In this article author David Limond provides a whistlestop tour of the ascendance of Western neo-liberalism and the resulting infusion of neoliberal values into the British – and correspondingly, eventually – Irish educational systems. Published in the summer of 2007 at the height of the Celtic Tiger – on the precipice of the 2008 Financial Crisis – Limond in his penultimate paragraph and quoting Orwell seems prescient when he notes; “‘…a return to “free” competition means for the great mass of people a [return to] tyranny’ because the market is fundamentally irresponsible and uncaring. But this is a lesson that many in Ireland have yet to learn…”
David Limond is a lecturer in the History of Education at Trinity College, Dublin. His research interests are primarily concerned with progressive education in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s and the past and future of universities.
David Limond, ‘Education, Neo-Liberalism and Contemporary Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 96, No. 382 (Summer 2007), 169 – 178. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27896461
The behemoths who effected the right-wing revolution of the 1980s have either quit the political stage or died, but their legacy lives on. The dead whom I have in mind are: Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), Ireland’s own principal prophet of neo-liberalism Charles Haughey (1925-2006) and France’s foremost political chameleon of modern times, François Mitterand (1916-1996). Of the undead leaders of that revolution I need not speak. Their revolution involved a sometimes uncomfortable alliance between social conservatism and neo-liberalism, but while the broad left may have won the cultural struggles of that decade (cementing in place changed social mores, winning recognition for the value of diversity and tolerance of ways and conditions of life previously considered beyond the pale of respectability or fit objects only of pity, such as people with disabilities) it was certainly the right that triumphed in the economic arena, with neo-liberal values (essentially the primacy of the market over state or society) emerging as the all-but undisputed orthodoxy in the political economy of the following decades.
Writing in his preface to a reissued edition of a classic work by Samuel Smiles, the principal intellectual architect of the UK’s neo-liberal revolution, Keith Joseph, gave a succinct account of its values – consumption over production: ‘[W]e are all – everyone in the world to a greater or lesser extent – consumers’, though he conceded that ‘The problem in any society is to reconcile the interests of people as workers with the interests of the same people… as consumers’. Though Joseph was not an advocate of the National Curriculum…it is largely this objective, the preparation of worker consumers that predominates in its aims and objectives.
I study the history of education…because I am fully convinced that, while there may be no royal road to the understanding of anything, one of the express routes to appreciating any society’s values, priorities, assumptions and beliefs is to examine what that society (or that society’s leadership class) deems most important to preserve, communicate and perpetuate generation to generation.
The neo-liberal ideologues of the 1980s made Adam Smith their totem and their talisman…In contemporary educational practices in increasingly many parts of the world the hidden hand is revealed – pushing one and all towards productive work and the consumption that is correlative to production at every turn. From Smith the neo-liberals certainly derived a justification of state intervention in education with which they seemed satisfied. The educated population was the better disciplined population and the better disciplined population would work harder, consume more and so work harder again the next day to pays the bills from the day before.
…Neo-liberalism insists on education as first, foremost and almost exclusively preparation for work, not because it believes in the dignity of labour and the value of useful and creative production, but because it assumes the primacy of consumption in human life. Neo-liberalism assumes that we always are, always have been and always will be consumed by the desire to consume, and values work (and hence preparation for work in and through education) only as a means to this end.
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Amongst the most obvious manifestations of [this] orthodoxy in England was, and is, the 1988 National Curriculum [NC] and there is an intimate, if often unacknowledged, relationship between the NC and its nearest Irish equivalent. The neo-liberal ideology written into the NC is evident at every turn: in its emphasis on the need to manage teaching and learning through specific and measurable targets, as in business practice; in its emphasis on obviously vocational skills and knowledge through the subjects of information technology and design and technology and in its behaviourist reductionism. And while these values, aims and assumptions may be moderated – or even compromised at times – by other values and priorities implicitly or explicitly present in the curriculum document…the overwhelming sense is always of encountering a curriculum that is an instrument intent both on recognising and advancing the orthodoxy of neo-liberalism.
The Irish Revised Curriculum [RC] came into being in 1999, following a ministerial request for the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment ‘to… review… the primary curriculum, while retaining the best principles adopted in [the ‘new’ curriculum of] 1971′. The RC covers junior and senior infants and first class to sixth class inclusive (ages 4-12) and thus equates to the NC most closely at Key Stages 1 and 2 (ages 5-11). Since its first implementation, in 1988, the NC has been issued in revised versions in 1995 and 1999…Insofar as the RC was very significantly and very obviously informed by the 1995 NC and insofar as the 1995 NC is very obviously and very significantly a product of neo-liberal values, priorities and assumptions, it follows that the RC is equally a product of such values, priorities and assumptions.
Thus, despite the differences between the NC and the RC…both seek to prepare worker-consumers rather than citizens or intellectuals, because neo-liberalism assumes that only the worker-consumer can be fulfilled. Only the worker-consumer truly benefits from the operation of the market because the market exists to serve, and is comprised of, worker-consumers. Neo-liberalism does not allow those who do not work the means to consume (unless their consumption is financed willingly by some other worker-consumer[s]) and it assumes that those who do not consume (or who consume least) are not (or only minimally) fulfilled. The preparation of the worker-consumers of the future thus becomes the highest end to which education can aspire.
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What Next For Irish Schools?
…The NC was both a cause and an effect of social change and the processes of change that made the NC and that the NC accelerated are increasingly to be found in Ireland. The neo-liberal ‘agenda’ in schools in England, Ireland and elsewhere means many things in practice: an increasing attention paid to vocational preparation in the curriculum, the privatisation and ‘out-sourcing’ of school ancillary services, the introduction, both explicitly and implicitly, of an emphasis on entrepreneurial ‘skills’, advertising and ‘branding’ being associated with education through commercial sponsorship of school activities and much more besides. It has not been and is not being universally accepted without resistance, however. One manifestation of this in Ireland being the spontaneous emergence of a ‘grass roots’ teachers’/parents’ coalition, the Campaign for Commercial-Free Education’ opposing the ‘contaminate[d] learning process’ that results from making ‘brand awareness and increased sales… the primary lesson objectives’. But the seemingly relentless juggernaut that threatens to bend all education to the neo-liberal imperatives of production, trade and consumption looks set to roll on.
What Next for Irish Society?
That contemporary Ireland is a country newly rich, where some – though by no manner of means all – of the population have benefited from a decade or more of unprecedented economic growth is not in doubt. These are new times for Ireland…The indices of insecure nouveau riche wealth are everywhere in a country where SUVs clog the roads like cholesterol plaques, their owners venturing only tentatively beyond the private Maginot Lines around their ‘gated’ communities. This is a country awash in the values of neo-liberalism and, to some extent, proud of the fact.
Increasingly, Irish politicians speak only one language when they speak of education, from schools to universities: marketspeak. The market is expected to solve all educational problems and, in turn, education is expected to prepare new worker-consumers who will advance Ireland’s collective wealth by their capacity to compete on its behalf in the international market. These views were already evident in Britain, and before that the US, before they ever appeared in Ireland. They now dominate in Ireland and have done so increasingly since the late 1990s.
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In his 1944 review of The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992), arguably the first and certainly the most widely-celebrated prophet of neo liberalism, George Orwell (1903-1950) said that what Hayek ‘does not see, or will not admit, [is] that a return to “free” competition means for the great mass of people a [return to] tyranny’ because the market is fundamentally irresponsible and uncaring. But this is a lesson that many in Ireland have yet to learn and we remain happy slaves, locked in our chains of consumption in the meantime, education only contriving to make us more content with our consumptive lot.
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Photo credit: Classroom by MDMA on Flickr.