Who are the heretics?

Abstract

The idea of the scholar as academic heretic and their place in education serves as a useful frame to analyse the challenges facing academia in recent decades. Beginning with the European tradition of scholarly criticism from its early institutional forms, a tradition that endured for many centuries, this chapter argues that recent changes to education wrought by global market economics are remarkable for their breadth and depth in a comparatively short space of time. Reflecting on a dominant narrative of neoliberalism within social scientific critique and within numerous chapters in this volume, examples are drawn together of neoliberal market ideology impacting education and learning. The analysis concludes that a philosophy for and of education has been eroded by neoliberal economics and might be rediscovered through a deeper critique of market-based practices of accumulation. This volume grew out of a symposium originally entitled ‘educational heresies’. Contributors to that symposium were presented with this definition: “Heresy is the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein” (Belloc [1938] 2011, p. 5). In the European tradition universities as we now recognise them gradually emerged through the eleventh and twelfth centuries from the organization and forms of institutionalised learning that had developed within the Christian monastic orders (Bartlett 1993; Southern 1961). For most of the subsequent eight centuries, political authorities and the growing mercantile classes have displayed at best ambivalence to this emergence. On the one hand they have recognized the need for increased technical specialization as the remarkable technological achievements of twelfth century found their way into production, trade and the creation of new markets; this period also saw increased reach and sophistication of European forms of governance and that called in turn for increasingly literacy-based managerial and communication capabilities, formerly distinctive features of monastic life, that came to find extensive secular application following the “aristocratic diaspora”.