Learning in a time of cholera: Imagining a future for public education

Abstract

This article considers some theoretical resources for resistance to neoliberalised schooling and develops principles for reimagining the common school. Whilst relevant internationally, it is situated in the particular context of England, as a global epicentre of school reform – a marketised and largely privatised system where the net of surveillance and control is tightly woven from assessment data, inspections and performance pay, and where the curriculum has been systematically divorced from young people’s life experience and concerns. To clarify the meaning of this crisis, the paper draws on some key ideas from the Marxist tradition, particularly class and alienation, situating neoliberal policy within the crises of late capitalism. The paper looks in two directions for resources to help overcome the current impasse. Firstly, it highlights the strengths of more creative and emancipatory pedagogies in earlier decades of English curriculum development, including the value of learners’ experience, vernacular language, dialogic teaching and play. Secondly it examines the northern European paradigm of curriculum construction focused on more holistic human development (Bildung), focusing particularly on the work of Wolfgang Klafki. The value of this theorisation of curriculum and pedagogy is highlighted through contrasts with the current drive towards a ‘knowledge-based curriculum’.