http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/16478-marching-in-chicago-resisting-rahm-emanuels-neoliberal-savagery
Protesters
march in the Loop March 27, 2013 during a rally to protest the proposed
closing of 54 Chicago public schools. (Photo: WBEZ/Robin Amer)
Across the globe, predatory capitalism spreads its gospel of power,
greed, commodification, gentrification and inequality. Through the
combined forces of a market driven ideology, policy and mode of
governance, the apostles of free-market capitalism are doing their best
to dismantle historically guaranteed social provisions provided by the
welfare state, define the accumulation of capital as the only obligation
of democracy, increase the role of corporate money in politics, wage an
assault on unions, expand the military-security state, increase
inequalities in wealth and income, foster the erosion of civil liberties
and undercut public faith in the defining institutions of democracy.
1.
As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects
of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being
downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish -
from public schools to health-care centers - there is also a serious
erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values
and the common good. One does not have to look too far to see what
happens in America’s neoliberal educational culture to see how
ruthlessly the inequality of wealth, income and power bears down on
those young people and brave teachers who are struggling every day to
save the schools, unions and modes of pedagogy that offer hope at a time
when schools have become just another commodity, students are reduced
to clients or disposable populations, and teachers and their unions are
demonized.
Read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other scholars at Truthout's Public Intellectual Project.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s current attempt to close down 54 public
schools largely inhabited by poor minorities is one more example of a
savage, racist neoliberal system at work that uses the politics of
austerity and consolidation to further disenfranchise the unskilled
young of the inner city. The hidden curriculum in this instance is not
so invisible. Closing schools will result in massive layoffs, weakening
the teachers unions. It will free up land that can be gentrified to
attract middle-class voters, and it will once again prove that poor
minority students, regardless of the hardships, if not danger, they will
face as a result of such closings, are viewed as disposable - human
waste to be relegated to the zones of terminal exclusion. Not only are
many teachers and parents concerned about displacing thousands of
students to schools that do not offer any hope of educational
improvement, but they are also concerned about the safety of the
displaced children, many of whom "will have to walk through violent
neighborhoods and go to school with other students who are considered
enemies."
2.
This is not simply misguided policy, it is a racist script that makes
clear that poor black youth are disposable and that their safety is
irrelevant. How else to explain the mayor's plan to produce a Safe
Passage Plan in which firefighters would be asked to patrol the new
routes, even though they have made it clear that they are not trained
for this type of special duty. That many of these children are poor
black children trapped in under-resourced schools appears irrelevant to a
mayor who takes his lead from politicians such as Barack Obama and
Arnie Duncan, two educators who have simply reproduced the Bush
educational reform playbook, i.e., more testing, demonize teachers,
weaken unions, advocate for choice and charter schools, and turn public
schools over to corporate hedge-fund managers and billionaires such as
Bill Gates. Emanuel’s passionate zeal to downsize schools in
impoverished black neighborhoods is matched only by his misdirected
enthusiasm to lay out $195 million "on a basketball arena for DePaul
University, a private Chicago university."
3.
Emanuel’s policies are symptomatic of a much larger war against
teachers, public goods and the social contract. We increasingly live in
societies based on the vocabulary of "choice" and a denial of reality -
a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible
concentration of power in relatively few hands and a growing machinery
of social death and culture of cruelty.
4.
As power becomes global and is removed from local and nation-based
politics, more and more individuals and groups are being defined by a
free-floating class of ultra-rich and corporate power brokers as
disposable, redundant, and irrelevant. Consequently, there are a
growing number of people, especially young people, who increasingly
inhabit zones of hardship, suffering and terminal exclusion. Power has
lost its moorings in democratic institutions and removes itself from any
sense of social, civic and political responsibilities. Mayor Emanuel,
along with his neoliberal political allies, occupies the dead zone of
capitalism - a zone marked by a ruthless indifference to the suffering
of others and self-righteous coldness that makes human beings
superfluous and unwanted. At the same time, this zone of capital
accumulation and dispossession destroys those public spheres and
collective structures such as public and higher education that are
capable of resisting the logic of the pure market and the
anti-democratic pressures it imposes on American society. Peter Brogan
sums it up well in his analysis of the forces behind the current attacks
on teachers and public education. He writes that the neoliberal agenda
behind such attacks has:
been outlined in numerous planning documents from different city
administrations, some of which have been drafted by the Commercial Club
and have at the center an urban development strategy based on
revitalizing the downtown core and prioritizing the financial, real
estate and tourist sectors of the economy while at the same time
demolishing public housing and schools in order to gentrify historically
African American and Latino working class neighborhoods. These
transformations are deeply related to the larger structural crisis of
capitalism. The background to this is the crisis of profitability that
comes to a head in the early 1970s, and the ushering in a period of
capitalist regulation known as neoliberalism, marked by savage attacks
on unions, workers and working class living standards. Reconstructing
the built environment of the city has been absolutely central to all of
these changes. This is one attempt to deal with the structural crisis of
capitalism at this critical juncture. And destroying unions, and
teachers’ unions in particular, have been key to that attempt. 5.
This is all the more reason for educators and others to address
important social issues and to defend public education as democratic
public sphere. And it is all the more reason to defend the Chicago
Public Teachers Union in its struggle with Emanuel because this battle
is not a local issue. On the contrary, it is a national issue that will
set the stage for the future of American public education, which is on
its deathbed. The struggle in Chicago must be understood as part of a
larger set of market-driven policies in which everything is privatized,
transformed into "spectacular spaces of consumption," and subject to the
vicissitudes of the military-security state.
6.
One consequence is the emergence of what the late Tony Judt called an
"eviscerated society" - "one that is stripped of the thick mesh of
mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found in" any
viable democracy.
7. This grim reality represents a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will, and open democracy.
8.
It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic
ideals. It is also the politics that drives Emanuel’s policies in
Chicago around education and a host of other issues.
In Emanuel’s ideological script, the common good is viewed as either a
source of profits or pathology. The market is the only template that
matters in shaping all aspects of society, and freedom is reduced to the
freedom to shop, indulge one’s self-interests and willingly support a
society in which market values trump democratic values. According to
Emanuel and his ilk, the arch enemies of freedom are the welfare state,
unions and public service workers such a public school teachers. And as
was evident in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, law and
order is the new language for mobilizing shared fears rather than shared
responsibilities, just as war becomes the all-embracing organizing
principle for developing a market-driven society and economy.
9.
Emanuel supports a notion of educational reform in which pedagogy is
often treated simply as a set of strategies and skills to use in order
to teach prespecified subject matter. In this context, pedagogy becomes
synonymous with teaching as a technique or the practice of a craft-like
skill. Even worse, pedagogy becomes a sterile method for developing
skills aimed at raising test scores. The Chicago public school teachers
must reject this definition of teaching and educational reform, along
with its endless slavish imitations, even when they are claimed as part
of an "educational reform" project. In opposition to the instrumental
reduction of pedagogy to a method - which has no language for relating
the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of
citizenship - progressive educators need to argue for modes of critical
pedagogy that illuminate the relationships among knowledge, authority
and power.
10.
For instance, any viable reform movement must raise questions regarding
who has control over the conditions for the production of knowledge. Is
the production of knowledge and curricula in the hands of teachers,
textbook companies, corporate interests, or other forces?
Central to any viable notion that what makes a pedagogy critical is,
in part, the recognition that pedagogy is always a deliberate attempt on
the part of educators to influence how and what knowledges and
subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations.
Of crucial importance is the question of authority and how it is
legitimated, used and exercised. When teachers are stripped of
authority, pedagogy becomes lifeless, methodical and militarized,
reduced to low-level skills and modes of standardization that debase
creativity and cripple the imaginative capacities of both teachers and
students. Part of what the Chicago teachers are doing in their protests
against the school closings is drawing attention to the ways in which
authority, knowledge, power, desire and experience are produced under
specific basic conditions of learning, and in doing so, they are
shedding light on educational reform movements in which teaching is
stripped of its sense of accountability to parents, place, and the
complex dynamic of history and communities. Under such circumstances,
the Chicago teachers are refusing educational policies in which matters
of authority and pedagogy are removed from matters of values, norms and
power.
Emanuel’s neoliberal educational philosophy has no understanding of
what actually happens in classrooms and other educational settings
because it is incapable of raising questions.
Nor does it acknowledge that pedagogy is simultaneously about the
knowledge and practices teachers and students might engage in together,
along with the values, social relations and visions such practices
legitimate. What scares Emanuel and other neoliberal reformers is that
pedagogy is a moral and political practice that is always implicated in
power relations because it offers particular versions and visions of
civic life, community, the future, and how we might construct
representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social
environment.
