Governing Identity through Neoliberal Education Initiatives: ‘Get[ting] Schooled’ in the Marketplace

As the above quote from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s website for one of its main educational initiative illustrates, business stakeholders and policy makers consider education to be a key space for engineering and maintaining public spheres, and as such are “central to the production of citizens.”2 Market-sponsored educational reform movements are but one of many everyday experiences that refl ect the workings of techniques of neoliberal governing.3 Under neoliberalism, educational goals, which were once understood as social and/or political, “are re-positioned within the domain of self-governance, often through techniques imposed by private institutions.”4 As Baez and Talburt posit, “techniques seeking to create self-government are the distinguishing feature of liberal governmental rationalities.”5