Abstract
Educational researchers have called attention to how neoliberal ideology has profoundly and detrimentally influenced public education systems, but less attention has been paid to how neoliberalism influences private educational institutions. This article examines the influence of neoliberal ideology on education in the USA through an ethnographic case study of a private Sudbury school, Central Valley Sudbury School (CVSS), whose radical unschooling philosophy positions itself in an oppositional stance towards public schools, which it perceives to be hopelessly beyond repair. CVSS represents the permeation of neoliberal ideology in education through its very existence as a private school in the growing alternative education industry. While Sudbury practitioners positioned themselves in opposition to the neoliberal policies and practices of public schools, at the micro-level of routine interaction at CVSS, neoliberalism presented itself through discourses of meritocracy and choice, individual autonomy, entrepreneurship, and education as a private good. Such a contradiction reveals that there may be more congruence between radical unschooling philosophies and neoliberal rationality than would first appear. The article contributes additional understanding to how schools—both public and private—reproduce key ideologies of the society in which they are embedded.
Introduction
Critical scholars of educational policy have drawn increasing attention to how neoliberalism contributes to the privatization of public education, increasing social inequality, and forming a global educational elite (Hursh and Martina, 2003; Lipman, 2007). Neoliberalism, a contested term, is an economic and social ideology that rests upon the rule of the (globalized) market, cutting public expenditures for social services (such as education), deregulation, privatization, and the elimination of the concept of the public good (Baltodano, 2014; Ross and Gibson, 2007). The values of individual autonomy and responsibility, meritocracy, and unfettered choice are understood as indisputable at the expense of collective agency, solidarity, and the state’s responsibility to provide for the basic needs of its people (Hursh, 2007). In education, neoliberal values translate into policies that emphasize the privatization and systematic dismantling of public schools, “choice” between (unequal) schools, high-stakes accountability aimed at driving families away from public education (Hursh and Henderson, 2011; Hursh and Martina, 2003), and a fertile market for the rapidly growing alternative education industry. Drawing on Foucault’s (1978/1979) notion of governmentality, Baltodano (2014) and others argue that neoliberalism has become a way of life, a culture of choice, rather than simply a social and economic policy, permeating every social setting in society; “neoliberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a mode of discourse. It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world” (Harvey, 2005: 3).
Less attention, however, has been paid to how neoliberalism influences private educational spaces, framed as progressive and radical, that—by virtue of situating themselves in the private sector—presuppose the neoliberal disinvestment in public education. In this article, I examine how such schools, in their day-to-day functioning, feed into neoliberal ideology in unexpected ways. Examining such under-researched spaces can provide insight as to how neoliberal ideology is pervasive and hegemonic, while adapting to the specific context in which it is situated. In this article, I argue that Sudbury education, a progressive educational model that emphasizes radically empowering children in a democratic setting, is an example of the many effects of neoliberal privatization. Specifically, this article draws upon findings from a critical ethnographic case study of Central Valley Sudbury School (CVSS), 1 a small, private school in California’s Central Valley, following the progressivist Sudbury model. I craft a thick explanation (Watson-Gegeo, 1992) of neoliberalism and education that demonstrates how, ironically, the radical disengagement of Sudbury schools from the public education system fuels neoliberal governmentality. I show that the progressivism of Sudbury education serves to create a niche market of progressive parent “customers” investing in an oppositional identity and valuing education as a private good.
Specifically, neoliberal privatization in this context refers to how private schools such as CVSS—that distinguish themselves from other schools through their radical unschooling philosophy—pull white middle-class families away from public schools, leading to increased educational segregation by race and class (Goyette, 2008; Roda and Wells, 2013). The choice to invest in public schools or disengage from them in favor of a private radical education is, as Cucchiara and Horvat (2014) point out, deeply imbued with symbolic meaning that centers on parents’ political identities 2 . For the adults in my study, the symbolic identity indexed by “choice” reflected their desire for a radically empowering education for children and rejecting what they perceived as overly involved middle-class “helicopter” parenting. Such a radically “hands-off” pedagogy, I argue, served to reinforce neoliberal rationality, producing Sudbury children as autonomous, individualistic, neoliberal subjects conceived of as developing best when disconnected from the lifeworlds of family and society.
