Policy Futures in Education, Volume 5, Number 2, 2007 doi:10.2304/pfie.2007.5.2.137

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Kidnapping Public Schooling: perversion and normalization of the discursive bases within the epicenter of New Right educational policies

JOÃO M. PARASKEVA Universidade do Minho, Portugal

ABSTRACT Public schooling has been kidnapped. The author examines how this happened – since we all know very well who did it. How did public schooling become a hostage of world’s neo-rightist political processes? This article attempts to unveil some of those strategies that underpin the very core of the neo-rightist current triumphalistic posture. To understand the way neo-rightist political processes encompassed public schooling at such a frightening pace it is necessary to situate neoliberal policies based on what has been called the third hegemony of historical capitalism. Also it is necessary to be aware of (a) how particular key concepts and practices have been cleverly and gradually twisted and perverted, positively hijacked from the social sphere, and coined within an economic flavoured materiality, and (b) how the new rightist triumphalism is deeply enmeshed within the politics of the common sense and the role that the media plays in building a particular commonsensical framework. The article ends by taking the Portuguese reality as an example, not only denouncing the poor record of some of the graduate and teaching education courses within the universities and colleges, but stating the need to rescue democracy by reinventing it.

Introduction

I will start my analysis with an indisputable and painful claim: public schooling has been kidnapped. My purpose is to examine how this happened – since we all know very well who did it. How did public schooling become a hostage of the world’s neo-rightist political processes? Obviously, numerous issues and strategies fuelled such choking reality.

This article attempts to unveil some of those strategies that underpin the very core of the neo-rightist current triumphalist posture. To understand the way neo-rightist political processes enclosed public schooling in such a frighteningly short space and time – totally stripped of its capacity to promote and develop the common good – we need to be deeply aware of (a) how particular key concepts and practices – such as democracy, state, schooling, etc. – have been cleverly and gradually twisted and perverted, positively hijacked from the social sphere, and coined within an economic flavoured materiality, and (b) how the new rightist triumphalism is deeply enmeshed within the politics of common sense and the role that the media plays in building a particular commonsensical framework. We will end our approach by taking the Portuguese reality as an example, denouncing what one might call without any blink of hesitation the criminal record of some of the graduate and teaching education courses within the universities and colleges.

Let me unfold – to use Roland Barthes’ (Barthes, 1987) terminology – the neoliberal cartography, one that makes neoliberalism a powerful non-monolithic hegemonic bloc. The words ‘non-monolithic bloc’ are important here to understand how the neoliberal model is an ongoing set of construction and deconstruction processes; processes that drive its devastating hegemonic and triumphal position, a position that represents an unlikely set of coalitions around the world.

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A Non-monolithic Hegemonic Bloc

Understanding accurately the emergence and consolidation of New Right policies within education requires paying close attention to the economic and political origins of these policies. As McChesney (1999, p. 7) argues, ‘it is precisely in its oppression of non-market forces that we see how neoliberalism operates not only as an economic system, but as a political and cultural system as well’.

The New Right political, economic, and cultural framework did not come ‘out of the blue’. A truthful analysis of its emergence and the effects of the New Right policies, in this particular case, within education, in general, and curriculum, in particular, requires examining the emergence of Reaganism-Bushism and Thatcherism-Majorism in the United States and United Kingdom respectively, considered by many scholars as the high point of the ‘right turn’. It is important to consider the economic and political platforms for the New Right policies as emerging from Reaganism and Thatcherism, for which House’s (1998), Hall’s (1988) and Apple’s (2000) analyses make an excellent starting point.

As House (1998, p. 13) highlights, the 1980s ‘will be known as the Reagan decade’ in which the conservatives attacked and undermined the prevailing ‘liberal economic view of education that if one increases the educational achievement of students, even poor students from minority backgrounds, they will eventually secure better jobs, advance themselves socially, and help the economy’. Instead, for conservatives, House argues (1998, p. 14), ‘students come to be seen as not simply uneducated, but as undisciplined – the fault of educators, the students themselves, their families, and lax government policies – and this new vision led to quite different educational policies’. Central to this attack was Murray’s Losing Ground: American social policy 1950-1980 ([1984] 1998), which, according to House (1998), claimed that societal and educational decline and chaos could be reduced to the simple fact ‘that government programs had given the poor too much’ and therefore the solution ‘was to scrap the entire welfare and income-support structure for working-age persons, so that the only alternative was the job market’ (House, 1998, p. 14). As House (1998, p. 14) points out, for Murray the prescription for society was quite simple: ‘Do not study, and we will throw you out; commit crimes, and we will put you in jail; do not work, and we will make sure your existence is so uncomfortable that any job will be preferable to it’.

It is within this context that Reaganism should be understood and politically contextualised. As House (1998, pp. 14-15) argues, ‘the Reagan administration pursued economic policies that reduced taxes and greatly increased expenditures on the military, thus incurring the largest national debt in history [let alone the undeniable evidence that] inequality of income and wealth among Americans increased dramatically’. The dimensions of this inequality, according to House, are quite clear in Philips’s (1998) study as well:

by several measurements, the United States in the late twentieth century led all other major industrial nations in the gap dividing the upper fifth of the population from the lower – in the disparity between top and bottom. In 1981, the top 1% of taxpayers had 8.1% of total reported income; by 1986 they had 14.7%. From 1977 to 1987, the top 1% of family after-tax income went from $174,498 to $303, 900, a 74.2% increase. The bottom 10% went from $3,528 to $3,157, a 10.5% decrease. This trend continued. By 1989, the average income of the upper 1% was $559,000, and by 1993 $800,000 compared with $8,400 for the bottom fifth. (Philips, 1998, cited in House, 1998, p. 13)

House (1998, p. 19) argues that ‘four Reagan policies accounted for much of the shift in income distribution [namely] tax rate reduction, federal budget management, deregulation, and monetary and debt policy’. This economic policy framework would dramatically affect the educational sphere. As mentioned above, the conservative ‘right turn’ instigated by the Reagan reign ‘started’ as a reaction against the liberal educational tradition. Whereas liberals were seeking to ‘increase educational spending’ since they thought (and defended) that ‘improved education leads to improved job skills, employment, and a wealthy economy, including international competitiveness’ (House, 1998, p. 19), the conservatives maintained that ‘inadequate education [meaning liberal education] led to poor job skills, which led to unemployability and unemployment, which led to low wages and poverty, which led to welfare, family dissolution, and crime, and to a declining national economy’ (House, 1998, p. 19). That is to say, ‘the failure of education resulted in defective

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students who could not or did not want to work’, and their failure ‘was not the fault of the society or the economic structure, but of themselves, their families, and the educational system’ (House, 1998, p. 19).

Among the political conservative strategies, House (1998, p. 19) claims, one can identify that ‘little money was available from the federal government’ and also that there was an emergence of ‘commonsense remedies, for example, cultural literacy, accountability through testing, new graduation and teacher certification requirements, and vouchers or schools of choice’. As he states:

the federal educational agenda during the Reagan years turned from equity access, social welfare, the common school, regulations and federal intervention to excellence and performance standards, ability and selectivity, productivity, parental choice and institutional competition, deregulation, and state and local initiatives. (House, 1998, p. 19)

House (1998, p. 20) sums up by stating that since ‘liberal indulgence had resulted in the destruction of the curriculum in public schools and universities under pressure from minority groups’, the conservative ‘right turn’ within education was deeply anchored in ‘institutional competition, individual competition, performance standards, harder content, parental choice, and character building’. During Reaganism, people demanded a ‘return to the classic works that formed the intellectual core of Western civilization’ (House, 1998, p. 20), and claimed that ‘students and teachers could be held accountable by imposition of new tests and standards of excellence’ (House, 1998, p. 20). Clear evidence of the impact of Reaganism discourse within US schooling was the fact that 47 states adhered to testing students through ‘national testing as a means by which national goals could be achieved’ (House, 1998, p. 20), and 37 states started to test teachers. As documented (‘on Reagan’s last day in office, it had a debt to foreigners of $500 billion [compared] to the 1980s’ $166 billion’ [Philips, 1998, cited in House, 1998, p. 24]), Reaganism would end up being a disastrous political strategy. As House (1998, p. 16) argues, ‘improving the work force requires more than pressuring teachers and students, [for] education is an important factor in productivity but not the dominant factor and certainly not the sole factor’. Thus, the ‘scenario in which poor education led to unemployment and poverty and then to welfare and crime is demonstrably incorrect [since] education can and should be made better, but its deterioration is not the root of our social problems’ (House, 1998, p. 16).

Crossing the Atlantic, Hall’s analyses show that Thatcherism aligned itself with the same economic views and political steps that undergirded Reaganism. Characterising the political context in the United Kingdom before the rise of the conservative ‘right turn’ during the 1980s, Hall describes how both the Right and the Left adopted a particular consensus over specific issues which assured a kind of social stability. As he argues:

The Right – marginalizing their more reactionary and free-market elements – settled for the welfare state, comprehensive education, the Keynesian management of economic policy, and the commitment to full employment as terms of peaceful compromise between capital and labor. In return, the Left accepted to work broadly within the terms of modified capitalism and within the Western bloc sphere of strategic influence. Despite the many real differences of emphasis and a number of bitter political and industrial struggles, which marked the political scene from time to time, the situation was characterized by a profound, underlying consensus or compromise on the fundamental social and economic framework within which conflicts were, for the moment, ‘settled’ or contained. (Hall, 1988, p. 36)

However, as Hall (1998, p. 37) reiterates straightforwardly, ‘the underlying conditions for this stabilization did not exist’ since, as he argues:

the British economy and the whole industrial structure were too weak, too tied to a traditional worldwide imperial financial role, too undermodernized, ‘backward’ and undercapitalized to generate the huge surplus required both to sustain the capital accumulation and profitability process and cream off enough to finance the welfare state, high wages, and improved conditions for the less well-off – the only terms on which the historic compromise could operate.

