higher educations removal from the publis sphere

[bentech]

Moreover, higher education is now dominated by a neoliberal discourse that removes it from its role as a democratic public sphere. Instead, it has become a financial investment and another workstation whose goal “is to insure that young people and society generally, can compete in a global economy.” Under such circumstances, education becomes “vocationalized,” democracy is cast as the enemy of freedom, and politics turns dark.

These anti-democratic tendencies are evident in the ways in which neoliberalism since the 1980s has reshaped formal education at all levels into an adjunct of corporate power and repository of market forces, and has imposed commercial relations as a template for governing all of social life. Every idea, social relationship, value, institution and form of knowledge runs the risk of being “economized” — turned into either a commodity, a brand or an ideological adjunct of corporate power.

This is not only a formula for the death of those public spheres that make a democracy possible; it is also a condition for the growth of authoritarianism

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