Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ When Generosity Hurts: Bill Gates, Public School Teachers and the Politics of Humiliation

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
Henry Giroux forges a link between Foucault and education with this long exegesis on the politics of humiliation applied generally and to educators particularly. "Anyone who does not believe in the pursuit of material self-interest, unbridled competition and market-driven values is a proper candidate to be humiliated," he writes.

"Beneath its discourse of urgency, altruism and political purity parading in a messianic language of educational reform and a politics of generosity are the same old and discredited neoliberal policies that cheerfully serve corporate interests: privatization, union busting, competition as the only mode of motivation, an obsession with measurement, a relentless attack on teacher autonomy, the weakening of tenure, stripping educational goals of public values, defining teacher quality in purely instrumental terms, an emphasis on authoritative modes of management and a mindless obsession with notions of pedagogy that celebrate memorization and teach to the test." Via TonNet.

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