Education, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Age of Pandemics

Abstract

In the age of the pandemic, higher education is increasingly defined by modes of governance modeled after a business culture. As the pandemic continues to ravage countries across the globe, education has accelerated its emphasis on job training, online tools, and remote learning, while further aligning curricula with business interests (Alford and Kroll, 2020). With the move to online teaching, instrumental rationality and the language of technique have increasingly become the lingua franca of education. Remote teaching has moved to the forefront of discussions about pedagogy and in doing so has generated a preoccupation with methods and training skills, which not only displace serious concerns about the role of higher education as a public good but also placing unacceptable burdens on both teachers and students (School Magazine Editorial Action Toronto, 2021). Questions about improving delivery, tutorials, recorded lectures, contract grading, and how to give students bonus marks for uploading their notes have moved to the forefront of pedagogical consideration. Matters concerning regulating screen time replace crucial pedagogical issues about fostering deep engagement and critical thinking among students about crucial social issues. What disappears in diverse forms of pandemic pedagogy is what Pope Francis describes as the need for students to be attentive "to grave social injustices, violations of rights, terrible forms of poverty, and the waste of human lives. Moreover, he has advocated that educators "leave behind superficial approaches to education and the many shortcuts associated with utility, (standardized) test results, functionality and bureaucracy, which confuse education with instruction and end up atomizing our cultures" (Cummings McLean, 2020). In this instance, there is a call for pedagogical approaches that are transformative, empowering, and deeply examine what role education should play in furthering a democracy in a time of growing tyranny. Unfortunately, pandemic pedagogy is neither on the side of expanding civic culture, social justice, or democracy. For instance, teaching and learning centers in many universities now dominate educational issues, largely concerned with providing training sessions on how to use a variety of teaching methods and platforms that extend from teaching Zoom classes to exploring the diverse vagaries of videoconferencing (Blum, 2020). As higher education succumbs to a business culture and cult of efficiency, it removes itself from issues regarding the complex relationships among knowledge, power, and the acquisition of agency. Matters of purpose and meaning become fetishized within a discourse of hyper instrumental reason that serves to hermetically situate faculty and students within a fetishized discourse of efficiency. What is lost here is the pedagogical imperative of teaching students to be thoughtful, informed, and engaged critical citizens. There is little talk about how education should be a place where students realize themselves as citizens or, for that matter, the role of faculty as public intellectuals who connect their work to crucial social problems while addressing pedagogy as a moral and political project. The COVID-19 pandemic has further intensified the corporatization of the neoliberal university. This is evident in the increasing control of universities by managerial elites, the loss of power by faculty in shaping governance and the mission of higher education, along with a loss of control over their own conditions of labor. As Watermeyer and his co-authors (2021, p. 654) observed: