A wave of education reform is sweeping the world. The basic direction of the reforms is much the same in many places. There are remarkable similarities in the restructuring processes currently underway, for example, in Canada, Indonesia and Mexico. The political complexion of the government seems to matter little – Ontario’s NDP government set in motion much of the education reform agenda that was implemented by the subsequent Harris Tory government.

Education reform is so widespread it would seem to be inevitable. The core of this agenda is an emphasis on what they call ‘standards’, the implementation of lean production methods for education workers and an increased orientation of the education system towards the market.

Standards is the codeword for increasing the opportunity for students to fail, for example through centralized tests that students must past to graduate from a particular program. Lean production methods are being used by management to achieve speed up, which means processing more students with fewer resources. This includes: an increase in the use of part-time and temporary workers (as teachers and staff), contracting out of services and the use of educational technologies or standardized curricula to deskill front-line teachers. The orientation towards the market is reflected in everything from user pay (increasing tuition fees) to an increasingly vocational focus for educational programmes (Ontario students are now supposed to keep a portfolio from grades 1-12 that discusses the ways their education will serve them in their eventual careers) and the use of market-model competition between students, departments and institutions.

Supporters of education reform argue that this direction is required to bring schools, colleges and universities into line with a changing world. An Ontario government pamphlet on schools reform put it simply: “The world has been changing faster than our high schools have.” They make it sound like simple common sense, that only the most entrenched interests (the Tory code for teachers’ unions) could oppose.

Education for a Lean World

These education reforms acquire the air of inevitability because they fit with a broader right-wing agenda (sometimes called neo-liberalism) to restructure the economy and restore capitalist profitability that has been a problem for employers on and off since the mid-1970s. They want us to believe that there is no alternative to their agenda of industrial reorganization to speed up, trim ‘waste’ and minimize permanent employment and increase the amount of contingent (temporary or part-time) work. This industrial reorganization is accompanied by state cutbacks to erode any alternative to the market to meet our wants and needs. New trade agreements are designed to seal the deal by binding governments to the decisions of unaccountable panels who decide what is fair on the basis of what is good for business.

The education reformers believe the system of liberal education that developed over the past 150 years does not do a good job of preparing students for this emerging lean world. They want schools, colleges and universities to prepare students for a harsh world without a net, where they are entitled only to what they can afford to buy on the market. The neo-liberal agenda is based on the assumption that the welfare state and liberal education created a working class that was pampered by entitlements to a certain degree of education, health care, pensions and social assistance. These were never adequate, but nonetheless the right-wing sees them as a real threat to what they call ‘self-reliance’ that really means utter dependence on the market.

The State of the Classroom

The system of liberal education that developed through the 19th and 20th centuries was oriented around the state. As the working class movement developed new forms of activism, states needed to work out responses to militancy that did not rely exclusively on repression. Quite simply, the working class was too powerful for that and repression sometimes has the opposite impact – it makes people really mad and spurs them on to fight harder.

So, very cautiously over time, states introduced new social programs that met some of the demands of the working class movement (generally in a limited and inadequate way) as a way to calm things down and move the struggle away from the picket line. After World War 2, for example, cities like Hamilton and Windsor saw insurgent strikes that mobilized whole communities in defiance of the law. The response was to grant certain limited demands and begin to create state services that would provide some working class people with a limited degree of security and the perception they had something to lose other than their chains.

Public education was one of the pioneering forms of state program designed to bring parts of the working class into society by means of the state. Through schools, the state domesticates its children. As students, we get used to being administered. We are numbered, graded, classified, processed, handled and finally released into the world with a diploma to certify that we are ready to administer ourselves (with the occasional refresher course from cops, social workers and other state officials).

In the classroom, we rehearse our eventual relationship to the state. The classroom is a community of sorts, but a very distorted one. If you observe a classroom before and after the entrance of the teacher, you will notice that it goes from being a collection of individuals and small groups to being a community that shares one thing: a single focus on the teacher. The fundamental relations in this community are not horizontal (between students) but vertical (between students and the teacher).

This community is also distorted by in-built assumptions about who really belongs. The central perspective in liberal education has been that of the white, european, bourgeois, heterosexual male who thinks he is all of humanity. The world is seen through his eyes, so that it is only, for example, through conquest by Europeans that other peoples become visible in this liberal perspective. In school we learn his science and his culture without any regard to their partiality.

Children of the Market

Liberal education developed as part of a system to maintain capitalist power in the face of challenges from the emerging working class and other disenfranchised peoples. It did its jobs pretty well and the education system was expanded to offer ever more refined forms of domestication for the population of the state. The university, for example, was the site of supple forms of administration associated more with self-discipline than with external regulation.

But liberal education began to look less appealing to state policy makers and representatives of the employing classes as they began to shift towards new lean production methods in the light of a profitability squeeze beginning in the 1970s. Lean production relies on “management by stress.” It created pressure on workers by mobilizing the fear and insecurity that follows from the precarious nature of their work. The core workforce has been slashed to an absolute minimum and part-time or temporary workers play an increasing role in production. The goal of lean production is to create a workforce where no one feels their job is safe.

Education reformers see liberal education as too soft to prepare students for this lean world. While liberal education oriented students towards the state and habituated them to being administered, the emerging post-liberal system is directed towards the market. Now schooling is to teach us to market ourselves to earn a living so we can meet our wants and needs as consumers.

It is a central assumption of this post-liberal approach that students must be made to learn, motivated by the fear of failure. This fear is to be heightened among students, to prepare them for a lean world in which precariousness is the condition of existence. The regime of the school is being harshened, through standardized exams, zero tolerance policies, regimented school uniforms and an tough user pay system that excludes those who can’t afford tuition. Published achievement scorecards are being used to create an atmosphere of market competition between students, teachers, programs and institutions.

Students radicals in the 1960s demanded an education that was ‘relevant’, meaning useful in the struggle for a more just society. The education reformers are imposing a very different idea of ‘relevance’, focused in narrow terms of market value. The slogan of post-liberal education is: if it doesn’t make you more marketable, it doesn’t matter.

It Can Be Beaten

There is nothing inevitable about this restructuring. It cannot be casually dismissed, it is not simply a mistake that some good-hearted government in the future will reverse. It will require a real fight for democratic and accessible education in the context of a broader anti-capitalist struggle against neo-liberal restructuring and corporate globalization.