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THE PRIVATIZED PUBLIC: ANTAGONISM FOR A
RADICAL DEMOCRATIC POLITICS IN SCHOOLS?
Deron Boyles
Department of Educational Policy Studies
Georgia State University
Abstract. In an extended era of privatization initiatives, when accountability principles and
competitive business logics pervade school discourse and practice, what is left of the ‘‘public’’ part
of public schooling? When market rationality privileges individualism and competition and provides
much of the justification for the aims of U.S. schools, how is the notion of the public good evidenced?
In this essay Deron Boyles makes the claim that public schools inordinately function as private
markets — as places where a unidirectional narrative of ‘‘givens’’ reinforce individualism, competition,
and corporatization under the guise of merit, testing, and school-business partnerships.
In an extended era of privatization initiatives, when accountability principles
and competitive business logics pervade school discourse and practice, what is
left of the ‘‘public’’ part of public schooling? When market rationality privileges
individualism and competition and provides much of the justification for the aims
of U.S. schools, how is the notion of the public good evidenced?1 My claim is
that public schools inordinately function as private markets — as places where
a unidirectional narrative of ‘‘givens’’ reinforce individualism, competition, and
corporatization under the guise of merit, testing, and school-business partnerships.
I stipulate that public schools, if they are to be public in any meaningful way,
must be more than places where all children have an equal opportunity to learn.
Instead, public schools must repeatedly demonstrate critical analysis of what goes
on in those schools by the very people in them: primarily teachers and students.
The type of critical analysis that I think is central to the public notion of a public
school does not subordinate criticality to standardized curricula, procedures,
or testing. Wherever schools represent and reinforce the commodification of
capitalist ideology without critique is where the ‘‘public’’ part of public schooling
capitulates to an ideology of privatization. While not a predetermined ‘‘given,’’
elements such as standardized curricula, tracking, and the many particular
instances of product placement under the guise of ‘‘partnerships’’ each constitute
part of what I take to be a significant problem in claiming public schools as
public. The constitutive parts should instead, I argue, become the object lessons
that yield authentically public schools. My goal, then, is to problematize the
notion of the public good by interrogating how schools function as restrictive
spaces incompatible with the democratic public interests repeatedly attributed to
1. See the recent Race to the Top Fund from the U.S. Department of Education’s Blueprint for Reform,
as well as other probusiness federal policies and reports such as A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for
Educational Reform (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983); America 2000: An
Education Strategy (Darby, Pennsylvania: Diane Publishing, 1993); the No Child Left Behind Act of
2001 (HR 1, 107th Cong., P.L. 107-110, 115 Stat. 1425, January 8, 2002); and the like.
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them.2 I contend that the function of schools as privatized spaces for free market
rationality systematically thwarts teacher agency, student agency, critical inquiry,
and democratic participation.3
This essay highlights a small but significant part of the larger history regarding
schooling for the public versus private good. I maintain that the usefulness of
‘‘the public good’’ as a rationale for public schooling is problematic in at least
two distinct ways: (1) it convolutes and conceals the role of private interests that
are increasingly pervading public schools; and (2) it functionally and materially
furthers market conditions that support an oligarchic versus a democratic republic.
Furthermore, because of that problematic stipulation, I suggest that schools use
such things as advertising, commercialism, and school-business partnerships as
object lessons for the construction of counterpublics where social transaction
and critical transitivity develop an engaged citizenry for a (comparatively) radical
democratic politics.4 In other words, ‘‘the public good’’ has become so privatized
as to have lost any significant comparative, differentiated, or substantive meaning
and should be replaced with a form of criticality that advances democratic social
potential over capitalist interests and individualistic competition.
The concept of the public, to be clear, has not lost its usefulness to rally
support and advance a wide variety of political and economic agendas that construe
schooling in particular ways. The notion of ‘‘the public good’’ continues to be used
by various social, religious, and political entities intent on gaining and maintaining
power.5 Yet the use to which that power is put represents a perverse irony about
‘‘the public good’’: it is not public — at least not in a radically democratic sense
that is critical of corporate or business influence over politics, public debate,
and schooling. It also is not singular, as there are a number of publics and
counterpublics, many of which have historically been left out of the ‘‘public’’
2. In this essay I do not consider the debate over public versus private schools as such (that is, forprofit, independent, religious, and the like), nor do I address the questions surrounding charter schools,
academies, or themed schools (such as performing arts or science and technology magnet schools). The
central issue I am concerned with here is how public schools enact a logic of privatization that makes
the ‘‘public’’ qualifier questionable and problematic.
3. See Margaret R. Somers, ‘‘What’s Political or Cultural About Political Culture and the Public Sphere?
Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept Formation,’’ Sociological Theory 13, no. 2 (1995): 113–144;
and Joseph Grange, ‘‘The Disappearance of the Public Good: Confucius, Dewey, Rorty,’’ Philosophy East
and West 46, no. 3 (1996): 351–366, esp. 354–357. See also Elizabeth A. Kelly, Education, Democracy,
and Public Knowledge (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995), esp. 11–45; John Dewey, Liberalism
and Social Action (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935), esp. 26 and 35–43ff; and Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed.
(New York: Verso, 2001).
4. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, xvii.
5. See Mary Lee Smith et al., Political Spectacle and the Fate of American Schools (New York:
RoutledgeFalmer, 2004).
DERON BOYLES is Professor of Philosophy of Education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies
at Georgia State University, P.O. Box 3977, Atlanta, GA 30302-3980; e-mail <[email protected]>. His
primary areas of scholarship are school commercialism, epistemology, and pragmatism.
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debate about public schools. The discourses that developed ‘‘the public good,’’ in
other words, constructed an idea that masks the restriction of agency and voice
that it touts as central to its being, to its ontic state. Gaining and maintaining such
power rests on the use of language games to convey (denotatively, declaratively,
and prescriptively) existence and value.6 These language games hype the ‘‘reality’’
of global competition and technological advancements, extend to the ensuing
belief that schools should exist to produce workers for globalized markets and
technological imperatives, and reify a discourse outside of which many people
cannot imagine. Therein lies both the problem and the possibilities that I wish to
trouble in this essay.
