachers-are-rising-up-to-resist-neoliberal-attacks-on-education/
= new reply since forum marked as read
and a "conservative" one? 
EDIT: Jesus H. Christ this dude is ALL over the fuckin' place... I expected an analysis of the educational system but it quickly devolves into some screechy diatribe trying to directly blame "neoliberalism" for Trump and pretty much everything else that's wrong in the world... Nevermind the fact that his sourcing is suspect and he never even attempts to organize his thoughts. It's just a 10-page rant?
(If a student handed me this as a paper I would have given it right back to him for a re-write)
Walmart Heirs Money Influences Black Charter Schools Debate, AP, Dec. 25, 2018.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/walmart-heirs-money-influences-black-charter-schools-debate/ar-BBRnVel?ocid=HPCOMMDHP15
Swelling Tide, Major Teacher Strikes Shifting Our Politics Against Charter Agenda, Common Dreams, Jan. 19, 2019
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/18/swelling-tide-major-teacher-strikes-shifting-our-politics-against-charter-agenda
The Deep Pocket Push to Deep Six Public Schools, Common Dreams, Jan. 20, 2019
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/20/deep-pocket-push-deep-six-public-schools
