Neoliberalism and education

Abstract The discourses and practices of neoliberalism, including government policies for education and training, public debates regarding standards and changed funding regimes, have been at work on and in schools in capitalist societies since at least the 1980s. Yet we have been hard pressed to say what neoliberalism is, where it comes from and how it works on us and through us to establish the new moral order of schools and schooling, and to produce the new student/subject who is appropriate to (and appropriated by) the neoliberal economy. Beck (Citation1997) refers to the current social order as the 'new modernities' and he characterizes the changes bringing about the present forms of society as having been…