Publish to Newswire
Add an EventFrom the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature
Newspeak Rules: How Neoliberalism Explains the World
Originally positive terms were devalued in the last decades (social state became "welfare dictatorship"). Social dislocations are charged to the impacted themselves. With personal responsibility, the scandal of poverty mutates to the scandal of the poor themselves. False words turn facts upside down or hide unpopular intentions behind a good formulation. Lower wage costs relieve businesses from their social obligation.
NEWSPEAK RULES. HOW NEOLIBERALISM EXPLAINS THE WORLD
By Sebastian Mueller
[This article published January 17, 2013 is translated from the German on the Internet, http://le-bohemian.net/2013/01/17/zeiten-des-neusprechs/.]
How is the socio-economic change of the last decades expressed in political language? Is there a specific ideology vocabulary of an economic paradigm dominating society and public perception?
As long as neoliberalism is a perpetual theme in public debates, the question about its language must be raised. The financial- and economic crisis reveals the unbroken hegemony of neoclassical dogma. Since it is more than a mere economic theory, neoliberalism as a whole remains an abstract phenomenon that is hardly graspable.
With the much-invoked end of ideologies since the disappearance of “command socialism” and the marginalization of political oppositions in a seemingly rationalized and secularized world, the delimitation of political parties by a different use of language becomes blurred. The struggle over terms is over – it is now waged beyond the parties.
Nearly all the parties use concepts of economic rationality and practical constraints. Neoliberalism overarches the parties and extends to all areas of human life together. Michael Baurmann, co-editor of the sociological journal Analyse & Kritik emphasizes that the model Homo Oeconomicus is propagated as a basic behavioral model for all the social sciences. The fact that academics oriented in economic thinking have crossed the borders of economic disciplines and increasingly focus on subjects far outside traditional economic theory is described as an institutionalistic revolution.
Since our society and the political culture are subject to a process of constant change, linguistic symbols and terms also inevitably change. Such change processes are regarded as unproblematic as long as concrete facts or undisputed connections are involved. However the communicative connection becomes difficult when linguistic signs attempt to characterize complex connections and values that are essential for religion and culture, history and politics.
This problem of potential ambiguity or vagueness can become the basis for systematic conceptual interpretation and reinterpretation in the course of ideological conflicts and social-political processes of change. Language becomes a result of the cultural, social and political history of the respective speech community and generation. The political vocabulary is very closely tied to the social life and changes with it. Political terms are a reflection of social development and of an ideology-vocabulary that changes its meaning in the course of time.
HETEROGENEITY OF NEOLIBERALISM
The ideology vocabulary of neoliberalism is not only the reflection of such a development. It can also steer this development with an unparalleled efficiency. Although neoliberalism is largely discredited as an abstract term, it develops and establishes its hegemony in everyday thinking through reinterpretation of political language in a triumphant hegemonial procession.
Since the 1990s the term “neoliberalism” along with the term “globalization” has had a boom season even though it is not used any more by its proponents. The term was judged increasingly negative in the last decade and was no longer merely descriptive or positive. Leftist forces succeeded in using a once positive term, negatively on the plane of conceptuality. Leftist movements celebrated at least a partial success since the strategies of neoliberal think tanks were applied against those think tanks.
On the other side, this led to mixing up original meanings. Neoliberalism has become a generic term that covers shareholder value, privatization serving a market-radical capitalism and the economizing of all areas of social life. This can hardly do justice to historical differentiation…
Seeking an unequivocal definition is a futile undertaking today after a debate over decades swelling-up and dying-out. However what unites neoliberalism regarding its ideology vocabulary should be highlighted.
Firstly, what most unites neoliberalism is the rejection of collectivism including social democracy and Keynesianism and the welfare state – after the Second World War – and not only communism, Marxism and socialism. Positive common interests can also be found beyond this smallest common denominator.
The broad approval of neoliberal minds on the so-called Statement of Aims of the Mont Pelerien Society is revealing. The MPS founded in 1947 as a union of liberal intellectuals is regarded as the most influential though little-known think tank of the second half of the 20thj century. At first it was led by Albert Hunold and Friedrich August von Hayek.
In the Statement of Aims, a “Redefinition of the Functions of the State” and methods for the “Reintroduction of the Rule of Law” are stressed alongside the principles private property, market competition and freedom. Hayek pointed out “the functioning of the `free’ economy assumes and requires very definite activities of the state.” These involve carrying out “the conscious application of competition as an ordering principle of the economy” and “creating conditions under which competition can take effect as charitably and undisturbed as possible.”
Before and after 1970, think tanks like the MPS spread Hayek’s market-radical freedom ideology and Milton Friedman’s economic theories. In Germany, the action groups Social Market Economy, Market Economy foundation, Friedrich-August-von-Hayek-society, Friedrich-Naumann-foundation and the Walter Eucken Institute could be named. As a neoliberal think tank, the well-known and influential New Social Market Economy Initiative has great power in Germany.
With all substantive differences, the think tanks appear with the goal of establishing neoliberal thou9ght patterns. The possibility of being hegemonial was and is given to neoliberalism since there are different intellectual and pragmatic positions within the MPS, other discussion circles and think tanks. In the German speech area, the INSM is very striking for the reinterpretation of terms and language as a means to an end – namely mixing in everyday understanding.
REINTERPRETATION THROUGH THE NEOLIBERAL LANGUAGE CODE
The name New Social Market Economy Initiative is already misleading since the goal of the INSM is more a “capitalist free market economy” than a “social” market economy. With this shrewd conceptual adaptation, a catchword coined by Ludwig Erhard and filled with positive associations in the history of Germany is reinterpretated and instrumentalized for its own goals. The INSM pretends to champion a modernization or renewal of a successful model for which there is a broad consensus in Germany.
In its core, the INSM supports economic interests through PR-measures. With an annual investment of 10 million Euros for campaigns, it has a significant influence on discourse in the mass media and on the Internet. The INSM has a sphere of activity throu9gh tightly packed personnel networks, prominent and highly decorated academic representatives and professional PR-work.
In 2000 the INSM created the slogan “social is what creates work” which was adopted two years later by the CSU in the election campaign. Despite clear references by the press to its historical incrimination, it was applied in the 2005 election campaign by Angela Merkel, Edmund Stoiber, Guido Westerwelle and other CDU- and FDP politicians. The PR-slogan changed the central term “social” without steering the debate in the sense of the INSM.
The targeted application of such slogans and catchwords helped initiate political “reform processes.” Bourdieu used this strategy when he demonstrated to the neoliberal proponents that a selective implementation of economic-rational theory and way of thinking was successfully anchored in human consciousness. Incomprehensible or everyday terms like “fit,” “sleek,” “competitiveness” or “globalization” serve as tools and ends. They help launch a desired ideal or problem,, set it on the political agenda and constitute social reality.