Thus, in the economic sphere of ‘wages, production, strikes, industrial conflict, union militancy, and so on’ (Hall, 1988, p. 37), and in the emergent areas of social life, including ‘crime,

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permissiveness, race, moral and social values, traditional social roles and mores’, the society fell into a crisis that inaugurated a complex phase of conflicts ‘that frequently accompany the struggles for the formation of a new hegemonic stage’ (Hall, 1988, p. 37). According to Hall (1988, p. 37), this was the key moment for the conservative ‘right turn’, led by Thatcher, a political ‘turn’ that, as we mentioned previously and as stressed by Hall, did not ‘materialize out of thin air’. In fact, according to Hall, it was a particular political conjuncture in Britain that marked the emergence of the New Right, an emergence that occurred first within the ‘Conservative party, and then in two successive governments of Mrs Thatcher and the political philosophy (Thatcherism) that she represents’ (Hall, 1988, pp. 35-36).

As Hall (1988, p. 39) points out, the two historical missions that underpinned Thatcher’s political strategy characterised Thatcherism. Its first historical mission

was not to bend and subvert but to contest and disperse the social democratic corporatist consensus that had dominated the political scene since the end of the Second World War and to disorganize the common sense – the political taken-for granted – the British postwar political settlement.

Its second historical mission

was to reverse the dominant trends in British society [which on] matters of policy ... meant reversing the trend to state-subsidized welfare, breaking the curve of public spending and the public sector, restoring the private enterprise and the imperatives of the free market and of free-market forces, rolling back the tide of the state intervention, underpinning profitability, keeping wages in check, and breaking the power the working class had come to exercise in society via trade unions, in economic and political life. (Hall, 1988, p. 39)

In essence, as Hall (1988, p. 39) argues, the mission of Thatcherism was to reconstruct not only ‘an alternative ideological bloc of a distinctively neoliberal, free-market, possessive individualist kind [and] to transform the underpinning ideologies of the Keynesian state and thus disorganize the power bloc’, but also ‘to break the incremental curve of the working class power and bargaining strength, reversing the balance of power and restoring the prerogatives of management, capital, and control’. Based on a belief in a free market and a strong state, Thatcherism conceived its strategy anchored in a narrow economic view, and the real aim was ‘to reconstruct social life as a whole around a return to the old values – the philosophies of tradition, Englishness, respectability, patriarchalism, family, and nation’ (Hall, 1988, p. 39). In so doing Thatcherism ended up rebuilding the common sense, but changing the meanings of particular central social concepts that underpin a just society, an issue that I will return to later on. Hall (1988, p. 40) reminds us that Thatcherism ‘succeeded in reversing or putting into reverse gear many postwar historic trends [by changing] the currency of political thought and argument’.

As one can clearly see from House’s (1998) and Hall’s (1988) scrutiny, the similarities between Reaganism and Thatcherism are quite palpable and unmistakable. In both political and economic approaches, we can identify a symbiosis between neoliberal and neoconservative drives and arguments. Apple (2000) overtly identifies the influences of both Reaganism and Thatcherism as catalyst periods for the ‘establishment’ of New Right policies. Likewise, Apple highlights Reaganism and Thatcherism’s success as political frameworks (or ideological foundations, so to speak) that build the path for the contemporary ‘right turn’. It is in this context that Apple (2000, p. 20) argues for the need to consider these policies in a larger context:

The ‘success’ of the policies of the Reagan administration, like that of Thatcherism and then Major in Britain, should not simply be evaluated in electoral terms. They also need to be judged by their success in disorganizing other more progressive groups, in shifting the terms of political, economic, and cultural debate on to the terrain favored by capital and the Right (Hall & Jacques, 2000); [that is to say,] there can be no doubt that the current right-wing resurgence has accomplished no small amount in its attempt to construct the conditions that will put it in a hegemonic position.

Understanding this ‘right turn’ requires being aware of a particular political context that created the favourable and ‘flattering’ political conditions for this powerful emergence. As we are reminded by Jessop et al (1984) and by Apple (2000), one must question, ‘How is such an ideological vision

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legitimated and accepted?’ (Apple, 2000, p. 23). In an attempt to address this issue, Apple (2000) stresses that the ‘rightist turn’ is not dissociated from the crisis that the social democratic accord achieved after World War II – one in ‘which the government increasingly became an arena for a focus on the conditions required for equality of opportunity’ (Apple, 2000, p. 20) – in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Hall argued in 1983 and Apple (2000, p. 23) argues, ‘the right-wing resurgence is not simply a reflection of the current crisis; [rather], it is itself a response to that crisis’. Specific events in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as the struggle for racial and sexual equality and the struggle to end the Vietnam War, not only produced a complex amalgam of turmoil, but also acted dynamically to disrupt particular key compromises between capital and labour, in which labour accepted the profit and market logic, and in so doing secured a minimum standard of living, and union rights. Before this, the cultural centre’ was transformed and quite naturally key concepts such as ‘family’, ‘community’, and ‘nation’ were profoundly altered. Not surprisingly, we witnessed the re-creation of a new ‘cultural mainstream’, one that fractured the common good and saw traditional social democratic state policies within education and health care as part of the problem and not the solution to the social crisis.

While the process of rebuilding a ‘new cultural mainstream’ implied an overt detachment from old conservative orthodoxies, in fact, the building of this ‘cultural center’ was based on the principles of the currently renovated Right, that confronts the ‘moral, existential, [and economic] chaos of the preceding decades’ (Apple, 2000, p. 24) with a network of exceedingly well-organised and financially secure organisations incorporating ‘an aggressive style, on outspoken religious and cultural traditionalism and a clear populist commitment’ (Apple, 2000, p. 24). In other words, Apple (2000, p. 24) claims, the project was aimed at constructing a

new majority that would dismantle the welfare state, legislate a return to traditional morality, and stem the tide of political and cultural dislocation which the 1960’s and 1970’s represented. Using a populist strategy (now in combination with an aggressive executive branch of the government), it marshaled an assault on ‘liberalism and secular humanism’ and linked that assault to what some observers have argued was an obsession with individual guilt and responsibility where social questions are concerned (crime, sex, education, poverty) with strong beliefs against strong intervention.

In short, one can see that House (1998), Hall (1988) and Apple (2000) trace the roots of the ‘rightist turn’ back to the Reaganism (see Chomsky, 2002a [1]) and Thatcherism eras, but also unveil the reasons why and how the Right was able to build itself as a hegemonic force. However, both Fairclough (2000) and Mouffe (2000) provide us with another powerful analysis that describes the complexity of the most current New Right forms. Therefore, I will now examine the cartography of the conservative ‘right turn’ in the United States, an analysis that fits too many nations throughout the world. In order to do that I will build on my analysis using Apple’s (2000) approach.

The current New Right trend should be understood as a non-monolithic bloc, able to build an intricate and powerful coalition incorporating antagonistic groups. Thus, the New Right should be seen as a conservative alliance that, within the United States context, includes four specific groups. The first group, the neoliberals, ‘represents dominant economic and political elites who are intent on modernizing the economy and the institutions connected to it’ (Apple, 2000, pp. xxiv-xxv). The second group, the neoconservatives, ‘are economic and cultural conservatives who want a return to “high standards”, discipline, “real” knowledge, and what is in essence a form of Social Darwinist competition’ (Apple, 2000, pp. xxiv-xxv). The third is ‘an increasingly active segment of authoritarian populists’, a group ‘made up of largely white working-class and middle-class groups’ (Apple, 2000, p. xxv), and the fourth group is composed ‘of a fraction of the professional new middle class’ (Apple, 2000, p. xxv).

While the neoliberals, ‘usually in leadership of the alliance’, exhibit absolute belief ‘that the markets will solve all of “our” social problems, since the private is necessarily good and public is necessarily bad – hence, their strong support of vouchers and privatized choice plans’ (Apple, 2000, p. xxv), the neoconservatives, as Levine argued in 1996 and Apple (2000, p. xxv) argues:

are fueled by a nostalgic and quite romanticized vision of the past [frequently] based on a fundamental misrecognition of the fact that what they might call the classics and ‘real’ knowledge gained that status as the result of intense past conflicts and often were

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themselves seen as equally dangerous culturally and just as morally destabilizing as any of the new elements of the curriculum and culture they now castigate.

