Education Has Entered the Market. What Has This Created?

What has the marketization of education done to students and teachers in post-fordist capitalism? Quite simply, this marketization of education has seeked to quantify the unquantifiable. In the name of neoliberal rhetoric about destroying top down bureaucracy and centralized control, neoliberalist capitalism has reproduced these very things, causing actors within the educational structures to end up serving entities of quantification like 'aims and objectives', 'outcomes', and 'mission statements' in the name of the market. These entities of quantification have become entities of power that teachers must serve to prove to the management class that their programs are successful and are worthy of funding, serving the very market forces that the marketization of education necessitates even when an action like “teaching” fundamentally cannot be marketed or sold. This is an inner-antagonism of marketized education that causes students and teachers to end up serving this short circuit, where they both care more about symbols of representation and success, than actual work and success, because that is what managers, surveyors and supervisors of teachers and market investors have to value when trying to quantify the unquantifiable. To quote Mark Fisher, “Much of this 'information' is provided by workers themselves. Massimo De Angelis and David Harvie describe some of the bureaucratic measures with which a lecturer must comply when putting together a module for an undergraduate degree in British universities. 'For each module', De Angelis and Harvie write, the 'module leader' (ML, i.e., lecturer) must complete various paperwork, in particular a 'module specification' (at the module's start) which lists the module's 'aims and objectives', ILOs, 'modes and methods of assessment', amongst other information; and a 'module review' document (at the end of the module), in which the ML reports their own assessment of the module's strengths and weaknesses and their suggested changes for the following year; a summary of student feedback; and average marks and their dispersion. This is only the beginning, however. For the degree program as a whole, academics must prepare a 'program specification', as well as producing 'annual program reports', which record student performance according to 'progression rates', 'withdrawal rates', location and spread of marks. All students' marks have to be graded against a 'matrix'. This auto-surveillance is complemented by assessments carried out by external authorities. The marking of student assignments is monitored by 'external examiners' who are supposed to maintain consistency of standards across the university sector. Lecturers have to be observed by their peers, while departments are subject to periodic three or four day inspections by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA).” For fellow students watching, I think we all know the feeling of caring more about the rubric and test marks in all classes instead of our actual work. It gets extra ironic in the creative arts classes though. In classes like art, music, and English, the market necessitates a quantification of the inherently unquantifiable. Once again, teachers need this form of quantification as proof to the management class who uphold this hidden bureaucracy to receive funding for their teachings. This system of quantification and representations has destroyed the once active interpersonal relations between teacher and student. Once long ago, the goal of teacher and student relations was to transfer knowledge and  critical thinking, giving a true education and creating a truly valuable relationship.  No longer. Both roles, as a law of their role in the now marketized education system, must serve symbols of representation to get by and prove successful now, This reaffirms Fisher's belief that these bureaucratic quantifications that were implemented as means to an end (method to reach the end goal of the former relationship just discussed), have becomes ends themselves as the market has necessitated. Sadly, the lesson we learn when analyzing the destruction of relationships is that the infiltration of capital into education has destroyed any inter-personal relationship between student and teacher as a rule. This transfer of quantification as a once theoretical means to a real life end in itself has created a new antagonism specific to post-fordist education. To quote Fisher, "Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians. Teachers want to help students to pass the exams.... they want us to be authority figures who tell them what to do." Teachers must care about getting the student to reach these representations, while also caring about their well-being and life as a student, an antagonism any teacher watching would know all too well. I'll leave you with the question and antagonism this marketization of education has all led up to that Fisher leaves us with, "are students the consumers of the service or its product?" 

(A response to a critique): Your critiques rest themselves on a faulty presupposition: that the set up of the modern classroom exists outside of the infiltration of capital into the classroom. The notion implied throughout the response is that capital infiltration into education isn’t as important as the pre-existing setup of the classroom. Sure, we can agree that throughout history, the set up of the education system has always been dictatorial in and of itself. My claim throughout however, and one I’ll expand on here, was never that this system is unique to post-fordist capitalism, rather that capital and the marketization of education has exacerbated this system we both critique. Currently, with constant quantification programs to allow managers and market investors to quantify “success,” the doctoral structure of not only the classroom, but the hierarchy existing within post-fordist capitalism is exacerbated because of this. To provide an example, we can focus on Further Education colleges being removed from local authority control in the early 1990s, to which they have become subject both to 'market' pressures and to government-imposed targets. What has happened as a result of this?  To quote Mark Fisher, “Much of this 'information' is provided by workers themselves. Massimo De Angelis and David Harvie describe some of the bureaucratic measures with which a lecturer must comply when putting together a module for an undergraduate degree in British universities. 'For each module', De Angelis and Harvie write, the 'module leader' (ML, i.e., lecturer) must complete various paperwork, in particular a 'module specification' (at the module's start) which lists the module's 'aims and objectives', ILOs, 'modes and methods of assessment', amongst other information; and a 'module review' document (at the end of the module), in which the ML reports their own assessment of the module's strengths and weaknesses and their suggested changes for the following year; a summary of student feedback; and average marks and their dispersion. This is only the beginning, however. For the degree program as a whole, academics must prepare a 'program specification', as well as producing 'annual program reports', which record student performance according to 'progression rates', 'withdrawal rates', location and spread of marks. All students' marks have to be graded against a 'matrix'. This auto-surveillance is complemented by assessments carried out by external authorities. The marking of student assignments is monitored by 'external examiners' who are supposed to maintain consistency of standards across the university sector. Lecturers have to be observed by their peers, while departments are subject to periodic three or four day inspections by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA).” Simply put, in any system where resources are allocated based on success quantification measures, increased bureaucratic systems exist not only within the classroom, but from manager-teacher, teacher-teacher, and then finally teacher-student, a system of relationship based off of the controller of quantified data, and the people who exist to not only feed data, but serve it as well, with students being at the bottom of the totem pole. Now, with an understanding of what the market does to the teacher's relationship with the class, forcing them to serve bureaucratic “market Stalinist” measures, we can analyze the doctoral system of the classroom itself, and how it impacts the students. Before I dive in here, I need to make it clear that with my analysis, I can’t conceive of exactly how education would work past markets. I think fundamentally, since education serves to produce whatever kind of human society needs in whatever system, a post capitalist system would rid itself of these dictatorial structures capital has imposed upon it. Alright let's dive in. In the modern classroom, work revolves around the creation, and then serving of this data. In the modern classroom, there is the explainer of how to serve this data (the teacher), and the people who serve the data (the student). What this does is create a class structure built around the destruction of individual thought, action, and desire, for individuality cannot be quantified, so it must be rid of to appease the management class and the investor class. Even things deemed “communal” such as classwide discussions are judged based on a rubric now. This exacerbated dictatorial class-set up that serves quantification data is innate to contemporary capitalism, and cannot be destroyed without the removal of capital and the market from the classroom. When imagining a future where education doesn’t exist to serve the market, anything becomes possible. Classroom rules represent very new things. Communal engagement becomes very real. The classroom we have known and hated for so long becomes a classroom that’s escaped and replaced by non-compulsory classes, teachers that invite conversation, not dictate it, and truly individual children, not products of a marketized service.