ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how neoliberalism as ideology and economic doctrine is a form of class warfare. It shows how market sovereignty restructures educational policy and practice for thirty years. The chapter describes how neoliberalism is a radical politics that rapidly undermines liberal and cultural conservative perspectives on schooling while threatening the possibility for the formation of critical forms of education. Neoliberalism promotes trade liberalization, the opening of national economies to foreign direct investment in ways that benefit rich nations and exploit the poor. Neoliberalism represents a break with the Keynesian orthodoxy that reigned until the 1970s in which government spending on public sector goods and services and government stimulation of the consumer base were assumed to be necessary to counter the vicissitudes of capitalist markets. Education in the United States has been radically transformed by both the economic doctrine and ideology of neoliberalism.