This complex coalition becomes more powerful with the integration of the authoritarian populists and a specific fraction of the new middle class. The authoritarian populists are quite powerful in spheres such as education and in other spheres of politics and ‘provide[s] much of the support from below for neoliberal and neoconservative positions, since they see themselves as disenfranchised by the “secular humanism” that supposedly now pervades public schooling’ (Apple, 2000, p. xxv). The middle class display a particular kind of ‘uncompromising’ faith in ‘techniques of accountability, efficiency, and management that are [in essence] their cultural capital’ (Apple, 2000, p. xxv) that overshadow their contradictory impulses towards the other elements of the alliance. By providing the ‘technical expertise that enables neoliberals and neoconservatives to put their respective agendas in place’ (Apple, 2000, p. xxv), they win a pivotal space within the alliance, continuously producing ‘managerial solutions to educational dilemmas’ (Apple, 2000). In fact, according to the New Right agenda, the only way to address ‘properly’ the crisis in a myriad of societal spheres, in general, and within education, in particular, is to expand the market dynamics to the educational field, and consequently reduce state intervention.

As one can recognise clearly, among countless issues that both underpin and drive the New Rightists’ impulses, most important is their draconian claim that the chaotic reality that public schooling faces can be blamed on the liberal tradition, but also (and this is of utter importance) the progressive tradition. In the front line of these conveniently skewed positions, I highlight the works of Bennett (1992), Hirsch (1996) and Ravitch (2000), among others. While Ravitch’s latest work, Left Back (2000), provides clear evidence of the way the New Rightists perceive and justify the crises of public schooling by blaming progressivism, Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (1996) demonstrates intellectual dishonesty. In a book awkwardly dedicated to Gramsci, Hirsch (1996, p. 7) quixotically stresses that the chaos that permeates the very root of the US school system is based on the fact that the system is anchored in a Freirean approach, a system that rejects ‘traditional teaching methods and subject matters [and objects] to the banking theory of schooling, [an approach that numbs] the critical faculties of students and [preserves] the oppressed class’, instead of following a Gramscian approach, one that maintains ‘that political progressivism demanded educational conservatism’ (Hirsh, 1996, p. 7). While it is true that Gramsci defended the construction of working-class organic intellectuals as a critical way to achieve power in a given society, the fact is that Gramsci by no means claimed that that process should be achieved through the obliteration of the working-class culture. In fact, Gramsci made a call for the working class to master the mainstream culture (or as Hirsch [1996, p. 7] wisely puts it, ‘to master the tools of power and authority’), but in so doing, they also ‘invade’ that mainstream space with working-class culture. Avoiding any kind of euphemisms, Gramsci never claimed that the price that the working class has to pay to apprehend the mainstream culture was the erasure of their own powerful working-class cultural capacity.

Moreover, such a skewed reading of Gramsci is even more unacceptable for someone whose background is in literature, as is the case for Hirsch (1996). Those who have a literature background (and we do not claim here any sort of selectivity) know very well the interplay between languages and cultures; they rub against each other, provoking dramatic changes. As Gramsci (1985, p. 41) felicitously reminds us, ‘the mere fact that the workers raise these questions and attempt to answer them means that the elements of an original proletarian civilization already exist, that there are already proletarian forces of production of cultural values’. Clearly, Hirsch is misreading Gramsci, to say the least. Even within the so-called magnanimity of the ancient culture Hirsch’s claims fall apart. In fact, Baker’s (1978) insight is useful here given his observation that while the Romans invaded the Greek empire, they were invaded by the Greek language and culture. And this is not an exception in history.

Moreover, in a school system profoundly ‘structured’ by the secular logic of efficiency that prizes an individualistic culture (as one had the opportunity to document in this work), one would be intellectually unfair to claim that that school system is an example of social havoc because it is harboured in an approach (e.g. Freirean) that claims precisely and radically otherwise. Hirsch’s analysis is unfair, not only with regard to Freire and Gramsci, but also with regard to the US school system. However, in so doing, he achieved something that should not be minimised; he shifted

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responsibility from the efficiency models to a conveniently vague notion of progressivism identified as a monolithic political group, and in doing so ‘constructs’ the disease and offers a prognosis.

Summarising the main arguments of these New Rightist approaches towards public schooling, Apple’s (2000) arguments teach us a great deal. Describing the current period in education as a period of reaction, Apple (2000, p. 91) argues that New Right attacks on public schooling are based in a ‘hurried’ vision of ‘our educational institutions ... as failures’:

High drop-out rates, a decline in ‘functional literacy’, a loss of standards and discipline, the failure to teach ‘real knowledge’, poor scores on standardized tests, and more – all of these are charges leveled at schools. And all of this, we are told, has led to the declining economic productivity, unemployment, poverty, a loss of international competitiveness, and so on. Return to a ‘common culture’, will make the schools more efficient, more competitive, more open to private initiative (‘Mammon’); this will solve our problems. (Apple, 2000, p. 91)

Obviously, Apple argues (2000, p. 91), ‘behind this is an attack on egalitarianism norms and values’ and the dangerous fallacy that ‘too much democracy – culturally and politically [is] the major cause of “our” declining economy and culture’. The frenetic and less than thoughtful New Right promotion of standards, competition, efficiency, and accountability, just to mention a few perspectives, not only destroys virulently any possibility to address issues such as inequality as a public asset, but also multiplies those very ‘savage inequalities’ (or in a more corrosive way, to make specific inequalities ‘invisible’, as Ellison [1952] noted), rooted at the very marrow of society. As a result of this approach, we are witnessing a new version of the survival of the fittest. Such version, Peters (1994) argues, is a facsimile of the neoliberal vision of a perfect society, one that aims to create a competitive, egoistic, rational subject ready for the logic of the market. Clearly, and as Hursh & Martina (2003) and Hursh (2006) point out, neoliberalism must be resisted, because it diminishes freedom, democracy, and equality in society and education.

Although one would be profoundly unaware to argue that Apple does not recognise the crises at the very root of public schooling, the fact is that he deconstructs this chaotic stage by urging the reader to pay close attention to the changing perception of public schooling instigated by the impact of the New Rightists’ policies, resulting, among numerous issues, in ‘draconian cuts’. That is to say, public schooling, under the curse of the New Right framework, experienced substantial defunding. It is precisely in the line of this argument that Apple (2000) denounces the materialisation of political projects such as Channel One in public schools, a well-achieved example of the connection between New Right economic policies and the idea of public schooling. As he argues (2000, p. 92), ‘sharply diminished revenues and a loss of public support for schools’ are at the very root of the crises public schooling is facing, and not the allegedly progressive imprimatur of Freireanism, as some of the key New Rightist demiurges within education are claiming. Apple stresses that the New Right’s defunding social policies create a situation in which federal and state aid to local school districts – never totally sufficient in many poor school districts – has been less and less able to keep up with the mandated programs such as classes for children with special needs or who speak languages other than English.

The lethal implications of this strategy are visible, say, in the way New Right policies have been able to draw multicultural curriculum policies based on English ‘tout court’ language while neglecting other linguistic forms (Macedo et al, 2003).

Furthermore, this kind of social policy ‘has meant that for many schools it will be nearly impossible for them to comply with health and desegregation programs mandated by the state and federal governments, to say nothing of other needs’ (Apple, 2000, p. 92). This lack of funding within public schooling should be partially contextualised within ‘the intensively competitive economic conditions faced by business and industry’ (Apple, 2000, p. 92). That is to say, ‘their own imperative to cut the costs and reduce the budget ... has led many companies to exert considerable pressure on states and local communities to give them sizable tax breaks’ (Apple, 2000, p. 92), thereby cutting off financial investments on public schooling. In fact, although tax reduction policies should not be perceived as something new within a capitalist framework, the fact is, ‘in an increasingly competitive situation in which companies find themselves in a context governed by capital flight in which states and communities are justifiably fearful that business will simply go elsewhere, such breaks have “drastically grown”’ (Apple, 2000, p. 92). The extraordinary annual

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deficit figure of $34 million in Cleveland’s school system speaks for itself of the harmful effects of the New Right social policies towards public education. Thus, public schooling should be analysed and understood as being in the middle of a large fiscal crisis, a fiscal crisis that allows a contract with Whittle Communication’s Channel One to look attractive, a kind of fatal temptation to deal with a calamitous reality (Apple, 2000).

However, in the face of the frightening reality upheld by New Rightist policies, a simple question becomes unavoidable. If New Rightist social policies are so poisonous and lethal for the social fabric, why have they achieved an overwhelming victory? Why is it that the New Right policies, in spite of their devastating effects on society, happen to be the dominant bloc currently? One is able to address this complex question by using Apple’s analysis. According to Apple (2000), among numerous issues, one cannot detach New Rightist accomplishments from the politics of the common sense and the role that the media plays in building a particular commonsensical framework. Notwithstanding its disastrous impact on less advantaged members of the population, the New Right managed to achieve support from that majority on the social perimeter.

Saying the Unsayable – the struggle over common sense

The meaning of public education has been gradually but successfully transformed under the leadership of the neoliberal social policies. Since concepts are not inert entities in which their meaning is constructed based on a particular context, we need to pay attention to the ‘meaning of language in its specific context’ (Apple, 2000, p. 16). In so doing, one is capable of ‘understanding political conceptions and educational concepts, since they are part of a larger social context’ which is ‘constantly shifting and is subject to severe ideological conflicts’ (Apple, 2000, p. 16). One would be naïve to ignore, as he argues (2000, p. 17) that

education itself is an arena in which these ideological conflicts work themselves out [since] it is one of the major sites in which different groups with distinct political, economic, and cultural visions attempt to define what socially legitimate means and ends of a society are to be.

