English Education

Sociocultural Paper

Sociocultural Perspectives

Neoliberalism, Race, and Income

Neoliberalism is the idea in American culture that believe business should trump Marxism. It was seen as a response to the progressive forms of government that struggled to come to fruition in the late 60's. Candidates such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan believed that there was no other option for the government to run. In Margaret Thatcher's economy, there was a boom followed by a bust due to government deregulation, as well as a faulty enterprise in the Falkland Islands that cost many lives. However, she and Regan were the emergence of modern conservatives such as President Trump and President Bush – tying business matters and innovation to traditional values. Neoliberalism forgets all to easily that Adam Smith's model of the free economy was of shareholders that got equal exchange from their transaction, tying it more closely with the Marxist view of equal distribution of wealth rather than one of one shareholder taking more in exchange from another (Bresser-Pereira, 5). With so many people idealizing the Orwellian view of the government as being bad with an inability to help it's citizens and instead taking from them, they all too easily give up their powers to billionaires that would rather exploit the poor instead (Bresser-Pereira, 12). Even at this moment, a college graduate is less likely to be hired in a corporation rather than an individual who has little vocational training and is less likely to ask their employer for a raise, showing that companies and businesses find "civic education to be unnecessary (Bresser-Pereira,14-15). In the future, we could readily have workers that do not question their lack of access to better pay, instead believing idealistically that hard work would pay off and staying in a financially undesirable situation for years. This is a main factor in not hiring the graduate school student, because it's all too dangerous to have informative employees. Understanding that higher education and business do not mix, they've sought to turn away people from higher education.

Education is quickly making the leap to Neoliberalism in extensive ways. For one thing, the structure of testing and assessment has made content geared towards tests with those tests leading to a cumulative test that eventually covers the material of which will determine funding for the school: the state assessment. For example, a survey of World Literature would include many white males from Britain and the Americas, with the occasional exception of one white female. This kind of content does not relate to students' lives, many who are biracial and bilingual. Instead, it leads to the similar belief, for example, that white men were the only ones who discovered science and white men being the only ones who wrote literature – leading other students to believe Literature and Science are not for them simply due to the lack of multicultural content.

There is a wealth of information that is kept back from students, teachers, and parents due to Neoliberalism that "undermines teacher authority that had been established within progressivism, shifting authority away from both students and teachers to state curriculum and surveillance authorities" (Davies+Bansel, 14). There is more focus on remembering historical events than discussion on being active forces for social change. It is said that business have a greater desire to "open up public schools to privatization, govern it according to business models of performance and efficiency, and institute a technical curriculum that coheres in form and content with these models" (Lissovoy, 5). There can be curriculum changes, such as literature that includes a variety of perspectives from multiple sources, and learning how to use research to benefit your own ideas rather than basing your ideas off of someone else's just because you believe them to be an "expert" in their field. However, the evidence overwhelmingly supports that students do not know how to write nor to understand rhetoric, are not taught cultural literacy, and do not see the current political/economic system within the United States as one that they can change – choosing to identify as non-political and see having an informed opinion as socially deviant instead. Adding onto students gaining nothing from their education, teachers are more concerned with achieving the right test scores to have a job the next year – causing "schools that are branded, and students to bear the collective and individual stigma of the scores they reproduce "(Lissovoy, 8). There is little to be done in an education system that is shuffling people into the workplace with no preparation.