Neoliberal governmentality, policy, and pedagogy
Neoliberalism, as an economic policy, first emerged in the USA in the 1970s to replace the Keynesian social democratic policies promoted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the aftermath of the Great Depression (Baltodano, 2014; Harvey, 2005). Prior to the 1970s, the policies of the federal government had assumed that human welfare would be maximized through New Deal programs that ensured “protection for American workers through the establishment of minimum wages, collective bargaining, and social security” (Baltodano, 2014: 124)—in short, the state was responsible for assuring a minimum standard of human welfare. In the 1970s, neoliberalism was framed as a solution to the “apparent failure of Keynesian economics” (Davies and Bansel, 2007: 250) but was also a response by the corporate elites to the political upheavals and civil rights gains of the 1960s as “democracies were beginning to be seen by some of those in the world of high finance as ungovernable” (Davies and Bansel, 2007: 250) and therefore requiring tighter governance for corporate profitability to be reinstated on a global scale.
In contrast to Keynesian social democratic policies, neoliberalism assumes that “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey, 2005: 2). The appropriate role of the state is not only to refrain from interfering with the workings of the market, but also to transform areas of social life previously untouched by the market (such as education, health care, and social security) into markets, ironically “by state action if necessary” (Harvey, 2005: 2). In short, the state enables the market through both direct and indirect means. In education, the neoliberal agenda—including policies such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top in the USA—is fundamentally about privatizing public education (Hursh and Martina, 2003) to the detriment of the public good (Baltodano, 2014) and, paradoxically, introducing stricter state controls on public schools through standards, high-stakes testing, and accountability. Such strict state controls enable the market by creating a culture of fear around school failure and an increasing investment in the private sector to fix the perceived problems of public schools (Koyama, 2010).
In addition to tracing the rise and dominance of neoliberal assumptions through policy, it is fruitful to employ Foucault’s (1978/1979) notion of governmentality to understand how the state imposes new mentalities that produce well-regulated, self-governing neoliberal subjects (Davies and Bansel, 2007). Neoliberalism works because it operates on the level of subjectivity in addition to imposing policy. By combining these macro-level and micro-level perspectives on neoliberalism, it becomes possible to understand why Sudbury education, which originated in the late 1960s during the era of neoliberalization, takes up neoliberal discourses as its own taken-for-granted assumptions even while it maintains a progressive stance on educational policy and pedagogy. Such an apparent contradiction between neoliberalism and progressive pedagogy can be resolved by understanding that the two are, in fact, less different than they appear to be. For example, Watkins’ (2007: 301) qualitative study of teachers’ reflections on their teaching desire reveals that “the desire to teach is often thwarted within contemporary pedagogic practice by a set of discursive constraints that draw heavily on both progressivist notions of teaching and learning and neoliberal forms of governance.” The connection between neoliberalism and progressivism lies in both ideologies’ emphasis on individuality and choice: in progressivist pedagogy the individual child’s exploration of the environment through a range of choices is assumed to result in the most positive developmental outcomes (Watkins, 2007); likewise, in neoliberal ideology human well-being is assumed to be maximized by “liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills” (Harvey, 2005: 2) in an unregulated market.
