NEOLIBERALISM Global neoliberalism and education and its consequences

24 Dave Hill and Ravi KumarFinally, the leading capitalist powers (the “Quad”—the United States, theEU, Japan, and Canada), driven on by major corporations and business interests,aretrying to revise GATS so it could be used to overturn almost any legislationgoverning services from national to local level . . . Particularly underthreat from GATS are public services—health care, education, energy,water and sanitation. . . . A revised GATS could give the commercial sectorfurther access and could make existing privatizations effectively irreversible.(Sexton, 2001, p. 1)This helps explain the British government’s determination to push throughprivatizations, to provide deregulatory frameworks for state services (e.g., therecent Education Bill) and to nurture the growth of indigenous businesses thatcan virus public sector operations. As yet, there has been no final agreementon the GATS (Education International, 2008) or on its regional variant inthe European Union, the Bolkstein Directive (Basketter, 2006; Hill 2006a).Resistance to the GATS is ongoing (Hill, 2009).NOTES1. See Hill (2001a) for a discussion of various types of government and statepolicy: neoconservative, neoliberal, “Third Way,” social democratic, socialist,Marxist. See Saltman and Gabbard (2003) and Hill (2001c, 2004a, b, 2006b)for a discussion of the increasing role of the repressive and surveillance stateapparatuses in society and in education.2. See Gillborn and Mirza (2000), Hill, Sanders and Hankin (2002), JosephRowntree Foundation, 2007; The Poverty Site, 2007; Gillborn, 2008; Hill,2009c for recent data on (racialized and gendered) social class inequalitiesin income, wealth and educational attainment in England and Wales—andhow much inequality has increased since 1979 and Althusser, 1971, for theoriginal formulation of these concepts.3. One needs to differentiate between a program of education and the educationaledifice as such. While programs are temporary arrangements to allow spacesfor private capital to be created in contemporary times, the educational edificein the form of government schools is permanent in character, which the neoliberalseeks to destroy.4. In capitalist society, “well-being” is now equated with “well-having”—we arewhat we consume. In educational terms our worth is how many years and creditswe have accumulated. Indeed, being a student is now a serious game, to buildup credits to get a better job. In the United States and in England and Walestoday, as in other advanced capitalist states, economic goals of education havesidelined social/societal/community goals, the traditional social democraticgoals of education, and have also replaced education/learning for its own sake,the traditional liberal and liberal-progressive goals of education.5. Perhaps the easiest way of understanding the concept of “national capital” iswith respect to Rikowski’s definition in terms of national labour markets: “thelabour-power needs of national capitals refer to those labour-power capacitiesrequired for labouring in any labour process throughout the national capital. . . [There] is the drive [to increase] the quality (of labour-power) vis-a-vis othernational capitals for gaining a competitive edge” (Rikowski, 2001b, p. 42). Thisparticular definition points towards the national capital (when being viewed inrelation to labor power) as the national labor market.