The term “sound bite” in the US is an extremely effective strategy of political communication:
“A sound bite is more than a good slogan. It is a three-dimensional illustrative term, a short message that impresses. Sound bite describes that message that a politicians or party want to teach voters and therefore is repeated in many speeches and statements, brochures and posters.”
The innate anti-enlightened potential to describe or construct a new “reality” is alarming. Words do not lead inevitably to new conceptual categories. However out of the need for a new picture of society, the catchwords are a necessary political means to simplify an ideology. At the same time they serve in fighting the existing reality or status quo – on one side by decoding the catchwords of the ideological adversary and on the other side by synonymous distinction of terms (liberal democracy instead of social democracy, competition state instead of social state and neosocial instead of social).
SOCIAL STATE UNDER ATTACK
If one glances at the political debates and opinion climate of the last decades, it is striking that originally positive terms were devalued analogous to selective re-creations or re-interpretations. The social state is targeted in particular. If it was an epitome for solidarity, social security, justice and democracy in the 1960s and 1970s, it has been subjected to vehement attacks at least since the 1990s (“welfare dictatorship”). The changed connotation is connected with the changing social and socio-economic framing conditions of Germany…
The erosion of the basic Keynesian consensus in Germany meant simultaneously the turning away from the interventionist welfare state. Visual perceptions shifted ultimately from the security- and provision-state toward increasing “freedom” and “personal responsibility” of citizens. Social dislocations are charged to the impacted themselves. With personal responsibility, the scandal of poverty mutates to the scandal of the poor themselves.
More possibilities for devaluating the social state are given with this rhetorical justification. Its social legitimation was taken away with word parodies like “social hammock” or with the pretext it stands in the way of reforms and pressing modernization.
This neoliberal narrative also has its own catchword. The term “reform backlog” (Reformstau) came into fashion at the beginning of the 1990s in the German media and was the 1997 word of the year. Since the term reform is interpreted as genuinely positive and connected with modernization and progress, the metaphor “reform backlog” was effective and popular.
The background of this word creation was the alleged competitive disadvantage of the German economic- and social state model in the location- and competition battle of different models of capitalism. Since the social state opposes the neoliberal ideal of a self-organizing market society, it is represented as bureaucratically encrusted, inefficient and endangering-freedom. That the idea of freedom in the self-image of neoliberalism is limited to the freedom of market participation is completely repressed.
“Neoliberalism withdraws from the emancipator roots of middle class liberalism through this one-sided equation of freedom with economic freedom. Political freedom (…) becomes a threat to the market society.”
STRATEGIES OF WORD CREATION
The creation of terms that mean something different than their literal meaning is also characteristic for neoliberal language work. False words turn facts upside down or conceal unpopular intentions behind a good formulation. When lowering non-wage labor costs is emphasized everywhere, the impression arises that wages will be free from unnecessary costs. However the relief of businesses from their social obligations is really meant.
This is also true for the word over-regulation which on first view can be understood as another word for bureaucratization. However nothing but the dismantling of workers’ rights is intended concretely. Flexibility which implies more freedom of movement becomes the freedom of movement of capital. Generational justice is a theme even when solidarity between the generations is cancelled (pension reform). In the public debates, language forms that veil real events are encountered everywhere.
In this context, Christoph Butterwegge, an erudite critic of neoliberalism, refers to a threefold modification of the term justice: from need- to “performance-justice,” distribution to “participation-justice” and social to “generational justice.”
All this casts a new light on the catchwords that were and are used intensively in the course of labor market and social reforms in Germany. Words like performance, efficiency, mobility, flexibility, location-competition, competitiveness and evaluation receive a new meaning as metaphors of an economic ideology. Their constituted meaning has an economic-political basis in the sense of entrepreneurship. They become classic terms of a neoliberal vocabulary. Neoliberal political goals are transported in physical metaphors like the “sleek state” that refer again to the ideal of the efficient, healthy and youthful person.
We have to grapple with a dichotomy. While neoliberalism on one side is often verbalized in the form of conservative nature imagery (information flood, state failure) and spongy terms like performance and competition elude critical questioning, an economization and mathematization of nearly all areas of life occurs on the other side. Things that cannot be operationalized in simple comprehensible numerical values are denied their market conformity and often their right to exist (for example, long-term basic research versus profit-oriented, technocratic expert knowledge).
The rise of firmly integrated anglicisms in academic- and economic language and in bureaucracy is only consistent. English is integrated as an essential element of the neoliberal ideology vocabulary on one side through the banal fact that a political and social focus on the economic also implies the language of the economy and on the other side the general change of course to an Anglo-Saxon capitalism model.
Words like benchmarking, ranking, job center, session, service, management, marketing, product placement, consulting in the economy and outsourcing, public-private partnership, cross-boarder-leasing as catchwords for the transformation and minimization of the state become the neoliberal ideal of the sleek or minimal state. The term New-Public-Management (NPM) stands for a reform of public management entities according to operational standards.
STATE FINANCES: THE WAY TO THE “DEBT BRAKE”
Thus the power of the political in the spirit of this economic paradigm serves less and less the regulative social organization. Rather it is used to serve an economic society as a model in the sign of neoliberalism. In the same way as with the Homo Oeconomicus within the market society, it is now carried out in the state machine itself – most clearly in the example of state finances. Finances are suited for the physical and ideal health discourse. Revenues and expenditures or deficits and surpluses stand ideally for a model social policy.
Accordingly a financial- and austerity-policy of the “sleek state” stands in the foreground and no longer goals like economic policy, investments and job creation schemes, all instruments that neoliberal economists reject as incursions in the free economy. Legitimating this policy which is inevitably connected with a reduction of diverse public services and investments necessitates a reversal and redefinition of the state political vocabulary. This new definition is often carried out by PR- and lobby-organizations like the INSM and only indirectly by the political parties.
By what special concepts is this ideology of neoliberalism held in state finances? What terms are essential for a hidden change of financial policy? The neoliberal arguments for low taxes that force a “sleek state” suggest on one side on the state revenue side taxes as unbearably high burdens, fiscal exploitation or robbery of taxpayers. On the other side, state spending programs in this view are evidence of an unrestrained wastefulness, an authoritarian attitude of the bureaucracy and an asocial claimant mentality of receivers of social benefits.
The financial-political goal of neoliberal think tanks is making the abolition of “obesity,” literally state indebtedness and extravagance, into the idea of “sound state finances” – a lexis with metaphorical dependence on the healthy athletic body. The essential implementations are described as “balanced public budgets,” “sleek state” and “budget consolidation.” Debts on the other hand demonstrate that the state lives above its means and to the burden of future generations.
Through the concept constellation “balanced public budgets,” one can speak of the production of a changed perception insofar as the reality of the state as a necessarily independent economic entity with social obligations is denied purely and simply. This can be illustrated in a campaign of the INSM that makes an analogy to the Schwabian housewife.
CREATING THE ZEITGEIST
Neoliberalism reflects the zeitgeist of a new generation with catchwords created expressly for the self-propagated market society. Neoliberal policy if reduced to only social cuts and privatization will hardly gain mass influence. Rather neoliberal policy seduces everyday consciousness withy new value standards- and catchwords like those cited above – that appeal both to the ideals and the prejudices of the recipients without the recipients understanding that they already move within the neoliberal logic.
Entrepreneurial spirit, flexibility, reform-friendliness, individualism and also envy are catchwords that seem very attractive and modern for a service society particularized in consumer- and sub-cultures.
“Whoever uses the little tricks of the tax law, gets excited over the car of his unemployed neighbor and looks annoyed at his social security contributions will find many neoliberal slogans plausible, for example the demand for less state and more personal responsibility or for reducing bureaucracy and transforming sluggish state operations into flexible private enterprises” (Harald Werner).
Neoliberalism corresponds to the zeitgeist and constitutes it in part. This is manifest when one sees that neoliberal thinking paradoxically does not find great support among conservatives but among unconventional and promotion-oriented sectors with a liberal attitude to state and society.
These sectors which also include the alternative-green middle class feel addressed by the appeals to independence and personal responsibility and regard the social state as a bureaucratic institution belonging to the past. Whoever sees himself as a creator of his own career and state regulations as tutelage or leading by the nose also believes he owes his status only to his own performance, adaptability and creativity, not to public provisions. Large parts of this generation grew up under the conditions of neoliberal policy and did not experience either the state or organizations like unions as promoters of their individual needs, the sociologist Harald Werner explains.
The neoliberal ideology vocabulary has concrete political and social effects in the last decades through targeted diffusion and agitation. Language constitutes reality and vice versa. Communication is action. Whoever controls the discourse also controls concrete politics. The reform policy since Agenda 2010 under Gerhard Schroeder should be viewed on this background.
RELATED LINKS:
Thomas Gerlach, “The Flexible Person,” 2002
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2002/11/32089.shtml
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
NEOLIBERALISM IN THE SCHOOL
Competence Brainwashing: Exercising Power through Individualization
By Andreas Hellgermann
[This article published 1/18/2013 is translated abridged from the German on the Internet http://akweb.de/ak_s/ak579/01.htm.]
[Neoliberal dogma with its “human capital theory” going back to Gary Becker (1976) also dominates the school. What appears operationally rational is good. The new education ideal is the “flexible person” who functions wherever he is set. “Lifelong learning” is necessary to guarantee availability for the labor market. “Competences,” a key term central for the neoliberal project, are learned.]
The philosopher Gunter Anders told this story about a king and his son: “The king was upset that his son had to walk across the country to form his judgment about the world. Therefore he gave him a wagon and a horse. Now you don’t need to travel on foot” [1].
Doesn’t the school function that way? The teacher is the king and the school has the task of giving students possibilities of forming judgments about the world. That judgments about the world and the ability to form judgments are defined and presented by the media is either not considered or gratefully accepted. The school could be different. Instead of preventing roaming around through the use of media, methods, guidelines and curriculum, it could open up a space in the world to students so personal judgment about the world becomes possible. We all know this is not happening.
To understand what obstacles or political-economic interests oppose students gaining their own judgment about the world, the concept “competence” must be analyzed along with the related paradigm change in schools and curricula. Nothing can oppose competence. This term has become the key term for the production of a specific subjectivity that is central for the neoliberal project. For this, comprehensive schools, the reduction of the education term, lifelong learning and the Bologna process are important praxis fields.
THE OPERATIONAL WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS
Developments in the school are time-delayed compared to other social areas. While criticism of neoliberal thinking and acting cannot be denied in many places, this criticism has not arrived in the school. Firstly, neoliberal concepts of change advanced 15 or 20 years ago are now established in the schools and secondly because they are not recognized as such. “Reform efforts” to carry out necessary change and legitimate criticism of present conditions in schools succeed. Thus the school becomes a crucial agency of neoliberalism. The danger exists of neoliberalism penetrating society in the long term and marking society on the way of education and training overarching the generations.
The neoliberal dogma that Gary Becker formulated in 1976 described a way of looking at the person and society that set the framework for all succeeding steps. The human capital theory developed by Becker and others sees human conduct from an economic perspective for exploitation interests: “The economic focus is so comprehensive that it can be applied to all human conduct… whether it involves recurring or rare decisions, emotional or practical goals, rich or poor persons, men or women, adults or children, intelligent or foolish persons, patients or therapists, businesspersons or politicians, teachers or students” [2]. Marx emphasized this perspective in the first sentence of “Capital” by defining the commodity as the elementary form of the capitalist production method. This elementary form is now imposed on human conduct. The dominance of the operational way of looking at things that is also found in the school is connected with this.
Several examples make clear the effectiveness of this one-dimensionality:
-After Allende’s 1973 overthrow in Chile, the experiment of a neoliberal transformation of society under the dictator Augusto Pinochet began with the arrival of a large number of advisors in key portions of Chilean society. Since neoliberalism cannot accept changes decreed down from above, the advisor is crucial for carrying out changes. In different ways the advisor also appears in the school. His instrument is quality analysis. He comes from the outside and wants to help improve the quality of the school. Following his analysis, there is no directive from above. The goal formulated by the advised themselves is now in the center… [3]
-The instruments for improvement are obviously produced in free enterprise contexts. In Germany, the Bertelsmann foundation is all-pervasive. The basic principle is the free supply of an instrument until it is introduced and functions and then is adopted by state financing. Spaces are created that are structured according to the market where advisors can be active.
-Turning away from a substantive orientation in the school to a competence- and action-orientation is central. A new language is connected with that, a jargon, concepts that now flood the school routine and must be filled with content: learning coach, learning counselor, systemic grading, individual advancement, portfolio, self-organization, cooperative learning, qualifications, competences, standards and lifelong learning. These “magic formulas” are found in didactic yearly planning, school programs and instructional projects for trainee teachers. That the learning climate becomes freer, students more independent and life in the post-modern more heterogeneous should go along with these concepts and terms and the transition from substantive- to action-orientation. Isn’t it strange that limitations and homogenizations occur everywhere? In the school (and in many other places), there is an abundance of standardizations that have become intolerable and stand in apparent contradiction to the goals. What is this contradiction?
MICHEL FOUCAULT: CONTROL THROUGH INDIVIDUALIZATION
Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and analyst of power, focused relatively late and not systematically on a form of power that loses significance more and more at least in our society: pastoral power.
