The Argument in Brief
Education is the most powerful force in a society. At the moment, a lot of formal education is functioning as an agent of destruction. We could, instead, use education to heal and create.
The crisis of contemporary education is often attributed to marketization and technologization. This is a misdiagnosis. They are symptoms of a deeper crisis, which is the corruption of the ideal of education. Marketization and technologization in education, in concert with one another and along with a misguided pursuit of efficiency, lead to the exile of spirit. We need to fundamentally reconceptualize our current idea of education, to revitalize it and ‘in-spire’ it. We can achieve this by conceiving of education in terms of ‘gift’.
This book details, on the basis of my personal experience, the everyday impacts and symptoms of marketization, technologization, and the pursuit of efficiency, as well as the way so much of what may seem sensible at first glance is, in fact, dangerous nonsense. The neoliberal critique of marketized education is a well-ploughed field, as is the critique of technology in education – but the way these aspects combine and double up on each other and mesh with unproblematized claims of efficiency requires the fine-grained critique offered here. The last two chapters of this book suggest that reconceptualizing education as ‘gift’ could rescue the idea of education from the swamp into which it is sinking. Some readers will already be familiar with some of the arguments I describe. However, we must get beyond the traditional defences of liberal education and critique and develop a wholesale and radical shift of paradigm. This book contributes to that endeavour.
I offer the background of a personal narrative here because I believe the lack of personal narrative in our institutions and curricula is a big part of the loss of meaning and spirit. The transformation of our institutions will require ‘the big fight’, but it will also be achieved by a myriad of everyday little refusals by educators and students alike. The struggle needs a coherent narrative. In my case, that narrative spans South Africa and Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as teaching in many different contexts. It is also informed by European and US scholarship.
This book is an extended study in direct opposition to any idea of a ‘quick fix’. The quick fix is rarely a fix at all. It appeals to the mindset already captured by the problem and far from fixing anything, it often exacerbates the problem. My analysis ranges across many disciplines not only to reflect the
However, there is a trap awaiting those who would eschew a quick fix and go for the wholesale and radical overhaul. Established educational institutions, especially universities, are extremely resilient and wily. In the neoliberal context, they can absorb challenge and chaos without fundamentally changing. Those seeking change must, whilst keeping the big picture in mind, also work on the many modest changes and initiatives that will bring it about. That requires constant vigilance and keeping track of the many apparently minor ways by which the system is kept in place. Familiarity with the threads, the usual suspects, is not enough. We need to discern the weaving of the tapestry and to pick at the threads, as I have tried to do in this book.
The argument of this book is that conceiving of education as gift may lead to policies that enable a creative, constructive, and sustainable route through the deleterious effects of marketization, technologization, obsession with efficiency, and vacuous ersatz spirituality. I am not convinced that we will be able to educate ourselves out of the impending crisis, but I am certain that we will not be able to marketize and technologize our way out of it.
A Personal Narrative
I am a White male born in South Africa in the 1950s to Irish/English Catholic immigrant parents. This heritage and background shaped my understanding of education. We lived alongside an indigenous culture that I only came to appreciate later in life. White South Africans lived in towns into which Black South Africans entered as servants. The intimacy was one-way, with ignorance in the other direction.
I include elements of my biography as a way of illustrating the complexity of education as an idea and a practice, and to inform references in the final chapters to indigenous populations and gender. Education is many things, it does many things, and it serves many often-conflicting interests. For some, the idea of education is of an all-encompassing process that includes socialization, moral development, and training, whilst for others, it has definite boundaries and focuses on formal academic qualifications.
In my youth, the education experience of South Africans was very different depending on whether you were Black, White, Afrikaans, English, male, or female, and these factors intersected with class differences. I went to a Catholic school, not all that different from the local high school but slightly at a slant
Racial tensions grew throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Like many White males, I was conscripted into the armed forces when I finished school. Education was becoming an explicit subject of debate, and universities and schools were becoming sites of struggle. While I was in the army, our battalion was enlisted to line the streets of a city in which university students were on an anti-apartheid demonstration march. It was an exciting break from the tedium of the barracks, and many of us soldiers cheered the students.
After army service, I became a newspaper reporter for several years. I vividly recall covering the forced relocation of Black South Africans from their ancestral lands. After three years of reporting, I followed my urge to develop a larger frame of reference for my life and went to the University of Cape Town. In 1976, while I was at university, the Soweto Uprising occurred and Black schools became a flashpoint of revolution. The apparent spark was the government’s insistence on the use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in Black schools. Many English-speaking university campuses – more than Afrikaans universities – were marked by riots and demonstrations. It was clear that the apartheid edifice was under substantial attack, although it would take another 20 years to crumble.
When I completed my degree, I left the country. One motivation for leaving was that I could not face being conscripted again, and nor was I prepared to join an armed struggle. The other was a typical youngster’s desire to see the world – to further my education, one might say. The option for me to have what in Aotearoa New Zealand is called an ‘OE’ (overseas experience) stood in sharp contrast to that of hundreds of Black schoolchildren who fled the country after 1976, to avoid being imprisoned and to further their education and fight for ‘The Struggle’ (against apartheid), many to Russia and other supportive communist countries.
I returned to South Africa several years later when the probability of conscription was virtually nil, with the idea that I could contribute to The Struggle via education. I enrolled in postgraduate studies and wrote theses on African literature and the psychodynamics of the master–servant relationship. I concurrently began teaching English in a ‘Coloured school’ in a deprived, drug-cursed gangland that had been created through the forced relocations mandated by the apartheid policy. From there I joined an academic development programme
Three years later I began teaching Industrial Psychology in one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities that had been established as instruments of the apartheid state but had turned into hotbeds of resistance. I often had reason to recall the words in 1971 of the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko:2 ‘The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed’. During this time I completed a Ph.D. through Sheffield University with a thesis on the relationship between education, research, and management practice. From 2002 through to 2023, I taught and researched in Massey Business School in Aotearoa New Zealand. This experience did not convince me of the value of applying a business outlook to education. Rather, it provided me with ample evidence to the contrary. In this colony, with another indigenous culture, I persist in asking: What is education? In global higher education today, especially business education, we can see the recurrence of the dark side of university history, its collusion with Empire and ‘the gift’ of civilization.
A significant theme in my life has been place and identity, and the capacity, in the words of the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, to ‘put a spade under one’s feet’. It involves having a sense of groundedness. It is about dislocation, intrusion, and belonging – the desire to belong and the failure to do so. This segues into appreciating the importance of understanding context, relationship, and living in a socio-economic and political ecology that has a history of conflict. It entails acknowledging difference, and that differences can be appreciated as a source of enrichment or feared as source of contamination. It means a life of learning and choosing to commit to specific values. Whilst this can be discussed in broad theoretical terms, it comes down to who gets to school and into higher education and who doesn’t, being able to speak the languages of the place where you live, living an ecologically sustainable lifestyle, and learning about who pays for what – and not only in a literal financial way in our marketized, globalized, technology-rich world.
The Themes – A Brief Overview
This book synthesizes several themes. One is the economic landscape – more precisely, the marketization of society. There are apparently no limits to the market and the homogenization of cultures and values. Another major theme
The marketization of education requires that education is taken to be a particular kind of thing with particular roles. Here are the contestable points: Is education a commodity or a process? What shape should it take? In whose or what interests should it be conducted? Education that is shaped and conducted in the interests of an incumbent ideology would be considered brainwashing by opponents of that ideology. What happens when an ideology becomes so pervasive that it seems to be common sense and natural? Is it possible to argue for an idea of education that transcends and lies beyond the reach of the market? Possible – but not easy. As my parents moved from working class to middle class, they were prepared to pay fees for our Catholic private education rather than send us to the free local school. Faith and finance make intimate bed-mates at times. One of the features of market ideology is its religious, almost fanatical, fervour and pervasiveness.
