ABSTRACT
US public schooling developed from the common school movement of the nineteenth century led in Massachusetts by reformer Horace Mann. The common school movement was promoted as a means of political inclusion, workforce preparation, and individual character-building aiming to bring together children of different classes and provide a common learning experience. Corporate school reform or neoliberal educational restructuring represents not merely better or worse school reform approaches—adjusting pedagogical methods, tweaking the curriculum, and so on. It is also crucially about redistributed control over social life, and as such is part of a much broader trend. Capitalist enclosure of the knowledge commons makes ideas into private property rather than freely shared and exchanged knowledge of use and potential universal benefit. Corporate school reform threatens the possibility for public schools to develop as places where knowledge, pedagogical authority, and experiences are taken up in relation to broader political, ethical, cultural, and material struggles informing competing claims to truth.