For Foucault, pastoral power is a special form of power different from the power of a ruler. It is the power of the shepherd concerned about the salvation of the flock. Originally in the Christian context, this power should “safeguard the salvation of individuals in the world to come” [4]. Following the picture in the New Testament, the shepherd is concerned about the well-being or salvation of every individual sheep and every individual all life long, not only about the well-being of the whole herd…
Even if this form of power fades more and more within the church, that does not mean it loses significance. Foucault’s thesis is that pastoral power is a form of power that can be found in the most different areas of our modern or post-modern society starting from church practices exercised for centuries. It is an individualizing form of power, a form of steering that does not aim directly at the person but at his/her action.
This helps us understand how seemingly more open forms of learning can be connected with the phenomenon of exercising power and control and interwoven with the project of neoliberalism. Pastoral power is a power technique that has been adopted by others than church institutions and is available as a new and diversely applied form of power… This power should not be confused with force or coercion…
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
… Competence involves what and how teaching occurs in the school. [5] The training of teachers is oriented in competence. Somehow it is better to learn a skill in school than knowledge. When I learn how I appropriate useful and necessary knowledge, then I can cope with any situation. If I only learn knowledge, this knowledge is not enough to manage a given situation.
But what is really learned in learning competences and what is not learned? In Franz E. Weinert’s definition, a certain type of student appears in the school: the problem-solver ready and able to master any situation. He is the “flexible person” described by Richard Sennet who functions and can act wherever he is put. It is certainly sensible when young persons learn early on how to deal with future life situations. But what happens when the situation is wrong and the realities altogether must be put in question when the whole is seen? That is not learned.
The new learning gives a possibility for mediating knowledge. It is oriented in the conduct of the subject. It seeks subjects who are no longer guided from the outside but have learned to guide themselves, who have internalized all the seemingly obvious demands and know how they must function. The human type who embarks on this learning was defined by the 2006 EU Parliament [6]. He is the entrepreneur. Market-oriented with personal initiative, he shifts the necessary driving forces in himself. If he is not a real entrepreneur, he is a responsible-minded co-worker able to act as an entrepreneur. He controls his human capital and uses it profitably.
To what extent has the basic orientation of instruction changed for this human type? There are many pointers: teacher competence in relation to teacher training, offers of continuing education, structural changes in the organization of the school, introduction of quality-assurance systems and language, the concepts applied in the school. These changes are obvious. Judging their effects is difficult because they are not self-evident. Blatant deficiency as a rule is always the starting point of innovation and change.
Grading is a simple example. Injustice in grading is a starting point for all teachers and students. One response to that is transferring grading to the students themselves through ingenious systems. In the tiresome theme group work for example, they receive a total grade in the form of points that then are distributed among one another through negotiation. They know much better who participates intensively in the work process. Such a system has many “advantages.” It strengthens and promotes personal responsibility, the ability to assess the intensity in the work process, self-organization and just negotiation.
What really happens in this connection from a perspective that sees the whole and asks what is produced for a subject and what is needed?
In this little building block, techniques of power and disciplining are shifted to the subject or internalized by the students without the question arising whether the grading system as a whole is unjust. So injustice is hidden instead of being made known. “Seeing oneself as an individual” is promoted for the student through negotiating grades and the view from the outside internalized. Thus market-friendliness and market-control are inculcated.
“Everyone is the creator of one’s happiness.” That is a banal and revelatory slogan of the neoliberal project that is always pulled from the hat when injustice is shifted from structures to individuals. Since this usually tends to the overstrain of the subject in schools, universities and work contexts and the individual is occupied with respective demands, the whole is no longer seen or critically questioned as a basic social order. Thus the term “criticism” has changed. Obviously “critical ability” must be learned. This also only refers to individual processes and groups. Expressing criticism among one another and enduring this criticism is crucial, never criticizing the whole.
THE MARKET AS A CENTRAL REALITY
This subject production cannot be reduced to the school and has shady sides. Alain Ehrenberg described the social consequences of exercising power through individualization [7].
The changes in the school, on one side, are the reflections and results of social processes and on the other side the prerequisite for continuing these power techniques in other social areas going along with an indebtedness of the whole society – an unlimited expansion of the education project. The efforts to move lifelong learning into the foreground and identity this with a competence level are examples of this power technique. These processes center on the subject. The individual is always the set screw that must be turned to carry out the adjustment project.
Depression is the paradigmatic sickness of the post-modern, Ehrenberg says. To what extent do we help produce this “exhausted self,” the human type that will be exhausted some time or other?
The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997) who should not be forgotten develops this perspective: “when uncoupled from one’s world, one loses the possibility of developing cultural signposts enabling one to understand the world, how to act in it and how to transform it. The pragmatic neoliberal attitude in an aggressive way creates a breach between oneself and one’s world by asserting a far-reaching connection between one’s self and the market. In other words, the focus of education in the neoliberal world is in becoming a competent consumer or a competent distributor of knowledge without raising any ethical questions” [8].
LIFELONG LEARNING
In the neoliberal world, the market is the central reality to which the school adjusts. Lifelong learning is distorted into availability for the labor market. “Teaching everything to everyone” was the goal of Johann Amos Comenius, founder of dialectic in the 17th century. The humanistic education ideal of middle class society never wanted to fulfill that ideal. The neoliberal pedagogical project of the EU completely reverses Comenius’ goal.
Learning to see the whole is and remains a prerequisite for recognizing the necessity of fundamental changes and cannot be taken in by more or less well-meaning reform proposals.
NOTES
1) Günther Anders: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen.
2) Gary S. Becker: Der ökonomische Ansatz zur Erklärung menschlichen Verhaltens.
3) Kathrin Dedering u.a.: Externe Schulentwicklungsberatung in Nordrhein-Westfalen - Grundinformationen. Bielefeld 2010.
4) Michel Foucault: Subjekt und Macht.
5) zitiert nach Eckard Klieme: Was sind Kompetenzen und wie lassen sie sich messen? in: Pädagogik 6/04.
6) Empfehlungen des europäischen Parlaments und des Rates vom 18.12.2006 zu Schlüsselkompetenzen für lebensbegleitendes Lernen.
7) Alain Ehrenberg: Das erschöpfte Selbst.
8) Paulo Freire: Eine Antwort. In: ders.: Bildung und Hoffnung, herausgegeben von Peter Schreiner u.a.
9) Deutscher Qualifikationsrahmen für lebenslanges Lernen, verabschiedet vom Arbeitskreis Deutscher Qualifikationsrahmen (AK DQR) am 22.3. 2011.
Andreas Hellgermann is a catholic theologian and teacher who works at the Institute for Theology and Politics in Munster.
RELATED LINKS:
Albrecht von Lueke, “George Orwell in the Government – the Rich Come from the Poor,” December 13, 2012
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2013/01/421341.shtml
FREE INTERNET BOOK: “The Future of the Welfare State,” Ireland, 2010
http://www.freembtranslations.net
FREE INTERNET BOOK: “Is the Whole World Going Bankrupt?” Rosa Luxemburg foundation, 2012
http://www.freembtranslations.net
By Sebastian Mueller
[This article published January 17, 2013 is translated from the German on the Internet, http://le-bohemian.net/2013/01/17/zeiten-des-neusprechs/.]
How is the socio-economic change of the last decades expressed in political language? Is there a specific ideology vocabulary of an economic paradigm dominating society and public perception?
As long as neoliberalism is a perpetual theme in public debates, the question about its language must be raised. The financial- and economic crisis reveals the unbroken hegemony of neoclassical dogma. Since it is more than a mere economic theory, neoliberalism as a whole remains an abstract phenomenon that is hardly graspable.
With the much-invoked end of ideologies since the disappearance of “command socialism” and the marginalization of political oppositions in a seemingly rationalized and secularized world, the delimitation of political parties by a different use of language becomes blurred. The struggle over terms is over – it is now waged beyond the parties.
Nearly all the parties use concepts of economic rationality and practical constraints. Neoliberalism overarches the parties and extends to all areas of human life together. Michael Baurmann, co-editor of the sociological journal Analyse & Kritik emphasizes that the model Homo Oeconomicus is propagated as a basic behavioral model for all the social sciences. The fact that academics oriented in economic thinking have crossed the borders of economic disciplines and increasingly focus on subjects far outside traditional economic theory is described as an institutionalistic revolution.
Since our society and the political culture are subject to a process of constant change, linguistic symbols and terms also inevitably change. Such change processes are regarded as unproblematic as long as concrete facts or undisputed connections are involved. However the communicative connection becomes difficult when linguistic signs attempt to characterize complex connections and values that are essential for religion and culture, history and politics.
This problem of potential ambiguity or vagueness can become the basis for systematic conceptual interpretation and reinterpretation in the course of ideological conflicts and social-political processes of change. Language becomes a result of the cultural, social and political history of the respective speech community and generation. The political vocabulary is very closely tied to the social life and changes with it. Political terms are a reflection of social development and of an ideology-vocabulary that changes its meaning in the course of time.
HETEROGENEITY OF NEOLIBERALISM
The ideology vocabulary of neoliberalism is not only the reflection of such a development. It can also steer this development with an unparalleled efficiency. Although neoliberalism is largely discredited as an abstract term, it develops and establishes its hegemony in everyday thinking through reinterpretation of political language in a triumphant hegemonial procession.
Since the 1990s the term “neoliberalism” along with the term “globalization” has had a boom season even though it is not used any more by its proponents. The term was judged increasingly negative in the last decade and was no longer merely descriptive or positive. Leftist forces succeeded in using a once positive term, negatively on the plane of conceptuality. Leftist movements celebrated at least a partial success since the strategies of neoliberal think tanks were applied against those think tanks.
On the other side, this led to mixing up original meanings. Neoliberalism has become a generic term that covers shareholder value, privatization serving a market-radical capitalism and the economizing of all areas of social life. This can hardly do justice to historical differentiation…
Seeking an unequivocal definition is a futile undertaking today after a debate over decades swelling-up and dying-out. However what unites neoliberalism regarding its ideology vocabulary should be highlighted.
Firstly, what most unites neoliberalism is the rejection of collectivism including social democracy and Keynesianism and the welfare state – after the Second World War – and not only communism, Marxism and socialism. Positive common interests can also be found beyond this smallest common denominator.
The broad approval of neoliberal minds on the so-called Statement of Aims of the Mont Pelerien Society is revealing. The MPS founded in 1947 as a union of liberal intellectuals is regarded as the most influential though little-known think tank of the second half of the 20thj century. At first it was led by Albert Hunold and Friedrich August von Hayek.
In the Statement of Aims, a “Redefinition of the Functions of the State” and methods for the “Reintroduction of the Rule of Law” are stressed alongside the principles private property, market competition and freedom. Hayek pointed out “the functioning of the `free’ economy assumes and requires very definite activities of the state.” These involve carrying out “the conscious application of competition as an ordering principle of the economy” and “creating conditions under which competition can take effect as charitably and undisturbed as possible.”
Before and after 1970, think tanks like the MPS spread Hayek’s market-radical freedom ideology and Milton Friedman’s economic theories. In Germany, the action groups Social Market Economy, Market Economy foundation, Friedrich-August-von-Hayek-society, Friedrich-Naumann-foundation and the Walter Eucken Institute could be named. As a neoliberal think tank, the well-known and influential New Social Market Economy Initiative has great power in Germany.
With all substantive differences, the think tanks appear with the goal of establishing neoliberal thou9ght patterns. The possibility of being hegemonial was and is given to neoliberalism since there are different intellectual and pragmatic positions within the MPS, other discussion circles and think tanks. In the German speech area, the INSM is very striking for the reinterpretation of terms and language as a means to an end – namely mixing in everyday understanding.
REINTERPRETATION THROUGH THE NEOLIBERAL LANGUAGE CODE
The name New Social Market Economy Initiative is already misleading since the goal of the INSM is more a “capitalist free market economy” than a “social” market economy. With this shrewd conceptual adaptation, a catchword coined by Ludwig Erhard and filled with positive associations in the history of Germany is reinterpretated and instrumentalized for its own goals. The INSM pretends to champion a modernization or renewal of a successful model for which there is a broad consensus in Germany.
In its core, the INSM supports economic interests through PR-measures. With an annual investment of 10 million Euros for campaigns, it has a significant influence on discourse in the mass media and on the Internet. The INSM has a sphere of activity throu9gh tightly packed personnel networks, prominent and highly decorated academic representatives and professional PR-work.
In 2000 the INSM created the slogan “social is what creates work” which was adopted two years later by the CSU in the election campaign. Despite clear references by the press to its historical incrimination, it was applied in the 2005 election campaign by Angela Merkel, Edmund Stoiber, Guido Westerwelle and other CDU- and FDP politicians. The PR-slogan changed the central term “social” without steering the debate in the sense of the INSM.
The targeted application of such slogans and catchwords helped initiate political “reform processes.” Bourdieu used this strategy when he demonstrated to the neoliberal proponents that a selective implementation of economic-rational theory and way of thinking was successfully anchored in human consciousness. Incomprehensible or everyday terms like “fit,” “sleek,” “competitiveness” or “globalization” serve as tools and ends. They help launch a desired ideal or problem,, set it on the political agenda and constitute social reality.
The term “sound bite” in the US is an extremely effective strategy of political communication:
“A sound bite is more than a good slogan. It is a three-dimensional illustrative term, a short message that impresses. Sound bite describes that message that a politicians or party want to teach voters and therefore is repeated in many speeches and statements, brochures and posters.”
The innate anti-enlightened potential to describe or construct a new “reality” is alarming. Words do not lead inevitably to new conceptual categories. However out of the need for a new picture of society, the catchwords are a necessary political means to simplify an ideology. At the same time they serve in fighting the existing reality or status quo – on one side by decoding the catchwords of the ideological adversary and on the other side by synonymous distinction of terms (liberal democracy instead of social democracy, competition state instead of social state and neosocial instead of social).
SOCIAL STATE UNDER ATTACK
If one glances at the political debates and opinion climate of the last decades, it is striking that originally positive terms were devalued analogous to selective re-creations or re-interpretations. The social state is targeted in particular. If it was an epitome for solidarity, social security, justice and democracy in the 1960s and 1970s, it has been subjected to vehement attacks at least since the 1990s (“welfare dictatorship”). The changed connotation is connected with the changing social and socio-economic framing conditions of Germany…
The erosion of the basic Keynesian consensus in Germany meant simultaneously the turning away from the interventionist welfare state. Visual perceptions shifted ultimately from the security- and provision-state toward increasing “freedom” and “personal responsibility” of citizens. Social dislocations are charged to the impacted themselves. With personal responsibility, the scandal of poverty mutates to the scandal of the poor themselves.
More possibilities for devaluating the social state are given with this rhetorical justification. Its social legitimation was taken away with word parodies like “social hammock” or with the pretext it stands in the way of reforms and pressing modernization.
This neoliberal narrative also has its own catchword. The term “reform backlog” (Reformstau) came into fashion at the beginning of the 1990s in the German media and was the 1997 word of the year. Since the term reform is interpreted as genuinely positive and connected with modernization and progress, the metaphor “reform backlog” was effective and popular.
The background of this word creation was the alleged competitive disadvantage of the German economic- and social state model in the location- and competition battle of different models of capitalism. Since the social state opposes the neoliberal ideal of a self-organizing market society, it is represented as bureaucratically encrusted, inefficient and endangering-freedom. That the idea of freedom in the self-image of neoliberalism is limited to the freedom of market participation is completely repressed.
“Neoliberalism withdraws from the emancipator roots of middle class liberalism through this one-sided equation of freedom with economic freedom. Political freedom (…) becomes a threat to the market society.”
STRATEGIES OF WORD CREATION
The creation of terms that mean something different than their literal meaning is also characteristic for neoliberal language work. False words turn facts upside down or conceal unpopular intentions behind a good formulation. When lowering non-wage labor costs is emphasized everywhere, the impression arises that wages will be free from unnecessary costs. However the relief of businesses from their social obligations is really meant.
This is also true for the word over-regulation which on first view can be understood as another word for bureaucratization. However nothing but the dismantling of workers’ rights is intended concretely. Flexibility which implies more freedom of movement becomes the freedom of movement of capital. Generational justice is a theme even when solidarity between the generations is cancelled (pension reform). In the public debates, language forms that veil real events are encountered everywhere.
In this context, Christoph Butterwegge, an erudite critic of neoliberalism, refers to a threefold modification of the term justice: from need- to “performance-justice,” distribution to “participation-justice” and social to “generational justice.”
All this casts a new light on the catchwords that were and are used intensively in the course of labor market and social reforms in Germany. Words like performance, efficiency, mobility, flexibility, location-competition, competitiveness and evaluation receive a new meaning as metaphors of an economic ideology. Their constituted meaning has an economic-political basis in the sense of entrepreneurship. They become classic terms of a neoliberal vocabulary. Neoliberal political goals are transported in physical metaphors like the “sleek state” that refer again to the ideal of the efficient, healthy and youthful person.
We have to grapple with a dichotomy. While neoliberalism on one side is often verbalized in the form of conservative nature imagery (information flood, state failure) and spongy terms like performance and competition elude critical questioning, an economization and mathematization of nearly all areas of life occurs on the other side. Things that cannot be operationalized in simple comprehensible numerical values are denied their market conformity and often their right to exist (for example, long-term basic research versus profit-oriented, technocratic expert knowledge).
The rise of firmly integrated anglicisms in academic- and economic language and in bureaucracy is only consistent. English is integrated as an essential element of the neoliberal ideology vocabulary on one side through the banal fact that a political and social focus on the economic also implies the language of the economy and on the other side the general change of course to an Anglo-Saxon capitalism model.
Words like benchmarking, ranking, job center, session, service, management, marketing, product placement, consulting in the economy and outsourcing, public-private partnership, cross-boarder-leasing as catchwords for the transformation and minimization of the state become the neoliberal ideal of the sleek or minimal state. The term New-Public-Management (NPM) stands for a reform of public management entities according to operational standards.
STATE FINANCES: THE WAY TO THE “DEBT BRAKE”
Thus the power of the political in the spirit of this economic paradigm serves less and less the regulative social organization. Rather it is used to serve an economic society as a model in the sign of neoliberalism. In the same way as with the Homo Oeconomicus within the market society, it is now carried out in the state machine itself – most clearly in the example of state finances. Finances are suited for the physical and ideal health discourse. Revenues and expenditures or deficits and surpluses stand ideally for a model social policy.
Accordingly a financial- and austerity-policy of the “sleek state” stands in the foreground and no longer goals like economic policy, investments and job creation schemes, all instruments that neoliberal economists reject as incursions in the free economy. Legitimating this policy which is inevitably connected with a reduction of diverse public services and investments necessitates a reversal and redefinition of the state political vocabulary. This new definition is often carried out by PR- and lobby-organizations like the INSM and only indirectly by the political parties.
By what special concepts is this ideology of neoliberalism held in state finances? What terms are essential for a hidden change of financial policy? The neoliberal arguments for low taxes that force a “sleek state” suggest on one side on the state revenue side taxes as unbearably high burdens, fiscal exploitation or robbery of taxpayers. On the other side, state spending programs in this view are evidence of an unrestrained wastefulness, an authoritarian attitude of the bureaucracy and an asocial claimant mentality of receivers of social benefits.
The financial-political goal of neoliberal think tanks is making the abolition of “obesity,” literally state indebtedness and extravagance, into the idea of “sound state finances” – a lexis with metaphorical dependence on the healthy athletic body. The essential implementations are described as “balanced public budgets,” “sleek state” and “budget consolidation.” Debts on the other hand demonstrate that the state lives above its means and to the burden of future generations.
Through the concept constellation “balanced public budgets,” one can speak of the production of a changed perception insofar as the reality of the state as a necessarily independent economic entity with social obligations is denied purely and simply. This can be illustrated in a campaign of the INSM that makes an analogy to the Schwabian housewife.
CREATING THE ZEITGEIST
Neoliberalism reflects the zeitgeist of a new generation with catchwords created expressly for the self-propagated market society. Neoliberal policy if reduced to only social cuts and privatization will hardly gain mass influence. Rather neoliberal policy seduces everyday consciousness withy new value standards- and catchwords like those cited above – that appeal both to the ideals and the prejudices of the recipients without the recipients understanding that they already move within the neoliberal logic.
Entrepreneurial spirit, flexibility, reform-friendliness, individualism and also envy are catchwords that seem very attractive and modern for a service society particularized in consumer- and sub-cultures.
“Whoever uses the little tricks of the tax law, gets excited over the car of his unemployed neighbor and looks annoyed at his social security contributions will find many neoliberal slogans plausible, for example the demand for less state and more personal responsibility or for reducing bureaucracy and transforming sluggish state operations into flexible private enterprises” (Harald Werner).
Neoliberalism corresponds to the zeitgeist and constitutes it in part. This is manifest when one sees that neoliberal thinking paradoxically does not find great support among conservatives but among unconventional and promotion-oriented sectors with a liberal attitude to state and society.
These sectors which also include the alternative-green middle class feel addressed by the appeals to independence and personal responsibility and regard the social state as a bureaucratic institution belonging to the past. Whoever sees himself as a creator of his own career and state regulations as tutelage or leading by the nose also believes he owes his status only to his own performance, adaptability and creativity, not to public provisions. Large parts of this generation grew up under the conditions of neoliberal policy and did not experience either the state or organizations like unions as promoters of their individual needs, the sociologist Harald Werner explains.
The neoliberal ideology vocabulary has concrete political and social effects in the last decades through targeted diffusion and agitation. Language constitutes reality and vice versa. Communication is action. Whoever controls the discourse also controls concrete politics. The reform policy since Agenda 2010 under Gerhard Schroeder should be viewed on this background.
RELATED LINKS:
Thomas Gerlach, “The Flexible Person,” 2002
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2002/11/32089.shtml
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
NEOLIBERALISM IN THE SCHOOL
Competence Brainwashing: Exercising Power through Individualization
By Andreas Hellgermann
[This article published 1/18/2013 is translated abridged from the German on the Internet http://akweb.de/ak_s/ak579/01.htm.]
[Neoliberal dogma with its “human capital theory” going back to Gary Becker (1976) also dominates the school. What appears operationally rational is good. The new education ideal is the “flexible person” who functions wherever he is set. “Lifelong learning” is necessary to guarantee availability for the labor market. “Competences,” a key term central for the neoliberal project, are learned.]
The philosopher Gunter Anders told this story about a king and his son: “The king was upset that his son had to walk across the country to form his judgment about the world. Therefore he gave him a wagon and a horse. Now you don’t need to travel on foot” [1].
Doesn’t the school function that way? The teacher is the king and the school has the task of giving students possibilities of forming judgments about the world. That judgments about the world and the ability to form judgments are defined and presented by the media is either not considered or gratefully accepted. The school could be different. Instead of preventing roaming around through the use of media, methods, guidelines and curriculum, it could open up a space in the world to students so personal judgment about the world becomes possible. We all know this is not happening.
To understand what obstacles or political-economic interests oppose students gaining their own judgment about the world, the concept “competence” must be analyzed along with the related paradigm change in schools and curricula. Nothing can oppose competence. This term has become the key term for the production of a specific subjectivity that is central for the neoliberal project. For this, comprehensive schools, the reduction of the education term, lifelong learning and the Bologna process are important praxis fields.
THE OPERATIONAL WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS
Developments in the school are time-delayed compared to other social areas. While criticism of neoliberal thinking and acting cannot be denied in many places, this criticism has not arrived in the school. Firstly, neoliberal concepts of change advanced 15 or 20 years ago are now established in the schools and secondly because they are not recognized as such. “Reform efforts” to carry out necessary change and legitimate criticism of present conditions in schools succeed. Thus the school becomes a crucial agency of neoliberalism. The danger exists of neoliberalism penetrating society in the long term and marking society on the way of education and training overarching the generations.
The neoliberal dogma that Gary Becker formulated in 1976 described a way of looking at the person and society that set the framework for all succeeding steps. The human capital theory developed by Becker and others sees human conduct from an economic perspective for exploitation interests: “The economic focus is so comprehensive that it can be applied to all human conduct… whether it involves recurring or rare decisions, emotional or practical goals, rich or poor persons, men or women, adults or children, intelligent or foolish persons, patients or therapists, businesspersons or politicians, teachers or students” [2]. Marx emphasized this perspective in the first sentence of “Capital” by defining the commodity as the elementary form of the capitalist production method. This elementary form is now imposed on human conduct. The dominance of the operational way of looking at things that is also found in the school is connected with this.
Several examples make clear the effectiveness of this one-dimensionality:
-After Allende’s 1973 overthrow in Chile, the experiment of a neoliberal transformation of society under the dictator Augusto Pinochet began with the arrival of a large number of advisors in key portions of Chilean society. Since neoliberalism cannot accept changes decreed down from above, the advisor is crucial for carrying out changes. In different ways the advisor also appears in the school. His instrument is quality analysis. He comes from the outside and wants to help improve the quality of the school. Following his analysis, there is no directive from above. The goal formulated by the advised themselves is now in the center… [3]
-The instruments for improvement are obviously produced in free enterprise contexts. In Germany, the Bertelsmann foundation is all-pervasive. The basic principle is the free supply of an instrument until it is introduced and functions and then is adopted by state financing. Spaces are created that are structured according to the market where advisors can be active.
-Turning away from a substantive orientation in the school to a competence- and action-orientation is central. A new language is connected with that, a jargon, concepts that now flood the school routine and must be filled with content: learning coach, learning counselor, systemic grading, individual advancement, portfolio, self-organization, cooperative learning, qualifications, competences, standards and lifelong learning. These “magic formulas” are found in didactic yearly planning, school programs and instructional projects for trainee teachers. That the learning climate becomes freer, students more independent and life in the post-modern more heterogeneous should go along with these concepts and terms and the transition from substantive- to action-orientation. Isn’t it strange that limitations and homogenizations occur everywhere? In the school (and in many other places), there is an abundance of standardizations that have become intolerable and stand in apparent contradiction to the goals. What is this contradiction?
MICHEL FOUCAULT: CONTROL THROUGH INDIVIDUALIZATION
Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and analyst of power, focused relatively late and not systematically on a form of power that loses significance more and more at least in our society: pastoral power.
For Foucault, pastoral power is a special form of power different from the power of a ruler. It is the power of the shepherd concerned about the salvation of the flock. Originally in the Christian context, this power should “safeguard the salvation of individuals in the world to come” [4]. Following the picture in the New Testament, the shepherd is concerned about the well-being or salvation of every individual sheep and every individual all life long, not only about the well-being of the whole herd…
Even if this form of power fades more and more within the church, that does not mean it loses significance. Foucault’s thesis is that pastoral power is a form of power that can be found in the most different areas of our modern or post-modern society starting from church practices exercised for centuries. It is an individualizing form of power, a form of steering that does not aim directly at the person but at his/her action.
This helps us understand how seemingly more open forms of learning can be connected with the phenomenon of exercising power and control and interwoven with the project of neoliberalism. Pastoral power is a power technique that has been adopted by others than church institutions and is available as a new and diversely applied form of power… This power should not be confused with force or coercion…
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
… Competence involves what and how teaching occurs in the school. [5] The training of teachers is oriented in competence. Somehow it is better to learn a skill in school than knowledge. When I learn how I appropriate useful and necessary knowledge, then I can cope with any situation. If I only learn knowledge, this knowledge is not enough to manage a given situation.
But what is really learned in learning competences and what is not learned? In Franz E. Weinert’s definition, a certain type of student appears in the school: the problem-solver ready and able to master any situation. He is the “flexible person” described by Richard Sennet who functions and can act wherever he is put. It is certainly sensible when young persons learn early on how to deal with future life situations. But what happens when the situation is wrong and the realities altogether must be put in question when the whole is seen? That is not learned.
The new learning gives a possibility for mediating knowledge. It is oriented in the conduct of the subject. It seeks subjects who are no longer guided from the outside but have learned to guide themselves, who have internalized all the seemingly obvious demands and know how they must function. The human type who embarks on this learning was defined by the 2006 EU Parliament [6]. He is the entrepreneur. Market-oriented with personal initiative, he shifts the necessary driving forces in himself. If he is not a real entrepreneur, he is a responsible-minded co-worker able to act as an entrepreneur. He controls his human capital and uses it profitably.
To what extent has the basic orientation of instruction changed for this human type? There are many pointers: teacher competence in relation to teacher training, offers of continuing education, structural changes in the organization of the school, introduction of quality-assurance systems and language, the concepts applied in the school. These changes are obvious. Judging their effects is difficult because they are not self-evident. Blatant deficiency as a rule is always the starting point of innovation and change.
Grading is a simple example. Injustice in grading is a starting point for all teachers and students. One response to that is transferring grading to the students themselves through ingenious systems. In the tiresome theme group work for example, they receive a total grade in the form of points that then are distributed among one another through negotiation. They know much better who participates intensively in the work process. Such a system has many “advantages.” It strengthens and promotes personal responsibility, the ability to assess the intensity in the work process, self-organization and just negotiation.
What really happens in this connection from a perspective that sees the whole and asks what is produced for a subject and what is needed?
In this little building block, techniques of power and disciplining are shifted to the subject or internalized by the students without the question arising whether the grading system as a whole is unjust. So injustice is hidden instead of being made known. “Seeing oneself as an individual” is promoted for the student through negotiating grades and the view from the outside internalized. Thus market-friendliness and market-control are inculcated.
“Everyone is the creator of one’s happiness.” That is a banal and revelatory slogan of the neoliberal project that is always pulled from the hat when injustice is shifted from structures to individuals. Since this usually tends to the overstrain of the subject in schools, universities and work contexts and the individual is occupied with respective demands, the whole is no longer seen or critically questioned as a basic social order. Thus the term “criticism” has changed. Obviously “critical ability” must be learned. This also only refers to individual processes and groups. Expressing criticism among one another and enduring this criticism is crucial, never criticizing the whole.
THE MARKET AS A CENTRAL REALITY
This subject production cannot be reduced to the school and has shady sides. Alain Ehrenberg described the social consequences of exercising power through individualization [7].
The changes in the school, on one side, are the reflections and results of social processes and on the other side the prerequisite for continuing these power techniques in other social areas going along with an indebtedness of the whole society – an unlimited expansion of the education project. The efforts to move lifelong learning into the foreground and identity this with a competence level are examples of this power technique. These processes center on the subject. The individual is always the set screw that must be turned to carry out the adjustment project.
Depression is the paradigmatic sickness of the post-modern, Ehrenberg says. To what extent do we help produce this “exhausted self,” the human type that will be exhausted some time or other?
The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997) who should not be forgotten develops this perspective: “when uncoupled from one’s world, one loses the possibility of developing cultural signposts enabling one to understand the world, how to act in it and how to transform it. The pragmatic neoliberal attitude in an aggressive way creates a breach between oneself and one’s world by asserting a far-reaching connection between one’s self and the market. In other words, the focus of education in the neoliberal world is in becoming a competent consumer or a competent distributor of knowledge without raising any ethical questions” [8].
LIFELONG LEARNING
In the neoliberal world, the market is the central reality to which the school adjusts. Lifelong learning is distorted into availability for the labor market. “Teaching everything to everyone” was the goal of Johann Amos Comenius, founder of dialectic in the 17th century. The humanistic education ideal of middle class society never wanted to fulfill that ideal. The neoliberal pedagogical project of the EU completely reverses Comenius’ goal.
Learning to see the whole is and remains a prerequisite for recognizing the necessity of fundamental changes and cannot be taken in by more or less well-meaning reform proposals.
NOTES
1) Günther Anders: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen.
2) Gary S. Becker: Der ökonomische Ansatz zur Erklärung menschlichen Verhaltens.
3) Kathrin Dedering u.a.: Externe Schulentwicklungsberatung in Nordrhein-Westfalen - Grundinformationen. Bielefeld 2010.
4) Michel Foucault: Subjekt und Macht.
5) zitiert nach Eckard Klieme: Was sind Kompetenzen und wie lassen sie sich messen? in: Pädagogik 6/04.
6) Empfehlungen des europäischen Parlaments und des Rates vom 18.12.2006 zu Schlüsselkompetenzen für lebensbegleitendes Lernen.
7) Alain Ehrenberg: Das erschöpfte Selbst.
8) Paulo Freire: Eine Antwort. In: ders.: Bildung und Hoffnung, herausgegeben von Peter Schreiner u.a.
9) Deutscher Qualifikationsrahmen für lebenslanges Lernen, verabschiedet vom Arbeitskreis Deutscher Qualifikationsrahmen (AK DQR) am 22.3. 2011.
Andreas Hellgermann is a catholic theologian and teacher who works at the Institute for Theology and Politics in Munster.
RELATED LINKS:
Albrecht von Lueke, “George Orwell in the Government – the Rich Come from the Poor,” December 13, 2012
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2013/01/421341.shtml
FREE INTERNET BOOK: “The Future of the Welfare State,” Ireland, 2010
http://www.freembtranslations.net
FREE INTERNET BOOK: “Is the Whole World Going Bankrupt?” Rosa Luxemburg foundation, 2012
http://www.freembtranslations.net
For more information:
http://www.freembtranslations.net
Add Your Comments
We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!
Donate
$155.00 donated
in the past month
Get Involved
If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.
Publish
Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.
Topics
More
Search Indybay's Archives
Advanced Search
►
▼
IMC Network