When Parents Have an Incentive for their Kids to Fail…

(...) Not only does neoliberalism undermine both civic education and public values and confuse education with training, it also treats knowledge as a product, promoting a neoliberal logic that views schools as malls, students as consumers, and faculty as entrepreneurs. It gets worse. As Stanley Aronowitz points out, (t)he absurd neoliberal idea that users should pay for every public good from parks and beaches to highways has reached education with a vengeance” as more and more students are forced to give up attending college because of skyrocketing tuition rates. In addition, thousands of students are now saddled with debts that will bankrupt their lives in the future. Unfortunately, one measure of this disinvestment in higher education as a public good can be seen in the fact that many states such as California are spending more on prisons than on higher education. Educating low income and poor minorities to be engaged citizens has been undermined by an unholy alliance of law and order conservatives, private prison corporations, and prison guard unions along with the rise of the punishing state, all of whom have an invested interest in locking more people up, especially poor minority youth, rather than educating them. It is no coincidence that as the U.S., and Canada to a lesser degree, disinvests in the institutions fundamental to a democracy, it has invested heavily in the rise of the prison-industrial complex, and the punishing-surveillance state. The social costs of prioritizing punishing over educating is clear in one shocking statistic provided by a recent study which states that “by age 23, almost a third of Americans or 30.2 percent have been arrested for a crime…that researches say is a measure of growing exposure to the criminal justice system in everyday life.” (...)