ABSTRACT
One of the most remarkable achievements of the offensive waged by capital against working and oppressed people since the 1970s has been the ideological cleaving of politics and education, at least so far as this attack has manifested in the United States. That education and politics are explicitly connected has been an assumption of educational theorists, researchers, and policymakers dating back to Socrates and Plato. There have been countless debates over what form this relationship should take, but that the relationship exists and should be debated has been taken for granted. Yet contemporary discourse around education-and this is not limited to the discourse pulsing through the corporate mass media, but includes teacher education programs, professional educational organizations, and a variety of academic publishing outlets-is predicated upon the very severance of education from the political. Instead of political concerns over values, directions, goals, and purposes, educational debates are increasingly staged in a highly abstracted economic register. This does not mean that education is no longer political, and perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the political presuppositions of contemporary educational discourse are so well entrenched that they appear to be effaced. That education should be oriented toward the insertion of subjects into the global capitalist political economy is taken for granted not only by right-wing think tanks and venture philanthropists like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or The Brookings Institute, but also by liberal education reformers like Linda Darling-Hammond and Diane Ravitch. 1 The latter school only differs from the former in that it wishes to intervene slightly in the global political-economic order in an effort to smooth out growing contradictions and antagonisms. Neither Darling-Hammond nor Ravitch, then, want to do away with capitalism-and neither even mentions imperialism. They merely want to decrease inequity within the existing framework, making it more inclusive (at least for those in the US).