Both because neoliberal ideology is complex and contradictory, and because neoliberal subjects retain agency and draw upon multiple discourses to construct their subject positions (Nairn and Higgins, 2007), it becomes possible to understand how subjects operate simultaneously “both within and against neoliberal rationalities” (Gannon, 2007: 366). And, as Fernández (2009: 33) shows through examining a private school within the context of neoliberalization in Chile, it is possible even for private schools that directly benefit from neoliberal school choice to work “in favor of socially oriented goals […rather than the] neoliberal and individualistic conception of how schools and society should operate.” Extending these findings, and responding to the dearth of emphasis on “the impact of neoliberalism on pedagogy,” (Watkins, 2007: 302), I argue that the notions of individual autonomy, freedom, and responsibility underlying progressivist Sudbury philosophy are compatible with neoliberal rationality. It is not surprising that those who have availed themselves of neoliberal educational “choice” would bring this ethos with them to create an environment of individualism and choice within a progressive context. In this article, I examine the relationship of Sudbury education to neoliberal discourse, which illuminates the paradoxical nature of neoliberalism itself while masquerading as providing an unprecedented amount of “human dignity and individual freedom” (Harvey, 2005: 5); neoliberalism in fact imposes additional constraints, as it transforms the state to the “protector of capital […and ensures…] active political intervention and manipulation of all the social institutions, from the media, the law, the arts, schools, and universities, to the most important protagonist of all, the state” (Baltodano, 2014: 127).
Neoliberal rationality is deeply imbued with racialized and classed meanings that are partly obfuscated by its reliance upon individualistic discourse. The individualism of neoliberal ideology relies upon a normalization of whiteness and middle-classness, as it theorizes the white middle-class ideal entrepreneurial self as fully self-motivated and separated from social context—even as neoliberalism is responsible for increasing inequalities in education and society (Hursh and Henderson, 2011; Lipman, 2007). Neoliberal ideologies exacerbate inequalities in part due to the myth of meritocracy, which posits that individuals begin on an even playing field, and when they do not end up at the same place, their individual attributes are blamed. Such a narrative is based on the experiences and worldview of the white, middle-class, Eurocentric self (Dalton, 2002). By denying that a social structure beyond the individual and family even exists—as Margaret Thatcher famously stated that “there is no such thing as society … There are individual men and women, and there are families” (Thatcher, 1993: 626–627, as cited in Hursh and Martina, 2003: 34)—neoliberalism exacerbates the white middle-class tendency to attribute everything in the social world to individual action and agency. CVSS students—who were overwhelmingly white and middle-class—benefitted from social and cultural capital afforded to them in part because their worldviews were compatible with the neoliberal individualism promoted in the school.
Sudbury education
Sudbury schools are part of a significant history of radical educational experimentation in the USA, and are framed by practitioners as a counter to the overly competitive, coercive, and authoritarian environment of traditional public schools (Greenberg, 1999). Sudbury schools are private, non-age-segregated, assessment-free, and student-directed educational communities of practice that rest upon a counterculture ideology emphasizing anti-authoritarianism and the radical empowerment of children. Prevalent in the United States since the opening of Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1968, these schools operate as small (anywhere between tens and hundreds of students) learning communities where children decide what they want to do every day. The school intends to treat children as equal to adults in knowledge, agency, and power and functions as an intentional community where children learn skills and hands-on activities. No formal classes are offered, but children can request classes and an adult (or a child) will teach it in a relatively informal setting. However, due to the environment of unconstrained freedom, children are free to attend a Sudbury school for years and never take a class. Children’s learning is never formally graded or assessed until they approach graduation, for which they write a thesis that they defend in front of the school. Children aged five through 18 attend together, without formal segregation by age or grade.
The freedom that children are afforded to determine their activities is limited by the rules that the school creates democratically through the School Meeting, a decision-making body where everyone (adult and child alike) has one vote and anyone can make a motion to change any aspect of the school. The School Meeting is supported by a Judicial Committee (JC) that enforces the agreed-upon rules: any person in the school can “write up” anyone else for a rule violation, at which point the issue goes to the JC. The JC functions like a jury, hearing the evidence and deciding democratically on an appropriate course of action (a “consequence”). Adults—who intentionally call themselves “staff” rather than “teachers”—take an extremely hands-off role with the children, intervening only when someone’s safety is in danger or if their own rights are violated. Children are expected to speak up for themselves when they have interpersonal conflict; adults do not typically intervene on children’s behalf. As I demonstrate in this article, these progressive notions of freedom, choice, and individual responsibility are also deeply imbued with neoliberal rationality.
