Neoliberalism in education

By way of Susan Ohanian, we find Benjamin Barber's take on the new trend to take the public out of public education. Yup. He is the guy who wrote Strong Democracy and Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy.

It is of course not hard to understand the sources of the current drive for school privatization. They are to be found in the neo-liberal ideology and preoccupation with market solutions that have dominated American political thinking at least since the years of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the United States and the United Kingdom. If democracy itself is to be privatized, why not privatize democracy’s chief public goods like education?

Neoliberalism. The new wave.