At the heart of the Chicago demonstrations against Emanuel’s polices
are a series of broader questions that situate the right-wing reform
movement in a broader set of market-driven politics. For instance, what
kind of society allows economic injustice and massive inequality to run
wild in a society allowing drastic cuts in education and public
services? Why are more police being put in schools just as more prisons
are being built in the United States? What does it mean when students
face not just tuition hikes but a lifetime of financial debt while
governments in Canada, Chile and the United States spend trillions on
weapons of death and needless wars? What kind of education does it take,
both in and out of schools, to recognize the emergence of various
economic, political, cultural and social forces that point to the
dissolution of democracy and the possible emergence of a new kind of
authoritarian state?
In an age of irresponsible privatization, unchecked individualism,
celebrity culture, unfettered consumerism and a massive flight from
moral responsibility, it has become more and more difficult to
acknowledge that educators and other cultural workers have an enormous
responsibility in opposing the current threat to the planet and everyday
life by bringing democratic political culture back to life. Lacking a
self-consciously democratic political focus or project, teachers are
often reduced either to the role of a technician or functionary engaged
in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent
problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of one’s
pedagogical practices and research undertakings. In opposition to this
model, with its claims to, and conceit of, political neutrality, it is
crucial that teachers in Chicago and cities across the United States
combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and
active citizen. This requires finding ways to connect the practice of
classroom teaching with the operations of power in the larger society
and to provide the conditions for students to view themselves as
critical agents capable of making those who exercise authority and power
answerable for their actions. The role of a critical education is not
to train students solely for jobs, but also to educate them to question
critically the institutions, policies and values that shape their lives,
relationships to others, and myriad connections to the larger world.
Equally important is the task of teacher unions all over America to
forge alliances with a range of social movements so that the struggle
for education is connected to the struggle for social provisions, a new
understanding of politics, and the development of mass movements that
can shut down the savagery of a neoliberal public pedagogy and economic
machine that is the enemy of any viable notion of democracy.
Education is never innocent, and if it is to be understood and
problematized as a form of academic labor, educators must resist all
calls to depoliticize pedagogy through appeals to either scientific
objectivity or ideological dogmatism. Educational dogmatism now takes
the form of blatant attacks on unions, the dissolution of public schools
largely inhabited by poor minority students, the imposition of
disciplinary apparatuses that criminalize the behavior of low-income and
poor students of color, and the development of curricula that deadens
the mind and soul through a narrow pedagogy of test-taking. What is
happening in Chicago and other cities in the United States is the
production of pedagogy of repression. This suggests the need for
educators to rethink the purpose and meaning of education, the crucial
importance of pedagogy in a democracy, and the collective struggles that
will have to be waged against neoliberal racism and its attempts to
dismantle the power of teachers to gain control over the conditions of
their labor.
Education must be reclaimed as central to any viable notion of
citizenship, civic responsibility and democracy itself. What Rahm
Emmanuel and his ilk fear is the potential of public education to enable
students to think critically, hold power accountable and imagine
education as a form of educated hope. Education and pedagogy cannot be
reduced to the dictates of an audit culture with its rendering of
critical thought nil and void just as it elevates a mindless pedagogy of
test-taking as the ultimate pedagogical practice and the final arbiter
over what constitutes quality teaching, learning and what it means to be
educated. What is lost in this pedagogical practice, is a pedagogy that
provides the conditions for students to come to grips with their own
power, master the best histories and legacies of education available,
learn to think critically and be willing to hold authority accountable -
and most importantly, the dangerous notion that changing attitudes is
not enough and that students should also be pressed to exercise a
fearsome form of social responsibility as engaged citizens willing to
struggle for social, economic and political justice. This is the last
approach to education that the current mayor of Chicago wants to see
materialize in the cities’ public schools.
What Chicago public schools teachers are fighting for in their three
days of demonstrations is the right to define teaching as a performative
practice that is not only about teaching young people to be literate
and knowledgeable but also to embrace the mutually informing modalities
of power and knowledge so as to engage education as an act of
intervention in the world, one that moves beyond simple matters of
critique and understanding. At the essence of the brave struggles waged
by the Chicago public school teachers is the recognition that any
viable approach to pedagogy must acknowledge the crucial nature of the
labor conditions necessary for teacher autonomy, cooperation, decent
working conditions, safety of the children, and the relations of power
necessary to give teachers and students the capacity to restage power in
productive ways - ways that point to self-development,
self-determination and social agency.
What these three days of demonstrations must address is that without
power over the conditions of their labor, teachers become pawns in a
neoliberal politics in which they are deskilled, reduced to security
guards, and work under conditions that transform education into a form
of training. High-stakes testing and its corresponding tactic of
promoting cheating among administrators, putting into play the most
degrading forms of competition, and its killing of the civic imagination
is both a debased form of instrumental rationality and a reification of
method - put another way, a kind of methodological madness. What needs
to be addressed is that pedagogy is more than a method or its
antithesis, a free-wheeling conversation between students and teachers.
On the contrary, it is precisely by recognizing that teaching is always
directive - that is, an act of intervention inextricably mediated
through particular forms of authority that teachers
can offer
students - for whatever use they wish to make of them - a variety of
analytic tools, diverse historical traditions and a wide range of
knowledge. At issue here is a pedagogical practice that must provide the
conditions for students to learn and narrate themselves and for
teachers to be learners attentive to the histories, knowledge and
experiences that students bring to the classroom and any other sphere of
learning. In this instance, pedagogy should enable students to learn
how to govern rather than be governed.
The war being waged against Chicago Public schools, teachers and
students is the product of a corporate ideology and pedagogy that numbs
the mind and the soul, emphasizing repressive modes of learning that
promote winning at all costs, learning how not to question authority,
and disdaining the hard work of learning how to be thoughtful, critical,
and attentive to the power relations that shape everyday life and the
larger world. As learning is privatized, depoliticized, and reduced to
teaching students how to be good consumers, any viable notions of the
social, public values, citizenship and democracy wither and die.
What role might public school teachers take in light of poisonous
assaults waged on public schools by the forces of neoliberalism? In the
most immediate sense, they can raise their collective voices against the
influence of corporations that are flooding societies with a culture of
war, consumerism, commercialism and privatization. They can show how
this culture of commodified cruelty and violence is only one part of a
broader and all-embracing militarized culture of war, the arms industry,
and a Darwinian survival-of the-fittest ethic that increasingly
disconnects schools from public values, the common good and democracy
itself. They can bring all of their intellectual and collective
resources together to critique and dismantle the imposition of
high-stakes testing and other commercially driven modes of
accountability on schools. They can mobilize young people and others to
defend education as a public good by advocating for policies that invest
in schools rather than in the military-industrial complex and its
massive and expensive weapons of death, for instance, the US
government’s investment in procuring a number of F35 jets that cost $137
million each. They can educate young people and a larger public to
fight against putting police in schools, modeling schools after prisons,
and implementing zero tolerance policies that largely punish poor
minority children.
Instead of investing in schools, children, health care, jobs for
young people, and much needed infrastructures, neoliberal societies
celebrate militarism, hyper-masculinity, extreme competition, and a
survival of the fittest ethic while exhibiting disdain for any form of
shared bonds, dependency and compassion for others. Advocates of
neoliberalism have eliminated social provisions, destroyed pension
plans, eliminated health-care benefits, allowed inequality to run wild,
and have done so in order to safeguard and expand the assets of the rich
and powerful. As social bonds and the institutions that support them
disappear from such societies, so do the formative cultures that make
civic education, critical literacy, and cultures of questioning
possible. Too many school systems operate within disciplinary
apparatuses that turn public education into either an extension of the
prison-industrial complex or the culture of the mall. When not being
arrested for trivial rule violations, students are subjected to walls,
buses, and bathrooms that become giant advertisements for consumer
products, many of which are detrimental to the health of students,
contributing to the obesity crisis in America. Increasingly, even
curricula are organized to reflect the sound of the cash register,
hawking products for students to buy and promoting the interests of
corporations that celebrate fossil fuels as an energy source,
sugar-filled drinks, and a Disney-like view of the world. And of course,
this commodification of public education is migrating to higher
education with the speed of light. University student centers are being
modeled after department stores, complete with an endless array of
vendors trying to sell credit cards to a generation already swimming in
debt. University faculty members are valued more for their ability to
secure grants than for their scholarship.