Introducing Central Valley Sudbury School
On a typical day at CVSS, children and adults would be busily moving around a cluster of buildings and outdoor spaces, individually or in groups, often engaged in animated conversation punctuated with loud bursts of laughter and rowdy games. Nobody was ever in one place for very long. Adults and children joked with each other, shared stories, spent time together, and helped each other with small tasks that arose throughout the day of living together in a learning community. If the weather was pleasant, many of the younger children would be busily playing outside—climbing the fig tree, running around, or swinging. Occasionally, a more structured class would occur, sometimes one-on-one, sometimes a larger group led by either a child or an adult. In the main building, the kitchen was often a particularly busy hub of activity, with participants preparing food or engaging in cooking classes. Participants would greet and bid each other farewell as they came and went at different times throughout the day, their comings and goings announced by the loud clanging of the front gate.
From its opening in 1992 until its closure in June 2010, CVSS was a very small, mixed-age, ungraded, private school following the Sudbury model located in an urban setting in California’s Central Valley. When it was open, CVSS was the only school of its type in its immediate geographical location. As of 2015, only two Sudbury schools remain in California. Inspired by the example of Sudbury Valley School, the first Sudbury school that opened in 1968, CVSS came into being in 1991 when three white middle-class women, Charlotte, Grace, and Barbara, discovered the model when searching for alternative schooling for their own children. All three founding members were parents of young children whom they had enrolled in various early childhood programs with which they were dissatisfied because they perceived too much adult control of the activities (Interview with Grace, 6 May 2009).
CVSS changed physical locations three times during its 19-year history. Its final location was in Valleyville, a mid-sized city in California’s Central Valley, in a residential neighborhood with some commercial development interspersed. According to 2010 US Census data, this area of Valleyville was more White (76.68%) and contained fewer people of color (6.8% Black or African American, 12.6% Hispanic, 4.1% Asian, 1.1% American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.6% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander) than the California average. Overall, the CVSS neighborhood was a mostly white, working-class, older, politically conservative, and educated population.
During the 2008–2009 school year, there were five staff members and 13 students participating in the school. Although the school website claimed that there is no “typical” student—“students range from five to 18, and each is unique”—in reality most of the children and staff were white and middle-class, coming from relatively privileged backgrounds. Student diversity, therefore, was defined by the CVSS website as individual differences in “temperaments, life experiences, interests and skill levels” rather than other markers of difference such as race, ethnicity, gender, social class, or sexual orientation. Such an ostensibly color-, class-, and gender-blind discourse of individualism is indicative of neoliberal rationality, which feeds into white supremacy and neoliberal governmentality by ascribing the “choice” of attending CVSS to individual motives rather than the implicit social message that only white and middle-class students belonged there. Since 12 out of the 13 students and all five staff members were white (one student self-identified as Mexican-American), a discourse of extreme individualism served to obfuscate this important fact, and the workings of neoliberalism in reproducing educational segregation by race and class were invisibilized.
Yearly tuition at CVSS during the 2008–2009 school year was $3985 for the first child, with a sibling discount of $665 for the first sibling and an additional discount of $620 for the second sibling. Tuition at CVSS was lower than most Sudbury and private schools, and the staff emphasized that they tried to keep tuition as low as possible in order to offer a Sudbury education to all families that were interested. Still, there were families who wanted, but were unable, to send their children to CVSS because of the cost. Therefore, the families who sent their children to this school had enough income to afford such an education without the aid of scholarships or loans, sometimes sending as many as three children from the same family to the school. These families were united by their dedication to the Sudbury school model and their perceived freedom to experiment with their children’s education in such a radical way.
CVSS’ low attendance in 2008–2009 was a result of a pivotal conflict that occurred between the school and parents in the prior year. While an exhaustive analysis of the school closure story is beyond the scope of this article, a few points bear mentioning with respect to neoliberal privatization and school choice. A group of parents, frustrated with what they saw as having too little influence over the day-to-day curriculum at CVSS, 3 attempted to change the school into a parent co-op, which would have given them much more control. Faced with a School Meeting opposed to the change, these parents then (again) availed themselves of school choice and pulled their children out. As a result of the 50% decline in enrollment, the continued operation of CVSS became financially unsustainable and the staff decided to close the school rather than go into debt. Here, individual choice and these parents’ concerns about their children’s “success” (or rather, the parents’ identity as a particular kind of middle-class parent) took precedence over the survival of the school.
