The role of education in a capitalist society is to reproduce social and economic inequities. Capitalist logics center meritocracy, self-reliance, and competition, and establish hierarchies based on perceptions of economic productivity. Klees (2020) states that capitalism explains economic failings as a lack of individual skills, creating the discourse that blames education for the mismatch between what is produced by education and what is needed by the labour markets, redirecting attention away from larger structural issues and injustices. Inherent to this mismatch theory is the human capital and knowledge economy discourses, in which the purpose of education has been formulated as the accumulation of individual skills and knowledge needed for employment (Klees, 2020). Foundational to this human capital discourse is the neoliberal discourse (Klees, 2020).
Harvey (2005) defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political and economic practices that propose that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (p. 2). Neoliberal logics focus on efficiency, standardization, competition, enterprise, and market gain over equity, social justice, civic engagement, self-awareness, and broader, more liberatory notions of learning. Thus, neoliberalism positions schooling as a mechanism to prepare students for a globalized, competitive workforce (Barnoff et al., 2017). This reduces students’ educational experiences to bureaucratic, discrete, and often disconnected experiences that fail to account for historical, economic, and socio-political contexts.
As schools become sites of management, focused on marketization and competition, students are increasingly viewed as consumers, not as co-constructors of knowledge (Busher & Fox, 2020). The dominance of neoliberal ideology leads schools to evaluate students through standardization, productivity and performativity, placing value mainly on measurable outcomes rather than on their humanity, civic engagement, and the public good . This is also evident in higher education as universities strive to build their reputation as high-quality research/teaching institutions through competitive means of securing grants, researchers, and students (Busher & Fox, 2020). Neoliberalism promotes conformity and compliance through rules, norms, and surveillance (James, 2020).
Neoliberalism influences leadership within educational settings as it normalizes leader-follower relationships that encourage compliance to and with institutions and systems of power, limiting identity, agency, voice, dissent, questioning, and other forms democratic action (Kliewer, 2019). Neoliberalism “plays on the economic insecurities and anxiety of individual people” (Kliewer, 2019, p. 579), feeding into narratives of leadership as capacity-building, self-investment, continually reinventing yourself, and positivity by placing the interest of self over the collective.
In critiquing the logics of neoliberalism, we consider the following:
1. Illusion of choice – The promise of freedom of choice is at the heart of neoliberal ideologies. The problem with this theory is that there is differential access to information, resources, and power. This urges us to ask the question, freedom for whom and to what end?
2. Individual responsibility for free, autonomous individuals: Similar to white supremacy, critiques of neoliberalism challenge liberal myths of neutrality, meritocracy, and objectivity. Neoliberalism assumes and has us believe that larger social issues such as poverty and mental health are private, individual issues that are best solved by individual responsibility, instead of by support systems, governments, and a society committed to the public good. Neoliberalism calls for deregulation, the reduction of social and economic support and the privatization of state services, which is accompanied by violent constructions of the poor as undeserving, lazy, immoral, and bad (Barnoff et al., 2017).
3. Prominence of deficit thinking: Individualism also leads to deficit thinking in schooling, which is the belief that success and failure rest with individual students, families, communities, or educators instead of examining how systems and structures produce and reproduce social stratification along lines of race, gender, gender identity, social class, ability, sexuality, language, and more. Students are therefore encouraged to be more resilient, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and work harder to overcome “individual” barriers.
4. Schools are failing and it is the fault of teachers (Klees, 2020): In addition to blaming individual students, families, and communities, neoliberalism also blames teachers for failing school systems because these teachers are simply not talented enough to support student needs. Aims to undermine public education and the common good are central aims of privatizing education and securing wealth in the hands of a few.
By disrupting neoliberal approaches to leadership, we consider several questions:
1. How does a hyper-focus on management, accounting, and reporting, obscure liberatory possibilities for leadership?
2. How do top-down, hierarchical models of leadership engender leader–follower relationships that normalize competition, compliance, performativity, docility and subserviency?
3. What does a narrow focus on standardized test scores and narrow pedagogical approaches negate in schooling and leadership?
4. How might a focus on critical democracy encourage students, educators, and families to see the ways in which they are politicized, raced, gendered, historicized, and socialized?
5. What might it look like if leaders engaged with notions of difference, recognition, rights, advocacy, solidarity, community, collectivism, and care?
References
Barnoff, L., Moffatt, K., Todd, S. & Panitch, M. (2017). Academic leadership in the context of neoliberalism: The practice of social work directors. Canadian Social Work Review, 34(1), 5–21.
Busher, H., & Fox, A. (2020). The amoral academy? A critical discussion of research ethics in the neo-liberal university. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1707656
Harvey, David (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
James, H. (2020). Neoliberalism and its interlocutors. Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, 1(2), 484-518.
Klees, S.J. (2020). Beyond neoliberalism: Reflections on capitalism and education. Policy Futures in Education, 18(1), 9–29.
Kliewer, B. W. (2019). Disentangling neoliberalism from leadership education: Critical approaches to leadership learning and development in higher education. New Political Science, 41(4), 574–587.