Brief Historical Considerations of the Public Good and Schools
From individual case studies to general histories of U.S. schools, historians
have established a significant literature on the development of public schools,
including the role ‘‘the public good’’ has played as part of the development and
rationale of schools and schooling. Some historians have recently focused on the
development of common schools and private academies in the early nineteenth
century and how they often operated in a similar fiscal fashion insofar as each
received public funds and each required private tuition.7 Other historians provide
broad and inclusive historical analyses about the development of public schools,
while still others focus the general issue of public schooling on specific topics
such as the development of high schools.8 The idea of schools as markets dates
at least as far back as the 1760s, and there is ample evidence that the common
school movement of the 1830s developed after the expansion (in both the North
and South) of many other kinds of school markets (including charity schools, Latin
grammar schools, denominational schools, academies, and so on).9 It seems odd
6. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington
and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 9ff.
7. See, for example, Nancy Beadie, ‘‘Toward a History of Education Markets in the United States: An
Introduction,’’ Social Science History 32, no. 1 (2008): 47–73; Nancy Beadie, ‘‘Tuition Funding for
Common Schools: Education Markets and Market Regulation in Rural New York, 1815–1850,’’ Social
Science History 32, no. 1 (2008): 107–133; and David F. Mitch, ‘‘Market Forces and Market Failure in
Antebellum American Education: A Commentary,’’ Social Science History 32, no. 1 (2008): 135–139.
The importance of this point is that the conflation of the ‘‘private’’ and ‘‘public’’ is longstanding, even
if the point of this essay is not the distinction between public and private schooling as such. Common
schools, long connected with Horace Mann’s vision for ‘‘free’’ schooling, were not, therefore, ‘‘free’’
since tuition in addition to taxes was required.
8. For the former, see Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the High School: Progressivism
in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Vintage, 1961); Richard Pratte, The Public School
Movement (New York: David McKay, 1973); and Maxine Greene, The Public School and the Private
Vision: A Search for America in Education and Literature (New York: Random House, 1965). For
the latter, see Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School (New York: Harper and
Row, 1964); and David F. Labaree, The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market
and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University
Press, 1988).
9. See, for example, Albert Fishlow, ‘‘The American Common School Revival: Fact or Fancy?’’ in
Industrialization in Two Systems: Essays in Honor of Alexander Gershenkron, ed. Henry Rosovsky
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to me, therefore, to reinforce the mythology that common schools were really
public or democratic and that they served a public good above and beyond the
vexing issues of immigration, assimilation, citizenship, ‘‘rugged individualism,’’
religion, and so on.10 As an institutionalizing force or practice, common schools
were neither public nor democratic in anything other than a cursory or symbolic
way. They were, instead, a functional market representation of the colonizing
forces of a middle-class, Anglo-Saxon, protestant, male hierarchy imbued with the
specific capitalist economic system it promoted.11
What this scholarship indicates is that the history of education is far more
complicated when it comes to issues of private versus public goods than many
may realize. Beyond this truism, and in terms of the present topic, a public
good may be neither public nor good.12 Is assimilation of immigrants into ‘‘an
American culture’’ a public good?13 Is the schooling of girls supposed to be the
(New York: Wiley, 1966), 40–67; Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, ‘‘The ‘Virtues of the Past’: Education
in the First Hundred Years of the New Republic,’’ Working Paper 9958 (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
National Bureau of Economic Research, 2003); Carl F. Kaestle, ‘‘Common Schools Before the ‘Common
School Revival’: New York Schooling in the 1790s,’’ History of Education Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1972):
465–500; Carl F. Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750–1850
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973); Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic:
Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Daniel J.
Elazar, The American Partnership: Intergovernmental Cooperation in the Nineteenth-Century United
States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Fletcher H. Swift, A History of Public Permanent
Common School Funds in the United States, 1795–1905 (New York: Holt, 1911); Rush Welter, Popular
Education and Democratic Thought in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962); and
David Tyack and Thomas James, ‘‘State Government and American Public Education: Exploring the
‘Primeval Forest,’’’ History of Education Quarterly 26, no. 1 (1986): 39–69. For a different historical
overview, and one that informs this essay, see Kelly, Education, Democracy, and Public Knowledge.
10. Helen Haste, ‘‘Constructing the Citizen,’’ Political Psychology 25, no. 3 (2004): 413–439. See also
John Dewey, Problems of Men (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 46–69.
11. Zillah Eisenstein, ‘‘Stop Stomping on the Rest of Us: Retrieving Publicness from the Privatization of
the Globe,’’ Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 4, no. 1 (1996): 59–95; and Haste, ‘‘Constructing the
Citizen.’’ See also Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992);
and Lesley Bartlett, Marla Frederick, Thaddeus Gulbrandsen, and Enrique Murillo, ‘‘The Marketization
of Education: Public Schools for Private Ends,’’ Anthropology and Education Quarterly 33, no. 1 (2002):
5–29, esp. 5–6. For parallels to the United Kingdom, see Meira Levinson, ‘‘Liberalism versus Democracy?
Schooling Private Citizens in the Public Square,’’ British Journal of Political Science 27, no. 3 (1997):
333–360.
12. Rhys H. Williams, ‘‘Constructing the Public Good: Social Movements and Cultural Resources,’’
Social Problems 42, no. 1 (1995): 124–144.
13. The focus of this essay is on U.S. schools and the role, if any, the ‘‘public’’ plays in developing and
maintaining them. There is a significant literature, however, on multinational investigations of the role
of democracy, privatization, and the public. See, for example, Shaun Bowler, Todd Donovan, and Jeffrey
A. Karp, ‘‘Enraged or Engaged? Preferences for Direct Citizen Participation in Affluent Democracies,’’
Political Research Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2007): 351–362; Sten Johansson, ‘‘Conceptualizing and Measuring
Quality of Life for National Policy: From the Swedish Level of Living Survey to an Epistemology of the
Democratic Process,’’ Social Indicators Research 58, no. 1 (2002): 13–32; David Hartley, ‘‘Education,
Markets, and the Pedagogy of Personalisation,’’ British Journal of Educational Studies 56, no. 4 (2008):
365–381; M.J. Mancebón and M.A. Muñiz, ‘‘Private versus Public High Schools in Spain: Disentangling
Managerial and Programme Efficiencies,’’ Journal of the Operational Research Society 59, no. 7 (2008):
892–901; and Emmanuelle Auriol and Pierre M. Picard, ‘‘Government Outsourcing: Public Contracting
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same as or similar to that of boys? Should schools teach reading, or is reading
instruction the purview of the family and home? If public school is the place
for reading instruction, should it be taught by means of a protestant Christian
(King James) version of the bible, memorization and recitation, McGuffey readers,
whole language, ‘‘reader-response,’’ or something else entirely?14 These questions
include historical elements of the debates over the aims and goals of schooling
for the public good, and the variety of (competing) ideas reveals much about
the underlying socioeconomic value associated with schooling. Significantly, we
should remember which voices were, and which voices were not, historically part
of the ‘‘public’’ debate.15
Perhaps the underlying socioeconomic value is best seen in the development of
schools beyond common schools. From experiments in factory training in Lowell,
Massachusetts, to efficiency measures in the ‘‘platoon system’’ in Gary, Indiana,
to programmed instruction in Winnetka, Illinois, schooling in the United States
continually reinforced socially constructed hierarchies, vocations, and private
industrial interests, overwhelmingly to the benefit of white men.16 Even if one
allows for the growth of high schools as primarily ‘‘humanist’’ college preparatory
institutions in the middle to late nineteenth century, an elitist preparation still
reinforces a socially constructed hierarchy and preparation for a future career, albeit
deferred to college.17 One result of this development of schooling is the production
of a metanarrative that inscribes and reinscribes the ‘‘given’’ reasons for schooling:
preparation for a job in an industrial, technological, or global economy.18
with Private Monopoly,’’ Economic Journal 119, no. 540 (2009): 1464–1493. For an exploration of
nongovernmental organizations as they relate to privatization and public goods, see Sangeeta Kamat,
‘‘The Privatization of Public Interest: Theorizing NGO Discourse in a Neoliberal Era,’’ Review of
International Political Economy 11, no. 1 (2004): 155–176.
14. Richard Mosier, Making the American Mind: Social and Moral Ideas in the McGuffey Readers (New
York: Russell and Russell, 1965); and Henry C. Minnick, William Holmes McGuffey and His Readers
(New York: American Book Company, 1936). A different, if connected, history of literacy and what went
on in a wide variety of schools can be found in Daniel P. Resnick, ‘‘Historical Perspectives on Literacy
and Schooling,’’ Daedalus 119, no. 2 (1990): 15–32.
15. An increasing number of scholars problematize this point. A few significant works include, but are
not limited to, Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore,
Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age
of the French Revolution (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988); Nancy Fraser, ‘‘Rethinking
the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,’’ Social Text 25/26
(1990): 56–80; Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York:
Knopf, 1998); E. Nathaniel Gates, ed., Racial Classification and History (New York: Routledge, 1997);
and Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close
the Black-White Achievement Gap (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004).
16. See Denise Gelberg, The ‘‘Business’’ of Reforming American Schools (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1997), 9–65.
17. See Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School, 1880–1920 (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1969); and Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School, 1920–1941
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972).
18. W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), esp. 155–212; and Arthur G. Powell,
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A review of history also reveals the various discourses that use ‘‘the public’’ as
an a priori concept made material in the United States.19 It is as though the country
and its schools simply ‘‘were,’’ rather than specifically developed; that is, they
appeared ‘‘ready-made’’ instead of being intentionally constructed. Publics emerge
out of social transactions among people and are not to be confused with states or
governments abstracted from their actions and consequences. The metanarratives
of who we are and how we came to be do not distinguish or locate power within
contestation. John Dewey made much of this distinction in The Public and Its
Problems when he noted that ‘‘the theory [of specific causal authorship] flattered
the conceit of those nations which, being politically ‘advanced,’ assumed that they
were so near the apex of evolution as to wear the crown of statehood.’’20 Part of
Dewey’s point was to tease out of history the features ascribed to private, public,
and governmental realms and to criticize individuals who and institutions that
subjugated public goods to private interests by way of governmental authority.
Dewey noted the connection to feudal England, but extended the point to private
business when he wrote this:
Various devices were invented and fictions set up by means of which the jurisdiction of
kingly courts was extended. The method was to allege that various offenses, formerly attended
to by local courts, were infractions of the king’s peace. The centralizing movement went
till the king’s justice had a monopoly. The instance is significant. A measure instigated by
desire to increase the power and profit of the royal dynasty became an impersonal public
function by bare extension. The same sort of thing has repeatedly occurred when personal
prerogatives have passed into normal political processes. Something of the same sort is
manifested in contemporary [U.S.] life when modes of private business become ‘‘affected with
public interest’’ because of quantitative expansion.21
Dewey’s criticism is that a private interest masquerading as a public one,
under the aegis of government, is still a private interest. The corollary: Private interests masquerading as public ones, under the aegis of public schools,
are still private interests. To say, for example, that schools serve the public
good by providing workers for private enterprise is a manipulative discursive
move that conflates schooling with training and therefore myopically narrows
the very possibility for agency for which this essay ultimately argues. As Dewey
noted, narrowly conceiving schooling as training is ‘‘ineffective for every industrial end except setting up a congested labor market in the skilled trades
and a better grade of labor — at public expense — for employers to exploit.’’22
Eleanor Farrar, and David K. Cohen, The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the
Educational Marketplace (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1985).
19. See John Forester, ed., Critical Theory and Public Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985);
Michael Schudson, ‘‘Was There Ever a Public Sphere? If So, When? Reflections on the American Case,’’
in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992),
142–163; and Kenneth A. Strike, ‘‘The Moral Role of Schooling in a Liberal Democratic Society,’’ Review
of Research in Education 17 (1991): 413–483.
20. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927) (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1954), 46.
21. Ibid., 48.
22. John Dewey, ‘‘Splitting Up the School System,’’ The New Republic (April 17, 1915): 284. See also
Alan Cywar, ‘‘John Dewey: Toward Domestic Reconstruction,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 30,
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Beyond Dewey’s critique, but related to the hegemony of industry, Stuart Ewen
notes that
it became a central function of business to be able to define a social order which would feed and
adhere to the demands of the productive process and at the same time absorb, neutralize, and
contain the transitional impulses of a working class emerging from the unrequited drudgery
of nineteenth-century industrialization.23
This period coheres with Elizabeth Kelly’s view of history in that she believes a
bourgeois public emerged that argued for democratic discourse, but was ultimately
overwhelmed by the forces of monopolistic capitalism. From around 1870 to just
before World War I, the United States came closest to a democratic, if still classed,
sexed, and raced, understanding of what public engagement could be, according to
Kelly.24
Following the progression of time from World War I through World War
II through the post-Sputnik era, expansion of the military-industrial complex
represents an extended form of encroachment of private business interests in
public schools in the name of the public good.25 As Sandra Jackson observes,
the underlying assumptions and arguments are the same . . . to make an apparent case for
change, while proclaiming broad social benefits for everyone, which will in reality sustain
the status quo because the matters of structural barriers to equity and opportunity — access
as well as outcomes — go unacknowledged and thus unaddressed, unexamined, and hence
undisturbed in perpetuating inequalities.26
no. 3 (1969): 385–400. Dewey also noted that the ‘‘drift of nominal democracy from the conception
of life which may properly be characterized as democratic has come about under the influence of a
so-called rugged individualism that defines the liberty of individuals in the terms of the inequality bred
by existing economic-legal institutions. In so doing, it puts an almost exclusive emphasis upon those
natural capacities of individuals that have power to effect pecuniary and materialistic acquisitions. For
our existing materialism, with the blight to which it subjects the cultural development of individuals, is
the inevitable product of exaggeration of the economic liberty of the few at the expense of the all-round
liberty of the many. And, I repeat, this limitation upon genuine liberty is the inevitable product of the
inequality that arises and must arise under the operations of institutionally established and supported
finance-capitalism’’ (Dewey, Problems of Men, 117).
23. Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 51.
24. Kelly, Education, Democracy, and Public Knowledge, 30–31. She argues that there were glimpses
of public discourse that challenged capitalist assumptions about the role of individuals and schools
in society but, even granting a sympathetic reading of Alexis de Tocqueville’s view of democratic
participation, indicates that the discourse was ‘‘short-lived,’’ if it ever actually existed. See Kelly,
Education, Democracy, and Public Knowledge, 31–33; and Fraser, ‘‘Rethinking the Public Sphere,’’
58–63.
25. Note that the first federal encroachment into public schools was the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 — an
act promoted by private industry in order to have public schools offer vocational training. See Herbert M.
Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958, 3rd ed. (New York: RoutledgeFalmer,
2004), 121–126; and Powell, Farrar, and Cohen, The Shopping Mall High School, 233ff. For more on
the military-industrial complex and schooling, see Kenneth J. Saltman and David A. Gabbard, eds.,
Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools (New York: Routledge,
2003).
26. Sandra Jackson, ‘‘Commentary on the Rhetoric of Reform,’’ in Education as Enforcement, ed.
Saltman and Gabbard, 224. I do not mean to overlook Harold Rugg and George Counts who, among
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Renewed vocationalism in the 1970s led to the angst-ridden, economist-derived A
Nation at Risk in the 1980s, a general discourse that has remained uninterrupted
through America 2000 and No Child Left Behind to the most recent Race to the Top
strategy in the Blueprint for Reform that, again, uses economic competitiveness
as a central rationale for school policy and practice.
Illustrative of the understanding of economic competition and schools-astraining-sites as a ‘‘given’’ are the claims made by Kathleen Wilcox and Pia
Moriarty:
Like other industrialized societies, the United States has financed schools to socialize children
to competence as adults. Society pays for schools; schools, in turn, attempt effectively to deliver
children prepared to function in the full range of adult social roles. As social institutions,
schools are not isolated and autonomous constructs, but integral parts of a social whole
where institutions interact with and affect one another. In particular, schools must attend
realistically to the demands of the workplace where most of their children will move as
adults.27
Here Wilcox and Moriarty bring to light the assumption that a particular vocational
reality exists that requires people to match or fit into it. In this way, the quest
for certainty becomes a settled quest. We already ‘‘know’’ that the world requires
a socialized set of young people to fit into preordained jobs, so we need schools
to ‘‘deliver’’ those young people to the job market. This represents a public good
because there is ‘‘interaction’’ between public schools and the private sphere
that results in the maintenance of society. Even if we stipulate that there is
‘‘interaction’’ in the world between schools and society, if the consequences of
that interaction inordinately favor private interests and subordinate young people
to future occupational roles, how is that a public good when we divorce young
people from a public (and critical) consideration of jobs in society?28 Indeed, if
students are not already part of what constitutes the public, what do they represent
in and for society? If students are not critically engaged regarding the focus on
attaining and keeping a job, how will they find work that makes them happy and
enthused?
In his 1920 book Community Organization, Joseph Kinmont Hart decried
the separation of the private worker from the public citizen inherent in Wilcox
and Moriarty’s assertion: ‘‘Democracy cannot abide the mere isolated worker,
lost in the routine of his vocation. Every member of the democratic community ought to be a worker, and every worker ought to be a real member of the
community.’’29 Hart’s point, at least in part, is that even on the vocationalist
others, mounted an effort to develop counterpublics through social reconstructionism — importantly
(for Rugg) through social studies that criticized advertising and capitalism. See Harold Rugg, Man and
His Changing Society, 6 vols. (Boston, Massachusetts: Ginn, 1929–1936); and George S. Counts, Dare
the School Build a New Social Order? (New York: John Day, 1932).
27. Kathleen Wilcox and Pia Moriarty, ‘‘Schooling and Work: Social Constraints on Equal Educational
Opportunity,’’ Social Problems 24, no. 2 (1976): 204.
28. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 22–34.
29. Joseph Kinmont Hart, Community Organization (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 211.
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assumption of careerism or job-holding, if students do not figure out the work
most worthy for them, there will not be engagement with community life — life,
that is, connected with work. Importantly, however, Hart underscored that having
a job is not, itself, the point of contention. The concern is using the ‘‘lens’’ of
‘‘job’’ to restrictively construct both schooling and community life. That students
will seek jobs that lead to careers is not inherently wrong. What is problematic is narrowing the purpose of public schooling to privatized job preparation
at the expense of developing students’ criticality, connection, and understanding — and these elements are necessary for both public schooling and the private
sphere.
Regardless, Wilcox and Moriarty advance a position that represents and
reinforces the deeply ingrained assumption that schools serve ‘‘the demands
of the workplace.’’ They, and their vocational position, are the beneficiaries of
an already settled quest that indicates ‘‘what is.’’ Ontologically, schools produce
students who go to work. As Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin put it,
Public education is both a subsidy to employers and a way for workers to gain social mobility;
it trains young people to be good workers and good democrats, reproducing a class-structured
labor force to fit into a historically defined division of labor, but also inculcating aspirations
about the nature of work in a democratic society.30
Carnoy and Levin’s point is both an ontic narrative and an indictment. They
underscore how schools serve employers’ wants, all the while offering students
avenues for ‘‘social mobility.’’ The illusory nature of that mobility, however, is
revealed when we recognize the darker side of Carnoy and Levin’s point: schools
reproduce class distinctions, even when suggesting that individual goals and
personal effort are part of the key to meritocratic success.31 As Kelly points out,
part of the difficulty here stems from the fact that individualism is deeply entrenched in
American social and political culture. The moral and political primacy of the individual
over the social has often been presented as the foundation of democracy; private happiness,
individual initiative, and personal freedom are highly valued aspects of the ideal.32
What appears to be valued is the circularity of the metanarrative of meritocracy.
