Making Workers: Radical Geographies of Education (Radical Geography) - Softcover

Mitchell, Katharyne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745399851 ISBN 13: 9780745399850

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

As globalisation transforms the organisation of society, so too is its impact felt in the classroom. Katharyne Mitchell argues that schools are spaces in which neoliberal practices are brought to bear on the lives of children. Education’s narratives, actors and institutions play a pivotal role in the social and political formation of youth as workers in a capitalist economy. Mitchell looks at the formation of student identity and allegiance –as well as spaces of resistance. She investigates the transition to educational narratives emphasising flexibility and strategic global entrepreneurialism and examines the role of education in a broader political project of producing new generations of economically insecure but compliant workers. Scrutinising the impact of an influx of new actors, practices and policies, Mitchell argues that public education is the latest institution to embrace the neoliberal logic of 'choice' – pertaining to schools, faculty, and curricula – that, if unchallenged, will lead to further incursions of the market and increased socioeconomic inequality.

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Katharyne Mitchell is professor of geography at the University of Washington.
 

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Making Workers

Radical Geographies of Education

By Katharyne Mitchell

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2018 Katharyne Mitchell
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-9985-0

Contents

Acknowledgments, vi, 
List of Abbreviations, ix, 
Series Preface, x, 
PART I: GEOGRAPHIES OF WORK AND EDUCATION, 
1 Spatial Divisions of Labor and the Search for Jobs, 3, 
2 Creating the Entrepreneurial Child, 25, 
PART II: FLEXIBLE WORK, STRATEGIC WORKERS, 
3 From Multicultural Citizen to Global Businessman, 45, 
4 Geographies of Lifelong Learning and the Knowledge Economy co-authored with Key MacFarlane, 67, 
5 Global Restructuring and Challenges to Citizenship, 83, 
PART III: THE REFORM COALITION, 
6 Market Philanthropy in Education, 99, 
7 The Choice Machine and the Road to Privatization co-authored with Key MacFarlane, 119, 
PART IV: GEOGRAPHIES OF RESISTANCE, ACTS OF CITIZENSHIP, 
8 Taking Back Our Schools and Cities, 139, 
9 Conclusion: Paying Deep Attention, 157, 
Notes, 165, 
Index, 182, 

CHAPTER 1

Spatial Divisions of Labor and the Search for Jobs

How do children become workers? In his classic ethnography, Learning to Labor, Paul Willis wrote about how the children of the working classes were constituted as manual laborers through various kinds of structural constraints, but also through their educational and personal choices, including their own agency and resistance in the classroom.

These choices and associated forms of agency and resistance reflected the prevailing ideologies of work, masculinity, and community of that time period and place: England in the 1970s. Instead of focusing only on structural issues, Willis discerned how young men of the working classes — the "lads" — found respect, how they learned to value themselves. His focus thus turned to questions of culture, which he tied to those of political economy.

Culture has changed in the four decades since Willis's book was written — cultures of childhood as well as cultures of work and value. So has the actual workplace. So how are we valued by society and how do we value ourselves now? And what are the forces that are creating feelings of self and broader webs of belief?

We need to reexamine the types of questions Willis asked in light of contemporary changes in culture and society. How do kids "learn to labor" in ways that are both similar and different in the current moment? The contemporary period for young people almost everywhere is one of increasing precarity, where insecurities in the economy and labor market have been transferred onto workers, and ultimately onto children. Education prepares future workers for their entry into society — now a global society. The risks that young people are required to assume are thus global in scope, reflecting the flexibility and volatility of financial and labor markets without borders. They are also highly geographical, in the sense of a world unevenly developed, with deep rifts between cities, regions and nations, and with ongoing spatial divisions of opportunity and vulnerability.

In this context, what and how children are taught, and how and what they learn, can tell us a lot about both prevailing cultural norms and the political economy of the early twenty-first century. It can also tell us about how these norms are produced and contested. We need to know the overarching policy shifts and key struggles that are currently being waged in the name of educational and personal value. Who is weighing in on the content of the curriculum, the use of technology in the classroom, and on the types of schools and school choice that society should provide?

In this book I point to some of the new actors, technologies, and practices now being brought to bear on making children into workers. Beginning with a discussion of the shifting geographies of employment, I then move to examine how spatial changes in the opportunities of work, and the technologies that facilitate these shifts, also lead to new understandings of self and new cultural narratives and ways of being in the world.

I show that an influential actor in these processes today is philanthropy. The importance of philanthropic foundations is not just in their funding and programing priorities, but also in the ways in which they recruit young people and their parents into a new sense of value and security in vulnerable times. Much of this "value" resides in the opportunity to choose schools and learning styles, an opportunity that dovetails with market-based logics of individual free choice. This freedom entails certain kinds of responsibility and certain kinds of mobility — the right to be place-less rather than place-bound — an option for some, but not others.

I also look at regional, national, and supranational forms of educational governance over this same period. How have ideas about educating children to become democratic members of a diverse national community fused with and/or been displaced by something else? I examine ideas about multiculturalism in the context of labor market vulnerabilities, and contend that cultural ideas about work and its connection to multicultural education have shifted in this realm as well. Strategic ideas of cosmopolitan competence and lifelong learning now transcend those of social cohesion and national harmony. Here the watchword is flexibility: the ability to nimbly leap between skills and across spaces to capture the open position in the global economy. Once again, those who cannot make this leap are left behind, in place.

In this book I make an argument for the importance of geographical thinking in education. How children become workers is tied to these new/old divisions of labor and flexible work, as well as to cultures of self that echo the vulnerabilities of the global marketplace. Education reflects and reproduces these tensions, but it can also be a site of resistance. We are now at a critical juncture in educational theory and practice, where it is imperative not only to critique market-based logics and forms of recruitment, but also to consider the ways in which these orientations can be effectively resisted.

In the final two chapters of the book I consider the role of new geographies of radical thought and action in forming these spaces of resistance. These spatial practices can take many forms. Here I introduce two projects conducted with middle-school students in collaboration with Sarah Elwood, a geography professor at the University of Washington. One consists of finding and mapping alternative historical sites that were important for marginalized groups. They may have been neglected or deliberately overlooked in mainstream maps and tourist guides, so finding them and placing them on the students' own collaborative maps is a move that gives power to the children and also to the marginalized groups themselves. We call this project "counter-mapping" to indicate a refusal to abide by the normative rules of map-making.

A second project involves tracing the history and geography of a river. In this collective program the researchers worked with young people to find, map, and discuss the transformative relationship between humans and nature. Thinking and talking about straightening, dredging, damming, draining, polluting, and ultimately cleaning and caring for this "organic machine" is a project about the past and the future. It enables understanding about human and nonhuman relationships. It also helps children consider and imagine alternative future...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745399851
• ISBN 13: 9780745399850
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 200
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland