Counter-pedagogy – neoliberal ideologies flourish in spaces like the academy – the perpetuation of neoliberal knowledge directly causes our impacts, and demonstrates the imperatives of creating democratic counter-pedagogies within debate

Maria Nikolakaki, “Final Conclusions: Education for a Democracy,” in The Anatomy of Neoliberalism and Education: Imperialism, Class Struggle, and Pedagogy, Information Age Publishing 2022, pp. 308-309.

Taylor Webb and Kalervo N. Gulson (2011) argue that neoliberalism and protofascism are connected to biopower, and evidenced historically when liberalism usurped sovereignty. Further, they argue that liberal democracies use biopower to maintain power across national borders through structural inequalities (legislated school segregation). Moreover, as neoliberalism creates conditions for protofascisms to emerge (Giroux, 2004), neoliberalism in U.S. schools is normalizing the imperialist education project. It is characterized by corporatism, violence, militarism, incarceration, and blaming the poor for capitalism’s failures. In his book Proto-Fascism in America: Neoliberalism and the Demise of Democracy, by exposing a school reform agenda intent on taking away the rights of youth, Giroux (2004b) suggests the agenda “that kids cannot be trusted and that their rights are not worth protecting. Meanwhile they are being educated to passively accept military-sanctioned practices organized around maintaining control, surveillance, and unquestioned authority” (p. 44).

Giroux (2008) contends that this cultural agenda, doubled with the agenda of the “military-industrial-education complex,” reinforces the work of Army recruiters. The militarization of culture is insidiously approaching the youth. By the creation of military hip hop and urban culture, and disregarding the problems young people face, the Army lures young people with “the Hummer, where they can pep the sound system or watch recruitment videos” (p. 46). As Giroux (2006) says, a “school becomes a training ground for their ‘graduation’ into containment centers such as prisons and jails” (p. 196). “These military values are not learned in training camps or military-oriented schools.” They are learned through popular media and people: movies, MTV, music, friends, and family (Fletcher, 2005; Giroux, 2004a).

Under neoliberalism, education faces a dual assault. On the one hand, it continues – and intensifies – the practice of teaching as indoctrination, in order to deprive the future of critical consciousness and convince them to passively accept the neoliberal. The teaching of indifferent, useless, and out-of-context knowledge has been used as a means to this end. At the same time, education has been given over to marketization, with devastating consequences (Nikolakaki, 2012). As this volume has described, neoliberal education is about stratification for future workers through education. The workfare-prisonfare-warfare complex which we identified in Chapter 4, is well assembled in education to socially reproduce the class inequalities. Education as an ideological state apparatus is the ground terrain for the acceptance of class inequalities. The United States as the world hegemon determines in a large degree global education through the international financial institutions. The reason for attention to what is going on in the U.S. economy and education is that it influences global reforms. Communism, as the taking over power by the working class has always been the ruling class’s real and only threat. As Curry Malott (2017) convincingly says: “Neoliberal capitalism disciplining of the labor movement, especially within imperialist countries like the U.S., is part of a larger capitalist-class counter-offensive against the global working class, workers’ states, and the global movement for communism” (p. 129).