Education, Neo-Liberalism and Contemporary Ireland

David Limond

Issue 382, vol.96, Summer 2007

The neo-liberal view, by contrast, is utilitarian – tending in practice to prioritise the role of the individual as a potential generator of wealth through work (and so favouring the claims of consumerism or acquisitiveness).

With the 1988 revised National Curriculum in Britain, the neo-liberal ideology was written into the education system. A premium was put on training geared to the obviously vocational skills (important subjects being, e.g., “technology”, “design”, “information technology”); and the specific and measurable targets beloved of business practice were to be employed in the management of teaching and learning. The slant was reductionist, placing little value on the dignity of labour and on the innate value of creativity.

This approach featured micro-management of schools, pupils and teachers through frequent inspections – and through league tables of published attainments. The obsession with control in the short-term seemed designed to ensure long-term social control : dissent was to be eliminated – by crushing before they appeared any displays of imagination or willingness to think beyond the parameters of production and consumption. Indeed, the whole exercise looked set to subordinate the claims of society and of the body politic to the uncaring and fundamentally irresponsible demands of the market.

A Revised Curriculum (primary level) appeared for Ireland in 1999. Here too the approach could be said to be prescriptive, business oriented, narrowly behaviourist – in other words, neo-liberal in sympathy. And, of course, we hear many voices in today’s prosperous Ireland raised in favour of an educational system which would advance Ireland’s collective wealth by promoting competitiveness in the international market.

Already we are encountering here advertising and ‘branding’ associated with commercial sponsorship of school activities. And advocacy of league-tables is ever more strident.

David Limond lectures in the School of Education, Trinity College, Dublin.