In light of the downfall of the liberal reign and within the emergence of the New Rightist policies, Apple (2000, p. 17) denounces the shifting meanings of the word ‘equality’ ‘that have a good deal of success in redefining what education is for and in shifting the ideological texture of the society profoundly to the right’. As he maintains,

it is impossible to comprehend fully the shifting fortunes of the assemblage of concepts surrounding equality (equality of opportunity, equality, etc.) unless we have a much clearer picture of the society’s already unequal cultural, economic, and political dynamics that provide the center of gravity around which education functions. (2000, p. 18)

At the very marrow of the intricate changeability of meaning of ‘equality’, Apple (2000, p. 18) targets straightforwardly the tension between ‘property rights’ and ‘personal rights’, as a crucial connection for the economy, in which, unsurprisingly, the powerful groups ‘have fairly consistently defended the prerogatives of property’. Obviously, in a moment of fiscal crises, which is the particular case in nations such as the United States, the tension between property rights and personal rights becomes more belligerent and powerful groups are able to extend their economic needs to educational and other social institutions. According to those now in power, in order to address the economic catastrophe, ‘the gains made by women and men in employment, health and safety, welfare programs, affirmative action, legal rights, and education must be rescinded because “they are too expensive” both economically and ideologically’ (Apple, 2000, pp. 18-19). Therefore, not only do current military spending and tax breaks undermine fiscal resources, but also ‘people must be convinced that their belief that person rights come first is simply wrong or outmoded given current “realities”’ (Apple, 2000, p. 19). Thus, one can identify this segregated social ideal within ‘legislation, administrative rules, and ideological maneuvering to create the conditions right-wing groups believe are necessary to meet these requirements’ (Apple, 2000, p. 19).

It is in this context that, quite naturally, ‘equality, no matter how limited or broadly conceived, has become redefined’ (Apple, 2000, p. 19) since ‘the emphasis on public policy has materially

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changed from issues of employing the state to overcoming disadvantage’ (Apple, 2000, p. 19). He argues that

No longer is [equality] seen as linked to past group oppression and disadvantage. It is now simply a case of guaranteeing individual choice under the conditions of a free market. Thus, the current emphasis on ‘excellence’ (a word with multiple meanings and social uses) has shifted educational discourse so that underachievement once again increasingly is seen as largely the fault of the student. Student failure, which was at least partly interpreted as the fault of severely deficient educational policies and practices, is now being seen as the result of what might be called the biological and economic marketplace. (2000, p. 19)

In this rather elaborated, truncated and truculent process of redefinition of the very meaning and purpose of public schooling, we see an unquestioned fundamentalist faith in free choice to address social and educational ‘chaos’, and attacks on teachers and curriculum on issues such as quality, accountability, and commitment. Essentially, the ‘extraordinary’ political strategy led by the neoliberals drove both the social and educational worlds into a set of multifarious conflicts, conflicts that have led to a substantive transformation of schooling to the Right. As Apple’s analyses show us:

the movement away from social democratic principles and an acceptance of more right-wing positions in social and educational policy is precisely because conservative groups have been able to work on popular sentiments, to reorganize genuine feelings and in the process to win adherents. (2000, p. 20)

This particular perspective is quite visible in the critical approaches of Whitty (2002), Ball (2005) and Macedo (2006) as well. Part of the success of this strategy relies on a non-stop ‘dismantling of the welfare state and of the benefits that working people, people of color, and women ... have won over decades of hard work’ (Apple, 2000, p. 20). As Apple highlights, ‘one of the major aims of a rightist restoration politics is to struggle in not one but many different arenas at the same time, not only in the economic sphere but in education and elsewhere as well’, that is to say, in order to succeed in this endeavour, ‘the economic dominance must be coupled to political, moral, and intellectual leadership’ (Apple, 2000, p. 21). Showing his Gramscian political influence, Apple (2000, p. 22) stresses that we are facing a war of position, a war that ‘takes place where the whole relation of the state to civil society, to the people, and to popular struggles, to the individual and to the economic life of society has been thoroughly reorganized, where all the elements change’.

Using this intricate strategy that acts dynamically not only within the economic sphere, but also in other societal sites as well, the New Rightists successfully interceded within the common-sense environment, one that is deeply ordinary and contradictory, interrupting, renovating, and transforming ‘in a more “systematic” direction people’s practical consciousness’ (Apple, 2000, p. 22). It is precisely within this judicious restructuring of the common sense (a complex outcome of multifaceted and contradictory accords) that cultural battles are fought. As a result, we can identify ‘a successful translation of an economic doctrine into the language of experience, moral imperative, and common-sense’ (Apple, 2000, p. 22). In essence, the ethic of the market combines with populist insights; that is to say, we are witnessing ‘the blending together of a “rich mix” of themes that have a long history – nation, family, duty, authority, standards, and traditionalism – with other thematic elements [namely, self-interest, competitive individualism, and anti-statism] that have also struck a resonant chord during a time of crisis’ (Apple, 2000, p. 22). To be even more accurate, as Apple (2000, p. 22) argues, a ‘reactionary common-sense is partly created’. In essence, what one could get quite clearly from Apple’s analysis of the success of neoliberal policies currently, among other things, is their capability of working and reworking within the common sense and generating new meanings among societal key concepts.

As we had the opportunity to analyse elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2003, 2007b), the New Right transformed and distorted the meanings of key words, pushing basic concepts such as public vs. private, democracy, autonomy, diversity, freedom, social justice, equality, and human rights into the economic realm where they gradually lost their capacity to address and build the public common good. Macedo et al’s approach teaches us great deal here. As they argue, ‘in order to redefine the concept of freedom, neoliberal ideology produces a powerful discourse whose effects are so pervasive that it becomes almost impossible for anybody to even imagine freedom outside

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the market order’ (Macedo et al, 2003, p. 124). They argue that the ‘analytical predication of words such as freedom, democracy, equality, etc. or transgression of the discourse beyond the closed analytical structure is incorrect or propaganda’ (2003, p. 125). In other words, the very meaning of vital notions that should pave the way for a really just and equal society is perverted, questioning the very construction of the public common good. Using a good example put forward by Apple (1999), democracy loses its capacity as a public tool to build and maintain a really just society, becoming instead a consumer commodity. This well-orchestrated strategy builds a hegemonic common sense, and it is precisely within this strategy that one should not ignore the role that the media have played, helping dynamically in the process of reconstructing this hegemonic common sense by fabricating specific meanings while obliterating many others, some of them almost unquestionable and untouchable just a few decades ago.

Moreover, and this is particularly frightening, specific key concepts and agendas that historically were deeply rooted within the marrow of a progressive educational and curriculum body, such as social justice and freedom, experienced what we dare to call a (de)(re)meaning process, one which gradually reframed their very meaning to assume a marketwise cultural meaning. This shift documents, as I have commented on elsewhere (Paraskeva 2001, 2003), that curriculum does play a key role under the New Right agenda, an undeniable fact that led the New Rightists to appropriate the left discourse. What I am claiming here is that the process of reworking the very meanings of particular key words in order to operate a gradual reconfiguration within the common sense, one that serves the purpose of the New Right agenda, implies a careful and intricate process of disarticulation and rearticulation. Thus, what really underpins the New Right’s winning reconfiguration strategy within the common sense is a continuous dynamic tension between disarticulation and rearticulation. Consequently, the intricate process of articulation, which involves the tension between disarticulation and rearticulation, according to Torfing (1999, p. 211), allows one to understand ‘how cultural artifacts are overdetermined by political ideologies, and by social and political identities in terms of class, race, nationality, and gender’. Hence, articulation, as Hall (1996, p. 141) reminds us, is the ‘form of the connection that “can” make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions; [that is to say] it is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute, and essential for all time’. Thus, along with Hall (1996, p. 141), and recapturing some of the arguments that we raised before, the New Rightist bloc was ‘forged or made’ under particular circumstances put forward, not only by both Reaganism and Thatcherism, but also by the current complexity that the neoliberal policies manifest. As we noted previously, Fairclough’s (2000) and Mouffe’s (2000) analyses of the very latest neoliberal trend teach us great deal here. In trying to analyse the very latest metamorphosis of New Rightist policies, which push the very meaning of democracy to one of paradox since they give the dangerous idea that there is no alternative, Mouffe (2000, p. 108) stresses that both Blair and Clinton were able to ‘construct’ a ‘radical centre’. Unlike the ‘traditional centre, which lies in the middle of the spectrum between right and left’, the ‘radical centre’ is the new coalition that ‘transcends the traditional left/right division by articulating themes and values from both sides in a new synthesis’ (Mouffe, 2000, p. 108). This current coalition, as Mouffe (2000, p. 109) reminds us, stresses that ‘the alternative to state action is a “generative” politics that provides a framework for the life-political decisions of the individual and allows people to make things happen themselves’. Thus, ‘democracy should become “dialogic”, and far from being limited to the political sphere, it has to reach the various areas of personal life’ (Mouffe, 2000, p. 109). In so doing, such a coalition paves the way for the market mechanisms. So, based on Mouffe’s accurate analysis, one would be profoundly naïve to dissociate the impact of the attempt to erase historical political agendas such as those from the Left and the Right, led by the so-called ‘radical centre’, from the redefinition and reconfiguration of the common sense. Both are anchored in and an integral part of a strategy of (de)(re)meaning. Likewise, Fairclough (2000) also sees a connection between Reaganism and Thatcherism and Blair and Clinton’s ‘radical centers’. As he (2000, p. 43) maintains, ‘the “third way” is a political discourse built out of the elements from other political discourses, of the left and right’. However, unlike Mouffe, Fairclough stresses that the ‘radical center’ strategy does not consist only in ‘bringing together elements from these [left and right] political discourses’ (Fairclough, 2000, p. 44). As he argues, this ‘radical center’ was really able not only to ‘reconcile[e] themes which have been seen as