As noted earlier, marketization and technologization work hand in glove. When computers were first being introduced to schools, it was often the representatives of the computer/software businesses that explained (or should that be ‘touted’) the virtues and advantages of using computers in education. Massey University is known for its distance teaching, and the technological support is impressive. I wrote the later parts of this book and then revised it all between 2020 and 2023, which included a time of COVID and working from home. The world of Moodle, Adobe Connect, Zoom – a whole cornucopia of toys and tools – glittered seductively as we worked our way around the COVID lockdown. It was not an auspicious time to be a techno-sceptic, but it now seems more important than ever to be one.
I share Australian education researcher Neil Selwyn’s distrust of technology in education, and I worry about the hidden curriculum and what the
It would seem that the lure of the market, the seductiveness of technology, and the pursuit of efficiency conspire to exile considerations of spirit, even as they perversely and ironically adopt the less wholesome aspects of religions, which is what societies have traditionally used to carry matters of the spirit. Religions have inspired horrors, but they have also hosted spiritual yearnings. I have ‘done time’ in both Benedictine and Buddhist monasteries, and I continue to be inspired by writers such as Thomas Merton, Thomas Moore, Parker J Palmer, Mary Rose O’Reilly, and others. It is not surprising that an education shaped by the ideals of the market, the ‘rapture’ of technology, and the pursuit of efficiency would not escape the clutches of McSoul, McMindfulness, and McHappiness. But spirit is not religion, and people are not commodities, or data, or programmes. We need to understand how the spirit is exiled and how it may be embraced. We may, I argue, achieve a sustainable, life-affirming idea and practice of education by construing education as gift.
The idea of gift is no less complicated than the idea of education. A gift may be a source of joy, burdensome, a trivial token, poison in disguise, ruinous, meaningless, anonymous, and self-serving. It can serve several contradictory functions at the same time. There are universal gifts and culturally specific gifts. Gifts can be complex signalling systems, used to bind as well as to alienate. ‘The gift’ is a prominent theme in folklore and has inspired substantial anthropological, sociological, and psychological thought. It is no accident that these features of the gift are also features of money. Furthermore, gifts must, like technology, be treated with care: it is not coincidental that many technologies are viewed as ambivalent gifts from the gods and surrounded with cautions and prohibitions. Too much knowledge can be an agony.
The ultimate gift is life itself, and perhaps one of the most crucial revolutions we must have is related to our ambivalence towards Earth and motherhood,
This book is a cri de coeur against the great convergence that is not the celebrated utopia of information and Kurzweil’s singularity but is the convergence of environmental destruction brought about by unfettered marketization (and of course, market enthusiasts will point out, with some justification, the benefits of markets), the denial of physicality (and of course, the techno-hallucinators will question why we need bodies anyway), the stultifying control of religious fundamentalism (and of course, the religious fanatics will point out that this is the path to salvation), and the belief in a state of perfection (which can never ultimately be defined but can be fought about). I reject the convergence that celebrates the absence of communal frames of reference and I reject fantasies of individual self-reliance and omnipotence. In such a world there is nothing to lose, nothing to gain, anything can mean anything, everything can mean everything, and everything is everywhere at once; we are engines, programs, bytes of data, or algorithms in a great big ‘whatever’ playpen. We can start all over again: who made the playpen, why is it here, why are we in it, who is in control, and how can we get control so that we can …?
Over to you, Hal.
…
The ideas in this book have been developed over many years. The ideas about education and the market, education and technology, and education and bureaucracy have been developed more recently, and in one form or another have appeared in journals such as New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, New Zealand Sociology, Management Learning, Culture and Organization, Journal for the Study of Spirituality, Leadership, and the London Review of Education, as well as being presented at various conferences.