Methods
The central question I investigate in this article is: how does neoliberalism define the pedagogical practices and subjectivities produced by Sudbury education? To explore this question and others in the larger research project, I utilized critical ethnography combined with critical discourse analysis (CDA) of ethnographic field notes, interview transcripts, and documents from the school setting. Critical ethnography (Carspecken, 1996; Watson-Gegeo, 1988) combines the traditional ethnographic focus of understanding “people’s behavior in naturally occurring, ongoing settings, with a focus on the cultural interpretation of behavior” (Watson-Gegeo, 1988: 576) with the non-neutral critical approach of research and pedagogy for empowerment and liberation (Freire, 1970). CDA (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997) involves a more micro-level analysis of language-in-use than would normally be included in an ethnographic study and is unique in focusing on power relationships and the discursive reproduction (and contestation) of ideology.
I began the data collection process by visiting the school and engaging in participant observation for two to four hours twice a week, taking detailed ethnographic field notes as I moved through the school, observing different groups of children playing and learning, chatting with staff members, and attending School Meeting and JC meetings whenever I could. I varied the days of the week on which I visited the school, since different staff members were scheduled for their part-time hours on different days of the week. In meetings, I took detailed notes on who spoke, when, and what they said. I expanded my field notes into full ethnographic narratives as soon as I returned home after each visit. After having established relationships and observed for seven months, I conducted semi-structured, in-depth ethnographic interviews with those participants who volunteered to do so—nine out of the 18 participants (four adults, five children). One adult (Charlotte) and one child (Natalie) became key informants, and I interviewed both of them a second time after the school officially closed in June 2010.
Data analysis was guided by Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) method of constant comparison and Carspecken’s (1996) reconstructive analysis, with several phases of increasingly detailed coding and memoing. I used CDA to examine both the interactions during the more formal School Meeting processes, the interviews I had with adults and children, and the documents I collected throughout my visits to the school. Since decision-making processes and interviews, no matter how egalitarian participants attempt to make them, are constructed in asymmetrical relations of power, a critical perspective is necessary for any examination of such negotiated processes. Member checks were utilized throughout the data analysis process to ensure validity of the emergent theory.
Resisting neoliberal hegemony: the CVSS unschooling philosophy
Before discussing the multiple ways the CVSS version of progressive, radical “unschooling” reinforced neoliberal ideology, it is first useful to establish the important ways CVSS educators positioned themselves directly in opposition to the policies and practices of public schools. Within a neoliberal context, such an oppositional stance is essential for producing a niche market that attracts parents to, in staff member Charlotte’s words, “buying into freedom for children” (Interview with Charlotte, 6 October 2010), which contrasts with the lack of freedom in other educational environments. Educational “freedom,” in Charlotte’s conception, becomes a commodity that only Sudbury education can provide. Furthermore, the oppositional stance also results in a sometimes stereotyped and exaggerated representation of public schools; several staff members likened public schools to prisons. Staff member Grace observed that, “to keep kids busy all day, interested and focused, how can you do that without them feeling like they’re in a jail, you know?” (Interview with Grace, 6 May 2009). In this section, I examine how CVSS established itself in opposition to the neoliberal forces in public education by resisting standards, direct instruction, testing, grading, and hierarchy—but ultimately relying on a constrained neoliberal notion of “public good” afforded primarily to the deserving few.
Although the adults I interviewed often articulated their vision of education as a (neoliberal) private good (particularly when they discussed why they had chosen Sudbury education for their own children), there were some significant ways in which they pushed beyond consideration of the private good to consider how both they as individuals, as well as Sudbury education as a whole, might contribute to the larger community outside the walls of the school. This possibility was evident when staff members Grace and Charlotte shared with me their vision of using the physical site of CVSS as a community space that would be accessible to the public rather than merely the students and staff of CVSS. Grace used the analogy of a country club to illustrate her vision, though country clubs are elite institutions not accessible to the general population—here, “public” is redefined as elite in the context of neoliberal privatization.
Grace also shared that she was working on a scholarship program to increase accessibility to CVSS, though she was adamant that there would be no free handouts. In her mind, students and families who wanted to benefit from CVSS would have to work for it like everyone else, and the School Meeting would base its scholarship allocations on merit rather than financial need. “We are not socialists,” Grace informed me, referring explicitly to herself and fellow staff members Charlotte, Barbara, and Matthew; they felt that a need-based tuition assistance program would “punish people who make a lot of money” (Interview with Grace, 6 May 2009). Here, neoliberal rationality promises rewards to the individual entrepreneurial self. Whatever form it would have taken, the scholarship program never came to fruition. However, participants did consider how to push beyond education as a private good to explore how a public good of accessibility and equality could be achieved through the practices and resources of Sudbury schools—but still within a constrained notion of “public.”
Sudbury educators take up the same progressivist critiques of neoliberal education reforms as progressives in academic and other spaces. Sudbury education is inspired by the unschooling/deschooling philosophies of Holt (1982), Illich (1971), and, more recently, Gatto (1992), who insist that true learning can only occur outside of traditional schools because “the current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring” (Illich, 1971: 2). Aligning itself with the unschoolers’ critique, the CVSS website summarizes how Sudbury schools distinguish themselves from the regulated, controlling environment of public schools and resist neoliberal “efforts to increase educational efficiency through standards and standardized testing” (Hursh, 2007: 498): At [CVSS], we support children aged five through to eighteen in pursuing individual, unique paths of learning unhindered by age segregation, fixed time tables for classes, compulsory testing and grade evaluations, to name a few. Our students enjoy complete intellectual freedom as they work hard each day at mastering the complex skills they themselves decide as important and necessary for a successful life. How do we measure their success? By the smiles on their faces, the relationships they form and the intensity with which they pursue their ever-expanding interests each day. Outcome is secondary to the process that unfolds along the way.
The students, too, appropriated this view of learning as unquantifiable. Fourteen-year-old Natalie, who transferred to public school after the closure of CVSS, was able to clearly see the contrast in perspective and practices between Sudbury and public schools when she tried to explain her previous education to her peers: Natalie: it was like it was actually, and I’ll try, and like explain a little bit, like it was actually, we didn’t like have, … uh, we didn’t have grades, or, we didn’t do testing, and they’ll just be like, what? How do you know if you’re doing good then? I was like ‘cause you know it, like if you’re doing good, then why you like doubt that you ((laughs)) were doing good. ((laughs)) Or, like … people would ask me, who was your science teacher before this? I’m like oh I didn’t have a science teacher, and they’ll say what do you mean? I said well I’ve never had a science class before this one, and they go what? What school did you go to? I say well we could pick our classes, which ones we took, and I never wanted to take science … and they go well how did you learn anything? I said because I learned stuff ((laughs)) (Interview with Natalie, 29 April 2010).
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Neoliberal pedagogy I: producing entrepreneurial subjects
“Onze School voor Ondernemend Leren” (“Our school for entrepreneurial learning”) —Merkaba Sudbury School website
At CVSS, students were socialized as neoliberal entrepreneurial subjects whose purpose was to create profit for themselves and the school through acting as individuals motivated by their own financial self-interest. This socialization of neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivity occurred through the strikingly capitalist system of “Corporations” that made up an integral part of the school structure. These Corporations played a large role in the daily functioning of the school and operated alongside the democratic School Meeting and the Assembly (a larger governing body that included parents) to govern students and staff as neoliberal subjects. Corporations—complete with a charter, board of directors, an executive officer, and official bylaws—explicitly socialized students into acting both as consumers and as (re)producers of the structure of corporations in the larger society. Corporations were often created as a means of generating revenue for the school (in addition to their ostensibly educational purpose of providing a variety of activities for students to engage in), as students brought their own private funds and spent them on food from the Cooking Corporation, fees to the Computer Corporation to use the Internet, and so on. This socialization of children was reinforced by the peer culture at CVSS, as children encouraged each other to participate in the corporate structure, reflecting Schor’s (2003: 23) observation that, “in the end, we’re not only commodifying our children, which is the standard critique of consumer culture, but, even more powerfully, we are recruiting them to commodify themselves.”