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irreconcilable [but also to go] beyond such contrary themes, transcending them’ (2000, p. 45). Fairclough’s analysis deserves to be quoted in length:

It is one thing to say that there may be ways of reconciling for instance the promotion of enterprise and the attack on poverty and discrimination; it is quite another to say that the two ‘themes’ can no longer be in conflict. The former is perfectly conventional – Labour governments in the past have made such claims – the latter is not. The claim of [the radical center] to constitute a ‘new politics’ must be based on the latter. (2000, p. 45)

On another issue, and also unlike Mouffe, Fairclough (2000) argues that this strategy is not based on a dialogic stance. That is to say, the ‘radical center’ achieved consent within the governed sphere, ‘not through political [democratical] dialogue, but through managerial methods of promotion and forms of consultation with the public; [that is to say] the government tends to act like a corporation treating the public as its consumers rather then citizens’ (Fairclough, 2000, p. 12). Notwithstanding the seeming differences between Fairclough’s (2000) and Mouffe’s (2000) approaches, one becomes deeply aware of the main source that is driving the current complex reconfiguration of specific key social meanings. This process aims to interfere dynamically and efficaciously within the reconfiguration of the common sense, a common sense that is under, as Laclau & Mouffe (1985) highlighted, a complex process of articulation. In other words, the practice establishes ‘a relation among elements such that their identity is modified [precisely] as a result of the articulatory practice’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, p. 105).

Having analysed the way the common sense is reconstructed and reorganised around the tension of ‘old words–new meanings’, through a complex process of articulation, it will be judicious now to see how the media overtly lend a hand in this intricate and smooth process, a process that undeniably helps to perpetuate a particular hegemonic common sense that is helpful for the New Right political project.

Putting Reality Together

As I was able to analyse elsewhere (Paraskeva, 2007a), to understand the power of the media, one has to understand that the only strategic issue is the stock market. Ramonet’s (2001) approach teaches a great deal here. That is to say, we live in a moment in which raw materials are no longer considered as strategic arguments. Conversely, the more devastated economies in the world are those in countries that produce raw materials. As Ramonet (2001) argues, even Norway, a developed country that produces oil, saw its currency under a ferocious attack because its main resource is a raw material. Ramonet claims that global power is anchored in the speculative stock exchange platform, fully disseminated all over the world, and hence weakening national governments. Thus, political power is continually challenged by the economic power with the support of the media apparatuses. As Gee et al (1996) remind us, under the neoliberal strategy, we witnessed a transition from commodity-ism to consumerism.

Analysing the media, Bourdieu (1996) argues, requires awareness of issues such as economic and political censorship, the ‘game’ of showing and hiding, the circular circulation of information, and the relation between market share and competition, all of them pivotal, say, in political strategies such as Channel One’s approach toward schooling. As Bourdieu (1996) shows, television is permeated by both political and economic censorship. For example, television viewers experience a ‘loss of independence linked to the conditions imposed on those who speak on television’ (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 15), which means not only is there political censorship, but also economic censorship, as ‘what gets on television is determined by the owners, by the companies that pay for the ads, or by the government that gives subsidies’ (p. 16). Quite naturally this sort of promiscuity leads to what Bourdieu (1996, p. 17) calls ‘individual corruption [that] only mask[s] structural corruption’. This particular form of ideological control is profoundly related to what he calls a show and hide strategy in which ‘[paradoxically] television can hide by showing’, since journalists (neither Bourdieu nor I claim an essentialising position) ‘select very specific aspects [of a given event] as a function of their particular perceptual categories, the particular way they see things [categories] that are the product of education, history; [in other words] they used [specific] glasses’ (1996, p. 19). Thus, as Fiske & Hartley (1998) highlight, since ‘television is a human construct and the job that it does is the result of human choice, cultural decisions and social

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pressures’ (1998, p. 17), reading television is being radically aware of its ‘manifest [and] latent content’ (1998, p. 21). In essence, as Bourdieu (1996, p. 42) highlights, one should be aware that in the tension between ‘giving news vs. giving views’, the mainstream media aligns with the latter. In order to make something extraordinary, they prize ‘dramatization’ and in so doing they not only produce a ‘reality effect [but also produce an] effect on reality’ (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 22). Thus, one should not minimise the role that language plays in the media ‘milieu’, a ‘milieu’ that ‘allow[s] certain things to be said and proscribe[s] others’ (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 35). Thus, ‘both language and television “mediate” reality’ and the fact is that ‘television extends this ability and an understanding of the way in which television structures and presents its pictures of reality’ (Fiske & Hartley, 1998, p. 17). Following the same line of analysis, one can say that under the free market economy trend, the media acts according to what Herman & Chomsky (2002, p. 1) call the ‘propaganda model’ and ‘it is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society’. It is precisely this propaganda model that promotes what Bourdieu (1996, p. 23) calls ‘the circular circulation of information’; that is, given rating dynamics and the race for audiences, the media is competing over the same issues and ‘in some sense, the choices made on television are choices made by no subject’ (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 25). By being slaves and hostages of the audience ratings, journalists and the media by and large are acting under the rhythms and cadences of those ratings, which impose a specific cultural model. What we are claiming here is that we are before an overdetermined path between ‘audiences’ and the way the media build those audiences. Therefore, as one can easily see, ‘television puts reality together’ (Eldridge, 1993, p. 4). In so doing, as Derrida (2002, p. 42) argues, television produces an artifactuality that

signifies first of all that there is ‘actuality’ – in the sense of ‘what is timely’ or rather, in the sense of what is broadcast under the heading of ‘the news’ on radio and television – only insofar as a whole set of technical and political apparatuses come as it were to choose, from a nonfinite mass of events, the ‘facts’ that are to constitute actuality: what are then called ‘the facts’ on which the ‘news’ or ‘information’ feeds. [The] choices, of course, are never neutral, whether they are made at the television and radio stations or whether they are already decided at the press agencies. All actuality negotiates with artifice, in general dissimulated. But already it should be added [that] these artifices are controlled, simultaneously or alternatively, by private and state agencies.

Based on this analysis, the examples put forward by Fairclough (1995) (the overwhelming victories of both Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Blair’s New Labourism and the painful reality of the two million Hutu refugees in Africa), Grossberg et al (1998) (the way Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ was appropriate for both conservative and radical groups), Gitlin (1980) (the way the media made and unmade the Students for a Democratic Society movement during the 1960s), and Apple (2000) (his analyses of the way floods are portrayed in the news) function as clear evidence of the way the media acts dynamically and selectively in (re)(de)constructing reality. As Apple (2000) highlights in an analysis that is aligned with my analysis, the news is not something that is ‘out there’. Quite conversely, news is something ‘doable’ in a bias way. Thus, a critical understanding of the nature of that selective product implies that one must be deeply attentive not only to the selective and interpretive process that helps fabricate particular meanings, a process that actually occurs within the limits imposed by such meanings, but also to the construction of specific captive audiences upon which those meanings are aimed.

It is precisely the set of strategies distilled above that is crucial to the analysis of mainstream media vis à vis ‘non aligned media’. Contrasting the messages of particular mega media corporations (say, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, CNN, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, FOX) with those messages portrayed by ‘non aligned’ media (e.g. The Nation, The Progressive, Counter Punch, Le Monde Diplomatic, and so forth) provides evidence for how the mainstream media reconfigure the common sense through the intricate process of articulation. In sum, the media incorporate a ‘show by hiding’ strategy, circular circulation of information, political and economic censorship, and market influences that create complex cultural and policy struggles over meaning (Apple, 2000). To debunk and understand this complex struggle requires analysing

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how [the media] constructs a picture of the world, and how it makes sense of the real, [to theorize] the work these meanings perform in and on the viewing subject, [to connect] those television forms and subject positions to the way that power is distributed ad exercised in our social system [and] we need to examine closely the negotiated and oppositional ‘readings’ of television, thereby moving away from the idea of television or any ‘text’ as closed, as a site where dominant meanings automatically exert considerable or total influence over the reader. (Apple, 2000, p. 157)

As Bakhtin (1981) reminds us, one must not merge the world of the text with the world outside the text, since they are not the same.

Thus, since the real question is not ‘the “effects” of television, but rather how ... television ... as a polysemic potential of meanings, connects with the social life of the viewer or group of viewers[;] how is a ‘television text’ created by the active reading of an audience[;] How does the process of commonsense making operate’ (Apple, 2000, p. 98). We need to understand what Hall (1994), Fairclough (1995) and Van Dijk (1985) call media as discourse, an approach that permeates micro (concerned with the analyses of the syntax, semantics of the text), meso (the institutional forms of production, distribution and consumption of the messages) and macro levels (the political regulations and economic forms of control) (Torfing, 1999). We need to engage in ‘discourse analysis concerned with the ways in which texts are produced by media workers in media institutions, and the ways the texts are received by audiences [as well as] how the media texts are socially distributed’ (Fairclough, 1995, p. 16). Following a similar path put forward by Johnson, (1983), Fairclough (1995, p. 18) claims here a critical need to understand the media as discourse, a discourse that interferes dynamically both ‘as social action and interaction, [in which people interact together in] real situations [and, consequently] as a social construction of reality, a form of knowledge’. By claiming the term ‘discourse’ Fairclough (1995, p. 63) is ‘proposing to regard language use as a [per]form[ance] of social practices rather then [an ineffective and innocent] individual activity’.

Consequently, media as discourse should be seen not only as a ‘mode of action, one form in which people may act upon the world and especially upon each other, as well a mode of representation [which implies] a dialectical relationship between discourse and social structure’ but also as a social practice

shaped and constrained by social structure in the widest sense and at all levels, by class and other social relations at a societal level, by the relations specific to particular institutions such as law or education, by systems of classification, by various norms and conventions. (Fairclough, 1992, pp. 63-64)

Thus, as Fairclough (1992, p. 64) reminds us, analysing media as discourse builds a critical awareness of an apparatus that acts dynamically in the construction of ‘social identities, subject positions and types of self [helping to construct] social relationships between people’ and also in the construction of ‘systems of knowledge and belief’. Such an analysis helps us understand how the mainstream media discourse re-represented peace rally messages so that the war on Iraq became commonsensically unavoidable. To be exact, the mainstream media, through a process of political and economic censorship and circular circulation of information, to use Bourdieu’s lenses, acted dynamically and overtly to construct a complex amalgam of what Fairclough coined as social identities, subject positions, self typologies, systems of knowledge and beliefs. These are not only on both sides of the belligerent forces, but also within the Western and Eastern sides, a framework that ‘naturally’ helps to pave the way, not precisely to invade Iraq, but for the acceptance of US foreign policies. Moreover, and this is quite important, Apple (2000, p. 104) argues that we are under a distorted construction of the ‘other’ that ‘consistently define[s] international events and especially foreign social movements in ways that [confirm] the dominant political meanings and values of the American society’.

Both Said’s (1997) and Chomsky’s (2002b) analyses teach us great deal here. According to Chomsky (2002b, p. 13), forms of ‘vicious repression of dissident opinion’ today are rather different from those in the past. As he argues, ‘today the methods are different [since] now it’s not the threat of force that ensures the media will present things within a framework that serves the interests of the dominant institutions’ (2002b, p. 13). As Chomsky reminds us, ‘the mechanisms today are

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much more subtle, [and there] is a complex system of filters in the media and educational institutions which ends up ensuring that dissident perspectives are weeded out, or marginalized in one way or another’ (Chomsky, 2002b, p. 13). Based in this perspective, Chomsky (2002b, p. 15) advances the concept of a propaganda model as a tool to help us think about the way the media operates. After unveiling the tension between ‘how the media “ought” to function [vs.] how they do function’ (Chomsky, 2002b, p. 15) Chomsky argues that ‘the media presents a picture of the world which defends and inculcates the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic economy, and who therefore also largely control the government’ (Chomsky, 2002c, p. 15) Thus, according to ‘this “propaganda model” the media serve their societal purpose by the way they select topics, distribute concerns, frame issues, filter information, focus their analysis, through emphasis, tone, and a whole range of other techniques like that’ (Chomsky, 2002c, p. 15). As Chomsky indicates elsewhere, with Herman:

the essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of ‘news’ filters fall under the following headings: (1)the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms, (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media, (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power, (4) ‘flak’ as a means of disciplining the media, and (5) ‘anticommunism’ as a national religion and control mechanic. (Herman & Chomsky, 2002, p. 2)

Consequently, and inviting Said into the argument, these particular kinds of ideological filters will help maintain a non-stop process of building specific ‘communities of interpretation’ (Said, 1997), communities that are built through constant struggle yet only within particular semantic borders that will reward a specific kind of common sense.

Using such a political and ideological strategy, one that in fact, ‘reorganises’ or ‘reconfigures’ the common sense, which is still fragile and numbed by the tragedy of 9/11 and the frustrated but inconsequential capture of the CIA’s and FBI’s top most wanted individual, it was not difficult for Bush’s New Right militaristic approach to build and gain consensus of the governed, under a new reconfiguration of the common sense through the mainstream media. Both 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, and as we can now overtly see, the war in Iraq, were marked by what Gitlin (1980) highlights as selective media strategies. They are the same ones that ‘made’ and ‘unmade’ the Students for a Democratic Society movement in the 1960s. In fact, each tragic event noted above went through a selective media process of ‘trivialization, polarization, emphasis and marginalization’ (Gitlin, 1980). In so doing, and as Fairclough (1995, p. 12) highlights, the mass media operates critically and selectively ‘within a social system’. Thus, we face an overdetermined relation, since ‘the media are shaped by, and in turn contribute to shaping, the system overall’ (Fairclough, 1995, p. 12). Therefore, understanding the media helps us understand the way power relations occur within a given society. The media are both affect ‘and are affected by power relations within the social system, including relations of class, gender and ethnicity, and relations between particular groups like politicians or scientists and the mass of the population’ (Fairclough, 1995, p. 12). The mainstream media should be understood as an intricate system comprised of powerful allies of the dominant forces to create ‘commonsensical’ acts within every day life and to conquer the common sense.

The media are profoundly engaged

in the production of the fabric of everyday life [since] they organize our leisure time, shape our social behavior and provide material out of which our very identities are constructed in terms of class, race, nationality, sexuality, and distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. (Torfing, (1999, p. 210)

The media as discourse should be seen as a selective work at a cultural and ideological level including ‘particular ways of representing the world ... particular constructions of social identities [and] particular constructions of social relations’ (Fairclough, 1995, p. 12). The cultural and ideological bias characteristic of the (mainstream) media becomes even more aggressive under a free market policy trend. In fact, and drawing from Bourdieu and Williams (Williams, 1987), worldwide media corporations like MSNBC, CBS and ABC, by being owned (or produced) by mega multinational corporations such as General Electric, Westinghouse, and Disney (Bourdieu, 1996)

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respectively (and one could add Channel One via Whittle Communications, as Apple [2000] warns us), not only fall under those mega ‘corporational’ needs, but also are seriously and heavily dependent on the shared dominance they portray (or not) through advertising and to their audiences. These monopoly trends become a graphic dangerous reality according to the last Report of the Federal Communications Commission in the USA regarding the connections between the media and technology. As Dreazen & Flint (2003, p. 1) documented, the new Federal Regulations will allow the consubstantiation and aggravation of the current media framework, one in which ‘the top 20 online news sites are owned by 16 large media companies, with the top five sites getting more traffic than the other 15 combined’ – a reality that was anticipated several years ago by McChesney (1999).

As Williams (1987, p. 39) reminds us:

paid advertisements, or commercials, are now a significantly large element of most newspapers and most broadcasting services, to an extent where, in a majority of the cases, the financial viability of the presumably primary service [is] directly determined by its performance in this area.

What we see is clearly a quarrelsome struggle over what and how to make and unmake what constitutes ‘news’, a struggle that within a given media editorial board takes a ‘good deal of time talking about other newspapers, particularly about what they did and we didn’t do and what should be done, since the other part did it’ (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 24). Given the power of the advertising and audience dictatorship, the media have to act, not only within the limits allowed and instigated by those flaccid constructions, but also on the understanding that they are dealing with a profit-driven market device. This device is shaped by and shapes the social system in a given society, but it also gradually and successfully has been able to smoothly push the media to become a non-public issue. In fact, and as Fairclough (1995, p. 13) stresses, ‘marketization undermines the media as a public sphere’.

It is precisely this pertinent concern that one can identify within Apple’s analysis of the effects of Channel One within schooling, both at the level of the news and of the commercials. Hiding under the rhetoric of the fiscal crises within the USA, Whittle Communications ‘discovered’ (or ‘fabricated’) in schooling a new societal pocket in which it can become even more profitable. In order to do that, schooling has to shift from something with societal meaning to something with economic meaning. This strategic aim was achieved through the media reorganising the common sense by sensationalising the waste and inefficiency within public schooling. As one of the Whittle Communications spokespersons commented, ‘somebody has to pay for the bill for education [meaning the fiscal crisis bill], and commercials are the most direct way to pay’ (Apple, 2000, p. 96).

Hence, Channel One should be seen within the larger context of what Apple (2000) coined conservative restoration. Through his analysis of the impact of Channel One within schools, Apple (2000, p. 11) demonstrates not only the economic, ideological, and cultural dynamics underpinning the advent of Channel One, but also how Channel One should be seen as a ‘paradigm case of the social transformation of our ideas about public and private, and about schooling itself’. Thus, and recapturing Apple’s (2000, pp. 87, 89) arguments that we have already raised, ‘television inside and outside of schools is involved in the struggle for meaning [and] like textbooks, it is not simply a transparent medium that reflects or conveys “information” about the “real world” into classrooms and living rooms’. As Apple(2000, p. 111) argues, Channel One’s impact within schooling is not only palpable in the major aims of education, curriculum and teaching:

It is not just at the level of social goals or curriculum and teaching that the ‘industrialization’ of education has proceeded. Channel One stands at the intersection of other tendencies as well. ... The Right has attempted to alter our very perception of schooling itself, turning it away from the idea of a common ground in which democracy is hammered out (an intensively political idea involving interactive notions of citizenship in a polity). Instead, the common ground of the school becomes no longer based on a set of democratic political commitments (no matter how weak before); rather, it is placed by the idea of a competitive marketplace. The citizen as a political being with reciprocal rights and duties is lost. In its place is the self as consumer. Schooling (and students) becomes a retail product. Freedom in a democracy is no longer defined as participating in building the common good, but as living

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in an unfettered commercial market, with the educational system now being seen as needing to be integrated into the mechanisms of such market.

