In many nations around the globe, including Pakistan, education is losing ground as a public good to become another market-based commodity as the state shrinks its responsibility to schooling. This presents challenges to democratic futures, and particularly for young democratic states such as Pakistan. The government of Pakistan is pouring a…

This article considers how the development of for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) technologies fosters the privatization of public education and erodes the values and practices of democratic education. The introduction situates the advent of digital technologies in the context of the structural economic and ideological shifts of the past 40…

In this article I discuss the vision of education for liberation during the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa. The article focuses specifically on "People's Education" and "Workers' Education". Instead of an instrumental role for education reduced solely to the labour market requirements of business, economic growth and…

The authors consider how globalisation has fundamentally reshaped education. The assumption that in a knowledge economy workers need to be better educated has led to the belief that education is a private good. What the authors define as "responsibilisation" frames a radically different vision of public life from that of the past. The…

How do market-driven reforms and the privatization of public education reshape the professional identities of teachers and school leaders? This timely and accessible book examines two waves of business influence that created models of schooling that are out of touch with the experiences of students, the professional expertise of teachers, and the…

We currently live in an era of neoliberalism where privatization and profit are held up as political ideals. The ascendency of this ideology threatens the notion that public schools can serve not only as institutions that supply credentials but also as institutions that lay the building blocks for American democracy. This essay argues that teacher…

India and the United States are the largest democracies in the world, and since the 1990s, both countries have implemented neoliberal economic reforms into most of their social institutions-- including their education systems. Even though both countries have long-established commitments to public education as a means for socio-economic…

As seen through the recommendations of University Education Commission (1949) and Education Commission (1964), till about National Policy on Education, 1986, as markers of educational discourses, the concern was to resist expansion, to guard against dilution of quality and standards of higher education and excellence and reputation of higher…

The scholarship on school privatization and market-oriented reforms has demonstrated the negative effects on segregation and inequity triggered by this model, not only in Chile but globally. Less is known about how to transition toward a democratic-oriented education approach after decades of embedding the values rooted in a competition-based…

Neoliberal discourse has undergone substantial changes over the last years, taking a status as if it were a natural given. In this article we analyse the naturalisation of neoliberal discourse in higher education in post-dictatorship Chile. Based on discourse analysis of two Chilean higher education policy reports, we examine the reconfiguration…

This is the second of three articles on "Sources of Authority in Education". All use the work of Amy Gutmann as a heuristic device to describe and explain the prevalence of market-based models of Education Reform in the United States as part of what Pasi Sahlberg terms the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). This movement is based…

We focus on describing some of the effects of austerity capitalism in the public educational sector in Poland, a country that was a part of the Soviet bloc from WWII and experienced dramatic transformation after 1989. This transformation from "communism" to "democracy" involved all spheres of the life of society and individuals…

In this article, the author examines the growth of the current strain of fundamentalism that is influencing rural schools in the United States, and how it is, according to him, creating a self-sustaining pipeline of fundamentalists into positions of power. The author details the type of anti-public and anti-democratic education being expressed…

This response discusses the complexity of racial segregation in U.S. cities today and an emerging education movement for equity and racial justice. Racial segregation has been and continues to be a potent, and contested, strategy of containment, subordination, and exploitation, but African Americans have also, out of necessity, turned racial…

Although in plain sight daily, a highly successful war against the public schools has been hidden in the shadows of public consciousness. Only very recently have several people written articles about this war, with the only book calling it a war being written in 2002. Neither the public nor educators have become aware of the far-reaching extent…