In light of Schor’s insight, I observed how the structure of these Corporations heavily influenced what children did at school. For example, 10-year-old Sally was often coming to School Meeting interested in creating “shops” for selling various items from toys to food. Her constant eye towards expansion and accumulation was exemplified by her repeatedly asking for permission to add items to her “shops.” Sometimes, Sally’s requests for permission to expand her Corporation were the only agenda items for that day’s School Meeting. Eight-year-old Kitty, inspired by Sally’s entrepreneurship, also became involved in these activities. During School Meetings, students often spoke in business language and boasted of their knowledge of the difference between “net” and “gross” profits, as teenage School Meeting Chairperson Dominic did in one meeting. There was a constant exchange of capital in the daily life of the school, with students writing checks for purchases and begging each other to borrow money if they didn’t have any left in their personal spending account. In this way, students were quite explicitly socialized to participate as entrepreneurial individuals in the corporate structure of the larger society.
Neoliberal pedagogy II: responsibilization and individual choice
In addition to entrepreneurship, students were socialized into a neoliberal notion of individual responsibility and unconstrained choice that elided the social structures that regulate participation in a democratic society. For example, individual choice was constantly emphasized as children were free to come and go from activities as they pleased, answer their cell phones during meetings, and choose from an infinitely long list of legitimized learning activities—they were, according to staff member Grace, “free to explore, free to be bored, [… and] free to wear what they want” (Interview with Grace, 6 May 2009). Bansel (2007:288) argues that, in neoliberalism, “not only are subjects positioned as able to choose more freely among a broader range of products and services, they are also positioned as liberated to make broader choices about their socioeconomic position, and hence social identity.” In other words, in neoliberalism freedom is reduced to individual choice. Likewise, at CVSS, Grace’s definition of “complete intellectual freedom” is reduced to choice, one example of the very real epistemological constraints of neoliberal capitalism.
The neoliberal values of individual responsibility and autonomy are highly emphasized in the Sudbury environment. At CVSS adult participants claimed that it was up to the individual children to choose whether to participate in the decision-making process of the school, thereby ignoring the social structures in place that inhibited participation for some, particularly younger students and gendered females (Wilson, 2015). In the School Meeting setting, CDA results showed that older adult and male voices were consistently heard and taken more seriously than those of younger children, females, and newcomers. 5 In the context of neoliberalism, this finding is not surprising. The tendency of participants to ignore or not recognize that these inequalities were present was due to the neoliberal ideology of responsibilization and extreme individualism that ascribed responsibility for participation to individuals rather than acknowledging the social structures that constrained participation for some. In this way, the Sudbury philosophy echoes the neoliberal discourse of “shifting social responsibility from the community to the individual” (Hursh, 2007: 26)—exemplified, in extreme form, by Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement that “‘there is no such thing as society’ (Thatcher, 1993)” (Hursh and Martina, 2003: 34).
In the decision-making space of the School Meeting, participants were adamant that “anyone can make a motion” at any point, and that it was up to individual participants to ensure that their voices were heard in meetings. However, in reality the discursive genre that was expected of participants was extremely restricted: if participants did not word their contributions correctly according to the highly structured discourse of Robert’s Rules of Order and insert them at the correct time, they were either reprimanded for not following the process, interrupted, or ignored completely. The constant discourse of individual “choice” of whether to participate or even attend meetings masked the informal power structures in place that kept many students, particularly younger students, females, and newcomers, from participating fully. For example, Victoria imagined that children who came in to listen at School Meeting would often say to themselves, “oh I’m not interested, or I’m not at this place yet in my, you know, learning or interest to really hang out” (Interview with Victoria, 4 June 2009). Likewise, Grace explained that “they’re there when there’s something they want to shepherd through, or they’re there when they care, um, uh, so they trust that everything else being done, is gonna be done to their service, to what they want” (Interview with Grace, 6 May 2009). Through these neoliberal discourses of individual responsibilization, adult participants unintentionally obfuscated how the constrained discursive structure of Robert’s Rules of Order was used by some participants to disrupt an egalitarian, democratic process (Wilson, 2015).