What is encouraging about the growing opposition of the Chicago
teachers to the poisonous policies, pedagogies, and shameless racism of
Mayor Rahm Emanuel is their willingness, under the inspiring educational
leadership of Karen Lewis, the head of the Chicago Teachers Union, to
develop a discourse of both critique and possibility. This has meant
developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect reading the
word with reading the world and doing so in ways that enhance the
capacities of young people as critical agents and engaged citizens. In
taking up this project, Lewis and others have struggled to create the
conditions that give students the opportunity to become critical and
engaged citizens who have the knowledge and courage to struggle in order
to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. Hope
in this instance is educational, removed from the fantasy of idealism,
unaware of the constraints facing the dream of a democratic society.
Educated hope is not a call to overlook the difficult conditions that
shape both schools and the larger social order. On the contrary, it is
the precondition for providing those languages, values, relations of
power and collective struggles that point the way to a more democratic
and just world.
Educated hope provides the basis for dignifying the labor of
teachers; it offers up critical knowledge linked to democratic social
change; it affirms shared responsibilities; and it encourages teachers
and students to recognize justice, equality and social responsibility as
fundamental dimensions of learning. Such hope offers the possibility
of thinking beyond the given. As difficult as this task may seem to
educators, if not to a larger public, it is a struggle worth waging.
It is important to note that democracy begins to fail and political
life becomes impoverished in the absence of those vital public spheres
such as public and higher education in which civic values, public
scholarship and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a
future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity and civic
courage. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one
that thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and
agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good.
11.
The right-wing governors, corporate-affiliated politicians, and the
shameless hedge-fund managers and billionaires are waging a war in order
to colonize public education and destroy the dignity of teachers,
students and critical learning. The Chicago teachers refuse to believe
that the antidemocratic market-driven forces attacking American public
schools are irreversible, part of a new common sense that is beyond
critical inquiry and dissent. The three days of demonstrations hold a
wider meaning for all Americans. Not only do they demonstrate that the
future is still open, but that the time has come through a show of
collective struggle and moral and political outrage that public
education is crucial to invigorating and fortifying a new era of civic
imagination, a renewed sense of social agency and an impassioned,
collective political will. Public school teachers are one of the few
remaining forces left in the land of corrupt bankers, hedge-fund
managers and right-wing politicians who can imagine the promise of
democracy and are willing to fight for it. The struggle being waged by
the Chicago Public School teachers is part and parcel of a battle for
the essence of education, if not democracy itself.
1.
See, for example, David Harvey,
The New Imperialism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); David Harvey,
A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Wendy Brown,
Edgework (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Henry A. Giroux,
Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008); Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy,
Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford University Press, 2010).
2.
Valerie
Strauss, “Three Days of Marches in chicago to Protest School Closings,” The Washington Post (May 17, 2013).
3.
Travis
Waldron, “Why Is Chicago Devoting $125 Million To Build A Basketball Arena For A Private University?,” ThinkProgress (May 15, 2013).
4.
See, for instance, on the rise of the racist punishing state, Michelle Alexander,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010); on the severe costs of massive inequality, Joseph E. Stiglitz,
The Price of Inequality: How Today Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: Norton, 2012); on the turning of public schools into prisons, see Annette Fuentes,
Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse (New York: Verso, 2011).
5.
Peter Brogan, “What’s Behind the Attack on Teachers and Public Education?” Solidarity (September 14, 2012).
6.
Quoted in Michael L. Silk and David L. Andrews. “(Re)Presenting
Baltimore: Place, Policy, Politics, and Cultural Pedagogy.” Review of
Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 33 (2011), p. 436.
7.
Terry
Eagleton, “Reappraisals: What is the worth of social democracy?” Harper’s Magazine, (October 2010), p. 78.
8.
Alex Honneth,
Pathologies of Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 188.
9.
For an excellent analysis of contemporary forms of neoliberalism,
Stuart Hall, “The Neo-Liberal Revolution,” Cultural Studies, Vol. 25,
No. 6, (November 2011, pp. 705-728; see also Harvey,
A Brief History of Neoliberalism; Giroux,
Against the Terror of Neoliberalism.
10.
For examples of this tradition, see Maria Nikolakaki, ed.
Critical Pedagogy in the Dark Ages: Challenges and Possibilities, (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Henry A. Giroux,
On Critical Pedagogy (New York: Continuum, 2011).
11.
See, Henry A. Giroux,
The Education Deficit and the War on Youth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013).
Michelle Rhee(Credit: © Hyungwon Kang / Reuters)
David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist,
magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile
Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
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