ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights issues regarding neoliberalism and the global educational agenda. As many have noted, there has been a deliberate deployment, interrogation and reappropriation of the language of neoliberal education reform, masking new forms of colonialism. Education is often pursued in ways serving individualized, private, corporate market interests, diminishing bigger questions of access, equity, race, Indigeneity and decolonial resistance. This chapter interrogates the neoliberal agenda in specific African and Canadian contexts, revealing the ways a dialectic of “coloniality” and “modernity” have worked to ensure an epistemic hegemony of Western science knowledge. In African contexts, it is often revealed through a problematic linkage of democracy, good governance and human rights, all within the primacy of markets and global capitalism. In Euro-American contexts, acceding to the rights of global capital has meant paying attention to global capital’s regulatory capacities and space economies to determine who is deserving or deemed worthy of education.