Apple’s (2000, p. 111) analysis demonstrates that the key issue is ‘to see the ideological reconstruction that is going on, to understand that in the process of making the school ... into a product to be bought and sold, we are radically altering our definitions of what it means to participate in our institutions’ That is to say, ‘convincing the public at large to see education as a product to be evaluated for its economic utility and as a commodity to be bought and sold like anything else in the “free market”’ (Apple, 2000, p. 111) requires hard work within the ideological framework.

Unexpected Obstacles Called Democracy and Public Education

Among a set of adulterated concepts and practices upon which the neo-radical centrism project is based, two of them have been quite significant for the consubstantiation of the current ‘neo-hegemonic bloc’ purposes – the staining of Democracy and State. Neoliberalism has undermined the meaning and practice of democracy to promote and expand an unjust and unequal society.

Saramago (2003) offers a critical analysis of the disastrous forms that modern Western democracies have exhibited. The Portuguese Nobel Prize winning author anchors his approach in four axles. First, he establishes the differences between the Hellenic and Roman democracies, arguing that the Roman Empire perverted the democratic model that framed Ancient Greece. Conversely to the Hellenic democracy, ‘that presupposed the participation of all free men in the government of the city’ (Saramago, 2003, p. 8), the democratic model that was established in Rome had nothing to do with the Hellenic democratic platform. According to Saramago (2003, p. 8), ‘the main and definite obstacle to the implementation of democracy in Rome came precisely from the power of an economic aristocracy that saw the democratic system as a real direct enemy of their interests’. Such a differentiation between the Hellenic and Roman democratic epoch provides parallels with the current Portuguese, South African, and Mozambican era. In Saramago’s words:

it is irresistible that [we] question our selves if our current economic and financial empires would not be faithful to the exclusive and implacable logic gains, working hard and deliberately for a progressive elimination of a democratic possibility, a possibility that gradually distances itself from their embryonic expressions, aiming at a rapid pinning away, maintaining its external forms, yet with a profound vituperated essence. (2003, p. 8)

As we can see, real democracy is an extraordinary real obstacle to the economic interests of an (economically powerful) minority. This first axle is the real basis of the other axles, put forward by Saramago.

The second axle stressed by Saramago is what he called the demagogy of the vote. According to Saramago (2003, p. 8), more than being worried with the myth of the vote, we need – without any delays – to question the accuracy of democratic categories, ‘such as political processes like democratic delegation, representation and authority’. In fact, ‘instead of a pathetic obsession to convert democracy into something compulsory and universal’, we must stop and think, ‘pondering over what is our democracy, what about its real purposes’.

Moreover, we have ‘a caricature of democracy that we want to spread and install in the rest of the world, by persuasion or by force, as missionaries of a new religion’ (Saramago, 2003, p. 8). Such a caricature is a grotesque and fake example of real democracy, one that has nothing to do with the Hellenic democratic principles, but with the wise and convenient Roman democratic pragmatism. Such a perverted democratic model allows the concentration of wealth and the widespread distribution of poverty. Instead of equality, freedom, cultural and economic justice, such a twisted democracy has been able to build an impressive figure: at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the wealth of the 358 richest people in the world is greater than that of 45% of the poorest in the world (roughly 2.6 billion people) (Marcos, 2006 ). It is in this context that Negri (2002) claims his refusal to reinvent democracy. As he argues, ‘if you force me to reinvent democracy I simply cannot do it. I am tired of a system that perfectly adapts itself to capitalism’ (Negri, 2002, p. 175).

Saramago’s contumacious pen also opposes the loss of historical memory within contemporary civilisations. That is, he claims (2003, p. 8) ‘the democracies that reductively we call western

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democracies’ (nchored their vitality within the slogan of the vote. In so doing such plastic democracy ‘conceptualises and promotes appearances instead of realities’ (Saramago, 2003. p. 8). Such democracies wrongly construct the idea that ‘the votes of the rich citizen or the white skin citizen have the same value at the polls as the votes of the poor citizen or of the citizen with a much darker skin’ (Saramago, 2003. p. 8).

It is precisely with this axle of analysis – in essence the demagogy of the existence of social justice before a democracy based on the myth of the vote – that José Saramago unwraps the fragilities of a democracy that has nothing more to offer than just the vote itself. Undeniably this is the Achilles’ heel of contemporary Western democracies, a debility that opens the door for the concubinage relations between the State and the Market – an issue that represents Saramago’s third axle. He deserves to be quoted at length.

A mentally healthy community never has the foggiest idea of electing individuals both corrupt and corrupters to represent them in the parliament or government. No scrutiny, no microscopic exam over anonymous votes would be able to make visible and explicit, for example, the denouncing signs of the concubinage relations between the State and the international economic groups, whose criminal actions, including those that are pugnacious, are driving the planet in which we all live to a catastrophe. People did not elect their government for the government to drive the people to the market. The market uses all of its capacity to condition the government so the government takes the people to them. (Saramago, 2003, pp. 8-9)

It is in this context that Saramago (2003, p. 9) highlights the uselessness, the non-utility, of a ‘democracy that it is not built on the basis of a truly economic democracy and of an effective and powerful cultural democracy’. We must fight for the health of a really democratic platform, a platform that sweats economic, cultural and political democracy. It is undeniable that

the idea of an economic democracy was substituted by an obscenely triumphant market and that the idea of a cultural democracy was substituted by a grossly industrial massification of cultures, a tremendously false label – yet quite convenient – that attempts to hide the predominance of one of the cultures. (Saramago, 2003, p. 9)

Put it in such a way, the history of Western democracies is a history of a gradual adulteration of a really democratic model, a model that naturally exudes justice and economic and cultural equity. In Western democracies we are before elected institutions that hide behind the false myth of the primacy of the vote, elected institutions that, in essence, are hostages from the inhuman market dynamics. As Žižek (2005) brilliantly argues, we are before a short-circuit democracy. By challenging the concubinage relations between the State and the Market, Saramago edifies the portico of his fourth axle – the explicit and implicit dynamics of power.

As Saramago (2003, p. 9) reminds us, ‘if democracy were in fact what we ingeniously keep repeating, that is a government of the people, by the people and for the people, any debate over democracy would have been nonsense; that is, since people had power it was their duty to administrate that power’. Saramago (2003, p. 9) suggests that there is little sense in talking about a social democratic, a socialist, a liberal, a conservative government, since ‘power is in another and unattainable place; that is the real power, the economic power, which we can only perceive its shadows beyond the institutional weaves and wefts and invariably escapes if one tries to get closer, and that inevitably counter attacks if we make any kind of attempt to reduce or discipline its dominance, subordinating it to the rules of general interest’, stays in another place.

Straightforwardly, one must say that Western political order becomes ‘more and more a plutocracy – a government of the rich – and less and less a democracy – people’s government’ (Saramago, 2003, p. 9). It is before such a perverted, devastating social practice that Saramago challenges us not necessarily to renegade on or to reform such a Western democratic model. According to him we must ‘stop thinking democracy and something taken for granted, as something definitive and once and for all untouchable’ (2003, p. 9).

In a world that debates everything but democracy, we must undeniably discuss and debate democracy in order to reinvent it. Before a democratic cartography in which the oceanic mass of the poor of the world is called to elect, but it is never called to govern, in a world in which the lethal market primacy logics and private lobbies overcome the state dynamics of public common

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good, we all must say along with Saramago – ‘don’t even bother assuming the tremendous responsibility of killing democracy, since “democracy” is committing suicide every single day’ (Saramago, 2003, p. 9).

The four axles put forward by Saramago allow one to perceive that a real democratic system that pumps economic, cultural and political justice and equity is a powerful obstacle to the neo-rightist purposes. Also in this context, Saramago’s approach opens the door to an accurate understanding of something very crucial within the schooling phenomenon. In fact, before the concubinage promiscuous relations between the State and the Market, the real and effective democratic meaning and practices of common good defended by a myriad of societal spheres dissipates gradually.

One of those spheres is public schooling, which has been one of the prime targets of the new-rightist strategy. Public schooling has been kidnapped and is on the verge of having its final blessing in many nations. Many activities contributed to the potential demise of public schooling, including – in my view at the very core of the new-rightist strategy – the intentional and well-thought-out state disinvestment in public schooling, which destabilised and weakened its very own immunities as a secular institution in protecting and developing the public good. Such dangerous disinvestments functioned as the needed sign for the market forces to kidnap public schools and convert schooling into one of the market’s guinea pigs. As Sommers (2000) argues, it is the state that clearly paves the way for the market.

However, disinvestment should not be seen as a blind strategy but as a profound and wisely selective strategy. Notwithstanding that one is witnessing a systematic disinvestment policy that crosses public schooling, the fact is that such policy does act cautiously in particular privileged areas. The disinvestment policy in the public and commons is undeniably a surgical policy. A myriad of analyses (Ball, 2001; Macedo & Bartolomé, 2001; Torres Santomé, 2001; Whitty & Power, 2002; Apple, 2003; Hursh, 2006; Mouffe, 2006;) over the alarming and treacherous disinvestment in public schooling serve as a credibility check to our arguments.

Those who know the real smell of a public school know well the results from state disinvestment: schools falling apart, poor libraries, miserable teacher education programmes, and a manic obsession with national testing (as a form of controlling one of the most powerful weapons used to maintain public schooling in a hostage situation: accountability within schooling through teachers’ work). Such irresponsible state disinvestment functions as a green light for the market forces to hijack public schooling from a public social domain to an economic private sphere. In so doing, both the state and the market not only perverted the very idea of public schools as one of the promoters of the common good, but public schools became defenceless before the thirsty, inhuman and aggressive market mechanisms. Schools are seen as a new and exceptional market for profits. Under the neoliberal anthem children were transformed into a pale commodity.

During the last decade of the twentieth century, the promiscuity relations between public schools – starving to survive – and private funds increased disproportionally. Taking Portugal as an example in the European Union, public schools are a clear obstacle to the market strategy. As the programme of the previous Portuguese rightist government claims, ‘the quasi monopoly of public schooling is not desirable ... since it contradicts the constitutional principle of freedom to teach and to learn, to choose a social good’ (XV Governo Constitucional de Portugal (2001). To rely on Weiner’s (2005, p. 23) analysis between Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) and Bauman’s Ideological Corporate Apparatuses (ICA), one might say that, despite their differences, both the ideological and state apparatuses aim to ‘reproduce the conditions of reproduction through pedagogical strategies ... to make reality a matter of commonsense’ as well.

Fighting the Pedagogy of Big Lies

I will end this article with a personal note. One of my university colleagues recently asked me: ‘João, imagine if I could give you the power to build a curriculum for elementary schools here in Portugal. What would you do? What kind of objectives will you suggest?’ I did not blink for a second to reply: ‘I cannot answer that question’. ‘Why not? After all you are a curriculist, you must know how to build a curriculum, ... how come you don’t know?’ ‘I did not say that I don’t know. What I said was I cannot answer that question the way you want me to do it.’ ‘Why not? How

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come a curriculum person doesn’t know how to build a curriculum?’ ‘Again, that question is pointless’. And the questions went on and on. Finally I was able to explain my argument.

There are too many issues in my colleague’s question that I am challenging for the last decade. To highlight just a few, power is not really something that you give to someone; and the real curriculum question, especially under the current neo-rightist policies, is whether or not schools can build a new social order – something that George Counts raised several decades ago. Many of us in many different nations – the USA, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, Canada – are trying to address such a crucial question. In dealing with such a political issue one will be able to unveil whose knowledge schools do transmit, who really benefits from that knowledge that becomes ‘official’, whose voices are not heard, what becomes ‘official’ and why. These are the real curriculum questions, or the real leitmotifs for a ‘curriculum conversation’ during the twenty-first century, a conversation that has to challenge what Pinar (2004) felicitously denounces as the nightmare of the present.

In dealing with such an issue one will see that while educationally we are facing an era that ‘can be best characterized by an overdose of educational reform’ (Macedo, 2006, p. 137), the real curriculum issue, Huebner (1967) argues, is precisely ‘non-change’, knowing that so much has been done for the past century to promote changes and, basically, ‘nothing changes’. Undeniably, Macedo argues (2006, p. 137), teacher education has the critical role of promoting a different path, not only by challenging such reformist overdose that is anchored mostly in a ‘conservative discourse that celebrates a language of management, competition, testing, choice, and free enterprise’, but especially by fighting over the sedimentation of what Macedo calls ‘the pedagogy of big lies’, a pedagogical practice that helps build a perilous common sense that contributes to the multiplication of social inequality, poverty, starvation, and human misery. Macedo’s (2006, p. 137) argument deserves to be quoted at length:

How can we honestly speak of human freedom in a society that produces and yet ignores the existence of ghettos, reservations, human misery, despair of poverty, hopelessness? By ignoring these oppressive conditions, the purveyors of the present conservative educational reform discourse obviate the need to call for the creation of pedagogical spaces where issues of oppression are debated. Such a debate would enable educators to understand the intimate interrelationship between society’s discriminatory practices and the ‘savage inequalities’ in schools. Part of the reason that most educators have remained complacent before social inequalities lies in the fact that we have been subjected to a pedagogy of big lies that not only distorts and falsifies realities but also gives us ‘the illusion’ of individual freedom, ownership of our own thoughts and decisions.

Taking the Portuguese reality as an example, it is my perception that overall teacher education and graduate courses need to assume a completely different role. Unsurprisingly, as Freire (2004, p. 13) argues, one should not be ‘surprised that schools of education as well as other disciplinary departments at universities, with a few exceptions, demonstrate an aversion toward critical theory, and the development of critical thought’. That is, we are before a form of ‘academic selective selection of bodies of knowledge borders on censorship or critical educators’, and as Freire & Macedo (2001, p. 3) stress:

instead of bashing teachers we should put the blame squarely on institutions and schools of education that trained them in an approach that abstracts methodological issues from their ideological contexts and consequently ignores the interrelationships between sociopolitical structures of a society and the act of learning and knowing.

In fact, ‘most schools of education, under the rubric of science, specialism and specialisation, rupture with philosophies and cultural relations that are indispensable for the development of the critical thinking’ (Freire & Macedo, 2001, p. 3). It is precisely this kind of challenge that one needs and that one finds in Hursh & Martina’s (2003) approach, a ‘critical policy analysis in which [they] place education reform within the context of the social structure and examine its implications for social inequality’. Hursh & Martina situate their analysis

within the rise of increased global economic competition and neo-liberal policies in which the government seeks to retain legitimacy by instituting reforms to improve education

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while, at the same time, reducing education funding as part of the overall plan to reduce governmental expenditures on social services and, if possible, to privatize them.

Within the teacher education and graduate courses we need to challenge the view of higher education as a hostage before the discourse of the administration; we need to challenge the divorce with practice; we need to break the anti-intellectualism that pervades both teacher education and graduate courses; we need to fight for teachers as intellectuals, as ‘cultural workers’, as activists; we need to fight for a democratic teacher education; we need to challenge ‘one-dimensional teacher education and graduate courses’; we need to fight for teacher education and graduate courses that would promote cultural and economic justice, that would promote a sustainable development society. We need to challenge the way teacher education and graduate courses are participating in the edification of a dangerous common sense; we need to stop what I call the perversion and normalisation of the particular discursive categories at the very epicentre of New Right educational policies, since it is right here that the cultural battles are fought. We need to create a new language for education; one that is not reduced to objectives, tests, standards, skills. We have the right of a ‘pedagogy of indignation’ and the right to refuse to participate in kidnapping the very gracious concept and practice of public schooling as a public good. We have the right to claim pedagogy as a romance with love. We need to keep the struggle – as Paulo Freire suggested – for a humanising pedagogy. A humanising pedagogy is a

path through which men and woman can become conscious about their presence in the world – the way they act and think when they develop all of their capacities, taking into consideration their needs, but also the needs and aspirations of others. (Freire & Beto, 1998, p. 32)

This is the way to prepare a critical and emancipated teacher. This is one way (one of the most powerful actually) to rescue democracy, by reinventing schools as democratic spaces. However, I do not want to romanticise our task. It will not be an easy one. The attack on critical theory(ists) becomes actually a truism nowadays. However, in trying to address Counts’ question (despite his kind of naivety) – dare the schools build a new social order? – we need to pay close attention to some of the most crucial neoliberal reforms. It is actually through schooling that the Right has been able to consolidate and to score on the struggle over the common sense. We have to admit that neoliberals already prove to us that schools do have the capacity of changing society; however, quite unfortunately not in the way it should be – a public school that acts quite dynamically to build a really just society.

Note

[1] It is interesting to note specific claims over Reagan’s role within Reaganism. Chomsky’s analysis is a paradigmatic one in this regard. According to Chomsky (2002a), ‘for the first time, during the Reagan administration, the US did not really have a president. In all the books that have come out by people in the Reagan administration it is been extremely difficult to hide the fact that Reagan did not have the foggiest idea what was going on. [When] Reagan finished his job no reporter would dream of going out to see Reagan after that to ask him his opinion on anything – because everybody knows he has no opinion on anything’.

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JOÃO M. PARASKEVA is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minho, Portugal; Research Associate in the Centre for Research in Education at the Institute of Education and Psychology, University of Minho, Portugal; and Visiting Professor at the Universidade de A Coruña, Spain, and Federal University of Pelotas, Brasil. He is the senior editor of the first Portuguese curriculum journal, Revista Currículo sem Fronteiras, editor of four educational and curriculum series in Portugal, and has translated numerous books and articles into Portuguese. His work draws from Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches to analysing the impact of neoliberal policies in education, the contradictions within the neoliberal platform, and the limits and possibilities of critical pedagogy. He has several articles and books published both nationally and internationally. Correspondence: João M. Paraskeva, Institute of Education and Psychology, University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar, P-4710–057 Braga, Portugal (paraskeva@iep.uminho.pt).