Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Trevor died on Monday of pancreatic cancer, and will be buried tomorrow.  In his memory here's a reprint of his last Webdiary piece.

The theory of evolution provides an ideological support for thiseconomic theory, naturalising it, making what is actually a product ofa specific human culture into an independently existing state ofaffairs – in other words, making it into a myth.

The commodification of tertiary education means something much worse than that subjects, disciplines, awards and faculties will sink or swim on the number of customers they attract. Commodification changes the very nature of what is exchanged. As Noble notes, when education is commodified, concern is shifted from the experience of the people involved in an educational process to the production of what he puts in scare quotes as ‘course materials’...

The task of the intellectual is not to advance an ideal arrangement that will lead us to some kind of heaven-on-earth; the task of the intellectual is to call things by their names and this is what Keane has failed to do. Those who truly love democracy seek to account for its absence rather than to find it where it does not exist.

It is precisely this idea [describing education as a product] which bedevils the current debate on education, I would argue, for this kind of conception is an essential part of the current pursuit of economic uniformity. Education is seen in this context not just as a product but as a product produced for exchange. In other words, education is reduced to a commodity.

This is Halbbildung: it is not half-education but the denial of education. Each step in the dismantling of the system through which I was educated, each step in the process from education to Halbbildung, has been marked by the rhetoric of standards and testing. With the implementation of each review standards plunged further into the depths of Halbbildung. Good luck! Get all the private education for your kiddies that you can. It’s not going to make any difference.

As I understand it, to be critical is the very opposite of the approach of adopting an alternative worldview, whether from left, right or centre. What we need is not an alternative economic worldview so much as a critical approach in the real sense of the word.