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Engaging with Steven J. Klees’ ‘A quarter century of neoliberal thinking in education: misleading analyses and failed policies’

Steven Klees gives us here a remarkably thorough and extensive critical assessment of the ‘Great Experiment’ in education. He also shows us that, in the USA as well as in the less developed countries, both the misleading analysis and failed policies he describes are widely acknowledged as such, even by their proponents. So the question is: why is this ‘experiment’ now spreading rapidly around the world? My hypothesis is that it has not failed – if we take as the criteria of success not its advertised objectives, but its underlying intents. The latter can be inferred from both the economic changes of the last quarter century and the concomitant development of the neoliberal ideology. Nation-states and their immobile factors of production (institutions and labour force) are now in competition on the global market to attract mobile capital funds, through: (1) lower taxes (hence ‘budget constraint’); (2) the supply of a labour force that is both cheap and flexibly adapted to employers’ changing needs; and (3) inviting for-profit enterprises in to the supply of public services. Those objectives cannot be attained without a radical change in the relationships between state and market. In this respect, mainstream ‘liberal’ economists’ views have followed over time the needs of capital accumulation. When, from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, economic expansion was handicapped by the policies of governments and/or the remains of medieval socio-economic institutions, they held that the sphere of state activity should be narrowly confined to the strictly (i.e. indivisible) public services. Everything else was to be left to the laissez-faire of markets assumed to be spontaneously self-regulating. For Adam Smith, for example, only elementary instruction belonged to the public sphere, in as much as the workers did not gain anything from it while its externalities were a requisite of economic development and socio-political peace. In the second half of the twentieth century, the idea was still that a strong frontier should be drawn between state and market, but two movements enlarged the functions allocated to the former. One was the democratic pressure for a welfare state, and the other was the new needs of capital accumulation, including a steady increase in the national workers’ consumption, and a rapid supply of qualified employees at a time of dire shortage. In 1962, for example, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – now the main propagandist of the neoliberal creed – praised France and the USSR for their public central financing and planning of education. After the liberal and the welfare states, the present stage of capitalist expansion requires the obliteration of the frontier between state and market, public and private, and an osmosis sometimes presented as ‘participative democracy’ in as much as each agent is supposed to