Language, Education and Neoliberalism

Alfonso Del Percio and Mi-Cha Flubacher

Introduction

On May 3, 1981, The Sunday Times published an exclusive interview with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in which she was asked to elaborate on the measures taken by her cabinet to counter the economic recession. Competitiveness, she argued, was the key to economic recovery and job creation. To take advantage of expanding world trade, Thatcher noted, national industries needed to boost productivity and become more flexible. Then, it would be important to appraise and pay labor based on output. Moreover, workers should be liberated from the unionist structures and their feelings of loyalty to their employers fostered, while their cooperation with, and sense of responsibility to, their own companies should be promoted. Instead of blaming the government for increasing unemployment rates, Thatcher claimed that individuals needed to make the best of what technological change and industrial restructuration had to offer. She made an argument for a more effective and less monopolistic and bureaucratic state apparatus capable of supporting the British industry in transforming into a flourishing, efficient state able to compete with any other company across the globe. 'Economics', she concluded, 'are [just] the method. The object is to change the heart and soul of the nation' (Butt, 1981).

Language and education played a major role in the societal transformations that the British prime minister had in mind. In order to get at the 'heart and soul of the nation', i.e. to promote an ideological reorientation of the British public and to change people's attitudes and behaviors, Thatcher launched educational reforms that would produce the type of self-responsible, flexible and productive citizens needed for economic recovery. Pupils, especially, had to make headway in mathematics and science while also improving their English skills – i.e. in written and spoken English as well as in knowledge of literature. British schoolchildren should learn to articulate well, to give their thoughts and views appropriate expression, to develop the specific communicative qualities that would make them desirable for employment in local businesses and industries and, finally, to prepare themselves for technological change (Keay, 1987). Thatcher's educational reform also encompassed a redefinition of the privileges traditionally enjoyed by the 'educational establishment' in terms of unionism, salaries, training and performance assessment as well as the application of market logics to every domain of Britain's educational apparatus (Edwards, 1989; Wilby, 2013).

The social and economic changes promoted by Thatcher were informed by neoliberalism, a political economic philosophy developed and promoted by a 'thought collective' that has been traced by historians to the networks of intellectuals in Europe and North America after World War I (Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009). These intellectuals aimed to oppose the rising tide of collectivism, state-centered planning, and socialism that, in their view, had caused the Great War (Lemke, 2001). In order to counter the dominance of Keynesian politics and to avoid the dangers of alternative paradigms propagated by the Soviet Union, this group of intellectuals argued for the institutionalization of neoliberalism, i.e. they envisioned a society based on a political economic philosophy that preserves individual freedom through the protection of private property and that posits a competitive market as the key logic underpinning every domain of social life (Plehwe, 2009). Indeed, private property was considered the prerequisite for decentralized power and individual freedom. Freedom of choice – on the part of the producer, worker and consumer but also in terms of every individual's capacity to choose and plan their own lives independently – was therefore also seen as a source of democracy and an imperative for the efficient and satisfactory production of goods and services. Moreover, proponents of neoliberalism believed a stable and predictable legal and institutional state apparatus, i.e. the 'rule of law' (cf. von Hayek, 1944), constitutes an integral component in ensuring an effective competitive order (Ganti, 2014; Lemke, 2001; Plehwe, 2009). If these intellectuals shared classical liberalism 's belief in the regulatory forces of the market, one of the main ways their philosophy differed from the older ideology was the assumption that a 'good' and 'just' society does not occur naturally, but instead requires an organized political effort (Rose & Miller, 2008), i.e. a redefined mode of governmentality that – by extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social actions – reorganizes the relationship between the state, capital, property and individuals and that has as its main goal the maintenance of 'freedom' and competition (Brown, 2015).

Thatcher was not the only politician influenced by neoliberal philosophy. Neoliberal ideas are believed to be at the root of several reform agendas that, with the support of persuasive economic advisors as well as bastions of neoliberalism such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or the World Trade Organization (WTO), have been implemented since the late 1970s by various governments around the world (Harvey, 2005). For instance, neoliberalism has been argued to be the main motor in propelling the transition from a so-called 'socialist economy' to a 'market economy' (e.g. in Eastern Europe, South America and...