Neoliberal pedagogy III: education as a private good
The discourse of education as a private—rather than a public—good, which figures prevalently in the neoliberal push for privatization, is an important component of Sudbury educators’ values. Although CVSS adults occasionally engaged in the debate on how to fix public schools, for the most part they disengaged from a system that they saw as unsalvageably broken. For staff member Matthew, participation in Sudbury education was not about engaging with public schools or creating societal change: Matthew: so, w- we back, Barbara wanted to move back to Massachusetts … and I said let’s try it here first […] so we could just move there … get jobs and, and … put the kids in that school, and just do it. […] ‘cause it was for the kids, it was for my children. It was … you know, it wasn’t a movement … it wasn’t that I wanted to join a movement, and change the world, it was for my kids. (Interview with Matthew, 22 June 2010)
Resisting neoliberalism: radical possibilities in Sudbury education
In this article, I have shown how Sudbury education—specifically through the case of CVSS—both resists and supports the neoliberal agenda by aligning itself with the key neoliberal values of individual entrepreneurship, responsibilization and individual choice, and education as a private good. Ultimately, neoliberalism constrains the Sudbury definition of radical empowerment and transformation to the individual, rather than collective, benefit. While Ross and Gibson (2007:8) argue that “social (and individual) transformation [are] inseparable” in education, Sudbury schooling divorces these concepts from one another. I have implied here that the tension between resisting and reproducing neoliberal values cannot be resolved “without dealing with [neoliberalism’s] roots in the capitalist system” (Ollman, 2001: 93–94). Such a focus would constitute the truly radically transformative potential of progressive educational contexts such as Sudbury education.
Given the unexpected ways in which the CVSS unschooling philosophy merged with neoliberal values, I agree with Cagan’s (1978) assessment that radical education in the 1960s US could benefit from a more collectively oriented mindset. Because neoliberal education policies such as NCLB and Race to the Top have exacerbated social inequality rather than remedying it (Hursh, 2007; Lipman, 2007), any educational space that claims to be transformative must resist neoliberal policies and create spaces that truly promote egalitarianism, collective transformation, and solidarity—to embrace “other values, ones that cannot be generated within structures devoted to the forging of unbridled profit or within an individualistic vision for the world” (Freire, 2005: 118). Sudbury education, as a space with radical potential because it rethinks many of the ways we educate children, has the potential to create “other values” that resist neoliberal capitalism. However, to promote true egalitarianism and a democracy that resists neoliberalism, Sudbury schools must become more heterogeneous (by race and class) in order to resist the tendency of school choice and privatization to exacerbate educational segregation (Goyette, 2008). Furthermore, Freire (1985:170) argued that “any radical and profound transformation of an educational system can only take place (and even then, not automatically or mechanically) when society is also radically transformed.” Schools—both public and private—are often burdened with the formidable task of creating egalitarianism and equitable outcomes while the inequities in society go unchallenged. Neoliberal capitalism, which is structured in such a way that there are always winners and losers, must be radically transformed to a different economic, social, and political system that would allow for true egalitarianism, collective agency, solidarity, and a decent standard of living and education for every family. While Sudbury education and other alternative models provide interesting and inspiring examples of the radical possibilities of educational institutions, their location in the private sector makes them inherently inegalitarian. US society and economy must seriously re-invest in public education, and in the accompanying value of education for the public good, instead of retreating from public education to private schools, as Sudbury families do. Truly transformative visions of society that push beyond neoliberalism, capitalism, and high-stakes accountability must be imagined and realized collectively, not individually.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.