As Douglas Kellner has argued, the marketing effect of globalization ‘‘represents
the triumph of the economy over politics and culture . . . and the hegemony of
capital over all other domains of life.’’33 By conflating the ‘‘is-ness’’ of capitalism
30. Martin Carnoy and Henry M. Levin, Schooling and Work in the Democratic State (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1985), 77.
31. See also Joel Spring, Educating the Consumer-Citizen: A History of the Marriage of Schools,
Advertising, and Media (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003); Kenneth J. Saltman, Collateral
Damage: Corporatizing Public School — A Threat to Democracy (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2000); Alex Molnar, School Commercialism: From Democratic Ideal to Market Commodity
(New York: Routledge, 2005); Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in
America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Gelberg, The ‘‘Business’’ of Reforming American Schools; and
Saltman and Gabbard, eds., Education as Enforcement.
32. Kelly, Education, Democracy, and Public Knowledge, 21.
33. Douglas Kellner, ‘‘Globalization and New Social Movements: Lessons for Critical Theory and
Pedagogy,’’ in Globalization and Education: Critical Perspectives, ed. Nicholas C. Burbules and Carlos
441
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with the ‘‘ought-ness’’ of democracy, we are faced with ‘‘realities of life’’ that are
beyond question; as though there is no need for, nor benefit from, questioning the
neoclassical economic system so widely taken for granted as, in itself, ‘‘good.’’34
It is also easy to see how the logic of individualism and economic competition
continues to prevail in present-day discourse.
Advertising, Consumer Materialism, and the
Public versus the Private Good
In July 2010, John Ebersole, president of Excelsior College, took out a full-page
advertisement in the Chronicle of Higher Education in order to make his case
for schools serving the economy.35 ‘‘Having once led the world in the percentage
of adult workers ages 24–64 who have a degree,’’ writes Ebersole, ‘‘the U.S. now
ranks 17th among those with a bachelor’s degree among major industrialized
nations.’’ His assertion comes after this opening line: ‘‘America does not have the
workforce necessary for the economy it has and needs.’’36 What follows from such
claims, according to the advertisement, are a series of education initiatives that
variously rely on economic data to make the case for a ‘‘national imperative’’ of
higher education (the call to which Ebersole’s college can, of course, answer). In
this case, the public good follows from private, competitive interests. Grant that
the advertisement is a marketing tool for Ebersole’s college. Grant, too, that his
statistics are accurate and that ‘‘major industrialized nations’’ is an unproblematic
concept. The advertisement remains a telling example of market logic serving
as the rationale for schooling, whether for higher education specifically or
general education more broadly. Ebersole’s advertisement, like so many other
advertisements for online degrees, executive programs, career institutes, and so
on, is both materially and symbolically representative of private interests recast
as a public good. He references ‘‘America’’ in such a way as to call upon a kind of
collective public ideal that is served when we take classes at his college or other
colleges that ascribe to his economistic rationality. Herein resides a subtle but
important point: the degree to which advertisements influence public perceptions.
The work of Douglas Kellner, among others, indicates that an advertisement such
as Ebersole’s is so taken for granted that the disclaimer ‘‘paid advertisement’’ is
Alberto Torres (New York: Routledge/Falmer, 2000), 307. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Firing Back: Against
the Tyranny of the Market, trans. Loı̈c Wacquant (New York: The New Press, 2003), 66–74.
34. See Steven Cohn, ‘‘Common Ground Critiques of Neoclassical Principles Texts,’’ Post-Autistic
Economics Review 18, http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue18/Cohn18.htm; and Gordon Bigelow,
Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
35. John F. Ebersole, ‘‘A Call to Action,’’ Chronicle of Higher Education (July 2, 2010): A5. In an initiative
following the same basic rationale, Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club employees are now able to receive college
credit for their job performance. See Ylan Q. Mui, ‘‘Wal-Mart Partners with Online School to Offer
College Credit to Workers,’’ Washington Post (June 4, 2010), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/06/03/AR2010060302488.html.
36. Ebersole, ‘‘A Call to Action.’’ For a different view of the role of higher education, see Gregory S.
Prince, Jr., Teach Them to Challenge Authority: Educating for Healthy Societies (New York: Continuum,
2008).
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not likely to influence (or even register with) readers.37 Beyond advertisements
about schooling, note that the history of advertising lent itself to advertising in
schools, too. This point illustrates the broader argument about public and private
interests and how private interests influence what we understand to be ‘‘public.’’
At least as far back as the 1940s, corporations were influenced by the
survey research of the psychological and behavioral sciences. In the Journal of
Retailing, for example, article after article discussed the target audience in identical
terms — using ‘‘Mr. and Mrs. Consumer” to describe what was essentially the
middle class, a larger and growing segment of the population in the 1940s.38
Marketers targeted that population as shopping centers began appearing in the
suburbs. The grouping was basically homogenous, however. In 1956, Wendell
Smith offered a new idea. In an article in the Journal of Marketing, Smith came up
with the idea of market segmentation. He argued that as companies recognized that
‘‘their core markets have already been developed. . .to the point where additional
advertising and selling expenditures [are] yielding diminishing returns, attention to
smaller or fringe market segments . . . are of crucial importance to the aggregate.’’39
Along with Pierre Martineau, Smith advanced ‘‘a new axiom of marketing, whether
applied to cigarettes or refrigerators: homogeneity of buyers within a segmented
market, heterogeneity between segmented markets.’’40 In schools, this is eerily
similar to tracking, which has its origins in the social efficiency advocates’
rationale that schools should be analogous to factories, workers and managers
hierarchically positioned as workers, and outcomes, ‘‘peths,’’ or widgets the
products called students.41 ‘‘Thus,’’ as Kelly notes, ‘‘the public underwent a further
transformation as citizens became consumers of media images and events instead
37. Douglas Kellner, Television and the Crisis of Democracy (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press,
1990). See also Phyllis Sides, ‘‘Captive Kids: Teaching Students to Be Consumers,’’ in Selling Out
Our Schools: Vouchers, Markets, and the Future of Public Education, ed. Robert Lowe and Barbara
Miner (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Rethinking Schools Publications, 1996); Jane Kenway and Elizabeth
Bullen, Consuming Children: Education-Entertainment-Advertising (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Open
University Press, 2001); and Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass
Market (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989).
38. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
(New York: Vintage, 2003), 295. Cohen also references Oliver Zunz, Why the American Century?
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), whose work details the 1920s and 1930s. The difference,
notes Cohen, is that during the 1920s and 1930s, ‘‘middle class consumers were sought out as the most
promising, while those who differed — because they were poor or African American, for example — were
bypassed’’ (p. 496). See also Lears, Fables of Abundance; Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why
Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Philip Jones,
What’s in a Name? Advertising and the Concept of Brands (Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath,
1986); Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century
(New York: Verso, 1996); and Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for
Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2000).
39. Wendell R. Smith, ‘‘Product Differentiation and Market Segmentation as Alternative Marketing
Strategies,’’ Journal of Marketing 21, no. 1 (1956): 7.
40. Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 295.
41. See Molnar, School Commercialism, 7ff; Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency:
A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools (Chicago:
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of direct participants in political and cultural debates.’’42 Add to the enormous
increase in school-business partnerships the issue of advertising in schools, and
it is very difficult to understand schools as anything other than private — and
captive — markets.43
When we talk of contemporary schooling in the United States, therefore, we
should be mindful of this long history of influence by private business over schools
and schooling. It would be a mistake to think of schooling as though it was in
the public sphere and for the public good — as though there was one meta-debate
that, once settled, meant all debates yielded agreement. They did not, although
there is, again, evidence that job preparation was a primary goal of schooling
for over a century.44 I leave the more specific historical interpretations to those
better equipped to offer them, but my point is that the focus on ‘‘the public
good’’ is perpetually subsumed or infiltrated by private commercial interests. As a
marketer, if I can lead people to believe that their market segment’s identity rests
on consuming particular products, as indicated by Smith and Martineau, I am able
to set up the conditions to achieve inclusion and the stability of identity within
the market segment. As a teacher or parent in the role of consumer-citizen, if I can
lead students to believe (and hegemonically reinforce) that their role is to acquire
job skills for future productive employment, I am able to set up the conditions
for schooling that privilege utility, immediacy, and practices already subsumed by
market logic.45 Such a result is what I call consumer materialism.
Consumer materialism is the focus only or primarily on goods and ends.
Perhaps best characterized by students wanting to know how little they have
to do in order to ‘‘get’’ a passing grade or whether they are going to ‘‘get’’
their ‘‘money’s worth’’ out of a course, consumer materialism circumvents
the difficult and often messy processes of questioning in favor of immediate
satisfaction. Consumer materialism is also the valuing of easy answers over
critical investigation. Linked to convenience, consumer materialism manifests
itself in schools through business partnerships when the ends or goods (for
example, exclusive cola contracts, ‘‘free’’ pizza, trips to amusement parks, rewards
for promoting ‘‘partner’’ logos, and the like) become the focus and, further, where
University of Chicago Press, 1962), 223–243; and Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum,
1893–1958, 95.
42. Kelly, Education, Democracy, and Public Knowledge, 31.
43. For more on school-business partnerships, see the variety of reports from the Commercialism in
Education Research Unit at http://epicpolicy.org/ceru/publications/611?page=6.
44. Theodore R. Sizer, ed., The Age of the Academies (New York: Teachers College Press, 1964); Herbert
M. Kliebard, Schooled to Work: Vocationalism and the American Curriculum, 1876–1946 (New
York: Teachers College Press, 1999); Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational
Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); and George S.
Counts, The Social Composition of Boards of Education: A Study in the Social Control of Public
Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927).
45. See Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World’s Political-Economic Systems (New York:
Basic Books, 1977), esp. 161–213.
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this focus is not analyzed or investigated. Consumer materialism commodifies
student and teacher existence by reducing searching, questioning, and thinking
to objectified and reductionistic particulars. For schooling, it means (in part) that
students see their role as seeking ‘‘right’’ answers to questions instead of searching
for meaning by questioning, contesting, and antagonizing. Similarly, teachers see
their role as seeking preordained procedures that will allow the efficient transfer
of information from them (or the adopted texts or prepackaged curricula) to their
students.46 Accordingly, teachers demonstrate consumer materialism when they
participate in advertising campaigns and school-business partnerships without
questioning and analyzing the ideological, symbolic, and practical consequences
of promoting and partnering with the private sector in overtly commercial ways.
Does this mean that teachers and students have no agency? Are schools therefore
doomed to repeat what history seems to indicate: the replication of class differences
and the status quo? Students and teachers may, in isolated instances, act as agents
repeatedly in schools, but, I submit, those instances constitute the minority of
their actions. That agency is sometimes evident does not mean that schooling has
successfully put in place the critical or radically democratic ethic for which this
essay argues. In fact, much of the agency demonstrated by students and teachers is
a form of resistance; rarely is it a form of productive change. A radical democratic
politics in schools will require far more critical transitivity than is currently found
in most schools. It will also require a shift in understanding — from ‘‘public’’ to
‘‘publics’’ — in order to overcome the restrictiveness historically linked with the
notion of ‘‘the public good.’’47
Toward Radical Democratic Politics in Schools: Achieving
Critical Transitivity by Means of Object Lessons
Critical transitivity is best understood when compared to two other levels
of awareness: intransitivity and semitransitivity. All three terms were coined by
Paulo Freire. Intransitivity means ‘‘noncritical (in)action’’; it repudiates the power
of individuals to change their existence when, for example, teachers claim ‘‘I
can’t speak out about school-business partnerships because my school might lose
funding or I might lose my job . . . that’s the ‘real world’ and I can’t do anything
about it.’’48 Semitransitivity, on the other hand, is characterized by individuals
who see the world as changeable, but who also see the world in unrelated segments such that semitransitivity is two-dimensional and short term. Business
groups may donate money, time, or materials, for example, but teachers do not
ask whether businesses are getting tax credits, free advertising, or other ‘‘perks.’’
46. Peter McLaren uses a similar term, ‘‘consumer capitalist culture,’’ to make a connection between
what he calls postmodern pathologies and the constitution of the body/subject. See Peter McLaren,
Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a Postmodern Era (New York:
Routledge, 1995).
47. Fraser, ‘‘Rethinking the Public Sphere,’’ 57ff.
48. See Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Seabury, 1973); and Ira
Shor, Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992).
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While intransitivity and semitransitivity are most visible in schools, Freire’s
ultimate goal — critical transitivity — is rarely in evidence. Critical transitivity
is demonstrated when individuals make, according to Ira Shor, ‘‘broad connections between individual experience and social issues. . . . In education, critically
[transitive] teachers and students synthesize personal and social meanings with a
specific theme, text, or issue.’’49 Students and teachers who critique advertising,
commercialism, and school-business partnerships, rather than seek them out or
participate in them without question, are demonstrating, in nascent form, what
critical transitivity requires.
The point of connecting consumer materialism and critical transitivity in
relation to advertising, commercialism, and school-business partnerships is to
engage students and teachers in debates and arguments over, for example, the
motives for business involvement in schools, the benefits from partnerships for
schools versus the benefits for businesses, and what is gained and lost in specific
partnerships. Are businesses altruistic in their ‘‘support’’? How much time and
money is spent by school districts in ‘‘human hours’’ securing and maintaining
partnerships? If businesses paid non-reduced taxes (for example, many businesses
get tax reductions for locating in particular geographic areas), would the dollar
amount of their ‘‘contributions’’ to schools be greater or smaller than what they
would have paid if they had not received a tax break? These are the kinds of
questions that critical transitivity requires and are also questions that, by virtue
of their being formed and asked, challenge consumer materialist assumptions
regarding easy answers and convenient, simple conclusions. They demarcate
spaces of inquiry and action, investigation and growth, not answers for the purpose
of satiation or closure.
Critical transitivity also uses processes of investigation that do not accept the
impervious realities that Maxine Greene calls the ‘‘givens’’ of an imposed ‘‘real
world.’’50 In this sense, students would be better off being young philosophers
of education: questioning their own schooling at the very time they are engaged
in it. This questioning, again, is not for the purpose of ‘‘getting answers,’’ but
is undertaken in order to problematize and make contingent what is otherwise
taken to be ‘‘concluded’’ or ‘‘certain.’’ Unfortunately, formal opportunities for
questioning are limited in the vast majority of schools, as curricula that emphasize
testing, grading, and preparation for future life (that is, curricula that support
consumerism, job and workforce preparation, and the development of specific
skills) are overly plentiful. My concern here is that business partnerships inherently
inhibit questioning and instead help to develop uncritical consumers rather than
critically transitive citizens. This happens, in part, by their institutionalized
nature. Accepted by schools and reinforced in society, business assumptions
including consumer materialism and intransitivity become ‘‘beyond question.’’
Unwilling or unable to raise questions (for fear of losing a job, of frustrating others
49. Shor, Empowering Education, 127–128.
50. See Maxine Greene, The Dialectic of Freedom (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988), 22ff.
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by extending the time it takes to complete professional development sessions, and
the like), teachers and school leaders often demonstrate for their students what it
means to accede to the ‘‘given’’ of commercialism and consumer materialism. One
result of this dynamic is that schools harbor noncriticality and confer diplomas on
students (and employ teachers and administrators) who are unable (or unwilling?)
to raise questions about motive, meaning, and the consequences — both positive
and negative — of supporting business influences on and in schools. A cycle is
established, then, where business expectations for schools beget schools that
push products, provide free advertising, and ‘‘produce’’ future consumers who, in
turn, favor and support business interests and corporate involvement in public
schooling.
While a case might be made to get rid of advertising, commercialism, and
school-business partnerships altogether, in this essay I ultimately (1) assume that
advertisements, commercialism, and school-business partnerships are not going
away; and (2) argue that, therefore, schools should exploit their ‘‘partnerships’’
by engaging in critically transitive investigations of the partnerships themselves
as object lessons. This may be a surreptitious way to address advertising and
commercialism in schools, and to slow the more than 300 percent increase in
the number of school-business partnerships since 1990,51 but not investigating
school-business partnerships is the surest way to continue the conflation of
consumerism with citizenship and the understanding of private goods as public
goods.
There are numerous examples of how pervasive private goods and
commercialism are in schools today. Clorox provides teachers with lesson plans,
stickers, and posters to foster a culture of cleanliness with reference to the
‘‘Clean Club’’ (consisting of ‘‘Ella the Elbow Cougher,’’ ‘‘Johnny the Germbuster,’’
and ‘‘Harry the Handwasher’’) as part of Clorox’s ‘‘clean up the classroom’’
multimedia learning kit. In virtually every neighborhood grocery store, there are
programs where a small percentage of sales will be ‘‘donated’’ to local schools.
Coca-Cola has a summer ‘‘economics’’ institute program to promote competitive
business practices. Campbell’s offers rewards for soup labels. Nissan automobile
dealerships participate in ‘‘automotive services apprenticeships.’’ CiCi’s Pizza,
Chick-fil-A, and other fast-food chains set aside one night each month when
students and parents from participating schools come to the restaurant and
then a percentage of the net sales (not gross) is ‘‘given’’ to the school. Subway
provides ‘‘free’’ subs to local schools, and a representative from the store, in
order to make an ‘‘educational’’ link, comes to those schools as a guest speaker
on ‘‘health occupations.’’ McDonald’s has secured itself a spot in the cafeteria
‘‘choice’’ program in a Colorado school and offers business credit to students who
‘‘intern’’ as cooks and servers. Channel One is still connected to thousands of
classrooms, providing students with a news program and commercials for jeans,
51. See the Educational Policy Research Unit and the Commercialism in Education Research Unit,
http://epicpolicy.org/portal.
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candy, makeup, and other ‘‘targeted’’ products.52 Wachovia Bank participates
in an ‘‘Academy of Finance’’ program that claims to prepare junior high and
high school students for ‘‘rewarding careers’’ in the financial services industry.53
As the General Accounting Office (GAO) warned a decade ago, the increase in
commercialization in schools was rampant and growing. Constance Hays noted
that
The GAO report cites textbook covers distributed by Clairol, Ralph Lauren, and Philip Morris
with company names and logos fully displayed. In New York City, the Board of Education is
considering a plan that would provide computers for all of its students, starting in the fourth
grade. The computers might carry ads and possibly encourage shopping on a particular Web
site.54
Far from being limited to a couple of instances, advertising, commercialism,
and school-business partnerships are increasing in number and variety and
represent a larger agenda. The agenda is a probusiness, procapitalist, procareerist
one that excludes questions about whether business exploits workers and schools,
whether capitalism is the only or best economic theory,55 and whether elementary
school students should be forced to consider their future based not on substantive
questions regarding ‘‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’’ but on careerist
questions of ‘‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’’ Schools, then, are
faced with programs connecting them with the interests of private businesses
while also having outside forces further the idea that schools and businesses
should become even more closely aligned.56 The problem, again, is that students
and teachers become increasingly subsumed in a market logic that, in part because
of its pervasiveness, appears impervious to critique.57
To combat this pervasiveness, teachers and students should use the examples
sketched in this essay as object lessons for critique. This critique is characteristic of
a radical democratic politics because the project requires delimiting the discourse
and embracing the vicissitudes of inquiry. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
52. See also Harry Brighouse, ‘‘Channel One, the Anti-Commercial Principle, and the Discontinuous
Ethos,’’ Educational Policy 19, no. 3 (2005): 528–549.
53. For a longer list of examples, see Molnar, School Commercialism, 47–71.
54. Constance L. Hays, ‘‘Commercialism in U.S. Schools Is Examined in New Report,’’ New York Times
(September 24, 2000): C1, C25.
55. See, for example, James C. McKinley, Jr., ‘‘Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change,’’ New
York Times (March 12, 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html.
56. Alex Molnar, Giving Kids the Business: The Commercialization of America’s Schools (Boulder,
Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 166–184. See also Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron,
Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, 2nd ed. (1977), trans. Richard Nice (Thousand
Oaks, California: Sage, 2000), 204ff.
57. See Pam Bettis, ‘‘Corporate Discourses in School: Adapting to the Prevailing Economic Climate,’’
Educational Foundations 14, no. 1 (2000): 23–49; Abe Feuerstein, ‘‘Selling Our Schools? Principals’
Views on Schoolhouse Commercialism and School-Business Interactions’’ (paper presented at the
annual conference of the American Educational Studies Association, November 2000, Vancouver, British
Columbia, Canada); and Henry A. Giroux, ‘‘The Terror of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the Significance of
Cultural Politics,’’ College Literature 32, no. 1 (2005): 1–19.
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put it, ‘‘the educational system, labour relations, the discourses of the resistance
of marginal populations construct original and irreducible forms of social protest,
and thereby contribute all the discursive complexity and richness on which the
programme of a radical democracy should be founded.’’58 This means that schools
reconstitute themselves as publics: plural spaces where investigations both delimit
and (re)construct student and teacher identities as well as their varying agencies.
The ‘‘pluralization’’ of public to publics indicates diversity as well as
locality. As Nancy Fraser points out, ‘‘the public’’ never existed. Instead, ‘‘there
arose a host of competing counterpublics, including nationalist publics, popular
peasant publics, elite women’s publics, and working class publics.’’59 Schools,
by extension, are spaces for contestation, debate, and identity formation. The
antithesis of schools that adopt ‘‘national standards,’’ schools-as-publics relish
antagonism and vaunt critique by means of specificity of place and multiplicity
of views. In this regard, the public sphere as public school, extending the analysis
of Geoff Eley, positions schools as ‘‘the structured setting[s] where cultural and
ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of publics takes place.’’60 The
virtues of this reconstructed notion of schools include, but are not limited to,
(1) unshielding curricula as ‘‘given’’ and ‘‘transmittable’’; (2) recasting the roles
of students and teachers as inquisitive co-investigators; and (3) using already
existing consumerist elements of society (namely, advertising, instances of
commercialism, and school-business partnerships) as object lessons to deepen
and expand understanding and meaning.
Pierre Bourdieu considers these elements necessary features of what he calls
‘‘realistic utopias’’:
This is where the collective intellectual [students and teachers] can play its unique role, by
helping to create the social conditions for the collective production of realistic utopias. It
can organize or orchestrate joint research on novel forms of political action, on new manners
of mobilizing and of making mobilized people work together, on new ways of elaborating
projects and bringing them to fruition together. It can play the role of midwife by assisting the
dynamics of working groups in their effort to express, and thereby discover, what they are and
what they could or should be, and by helping with the reappropriation and accumulation of
the immense stock of knowledge on the social world with which the social world is pregnant.
It could thus help the victims of neoliberal policies to discover the differential effects of one
and the same cause in apparently radically diverse events and experiences, especially for those
who undergo them . . . in education, medicine, social welfare, etc.61
To be sure, Bourdieu understands this task to be both ‘‘urgent and extremely
difficult.’’62 So does, or should, anyone familiar with the operation and function
of ‘‘public schools’’ in the United States. They are so deeply entrenched in the
58. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 192.
59. Fraser, ‘‘Rethinking the Public Sphere,’’ 61.
60. Geoff Eley, ‘‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,’’
in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, 296.
61. Bourdieu, Firing Back, 21–22 (emphasis in original).
62. Ibid., 22.
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discourse of business that it is very difficult, indeed, to see much hope for radical
democratic change. But this reality, daunting though it is, should not deter those
who understand the exploitative nature of capitalism and who wish to have
students develop themselves beyond consumers of products (including schooling).
‘‘What is needed,’’ Fraser reminds us, ‘‘is a post-bourgeois conception [of the
public sphere] that can permit us to envision a greater role for . . . public spheres
than mere autonomous opinion formation removed from authoritative decisionmaking . . . [that would] allow us to theorize the range of possible relations among
such publics.’’63 The challenge is to theorize while continually critiquing the
theorizing. In other words, using object lessons to better understand corporate
hegemony is not a panacea. There are, in fact, no lists or procedures to ‘‘bring
about’’ critical transitivity that can be generalized, ‘‘taught,’’ or, perhaps especially,
‘‘modeled.’’ There is no rubric for criticality. Instead, critical transitivity emerges
from the various and messy transactions between and among people willing to be
wrong, willing to set aside deeply ingrained and long-held traditions, willing to
achieve what the Greeks called elenchus: refutation. As Laclau and Mouffe put it,
Conflict and division . . . are neither disturbances that unfortunately cannot be eliminated
nor empirical impediments that render impossible the full realization of a harmony that we
cannot attain because we will never be able to leave our particularities completely aside in
order to act in accordance with our rational belief — a harmony which should nonetheless
constitute the ideal towards which we strive.64
The hubris of certitude appears to me to be reserved for the ‘‘free marketeers,’’
the stalwart defenders of capitalism who view schools as training sites for future
employment. As though free markets are actually free (proven demonstrably false,
at least in 1929 and 2008), those who continue to see schools as the avenue
for future corporate earnings or reduced unemployment percentages demean the
potential of students, teachers, and the processes of teaching and learning in order
to streamline thought and action for conformity to capitalist economic rationality.
Instead, classrooms should be radically democratic counterpublic spaces where
student and teacher inquiry is supportively antagonistic — and results in public
schooling.
63. Fraser, ‘‘Rethinking the Public Sphere,’’ 76–77.
64. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, xvii.