Economics and Education for Human Flourishing: Wendell Berry and the Oikonomic Alternative to Neoliberalism

Abstract

Neoliberal ideologies and policies have transformed how we think about the economy, education, and the environment. Economics is presented as objective and quantifiable, best left to distant experts who develop algorithms regarding different monetary relations in our stead. This same kind of thinking—technical, numerical, decontextualized, and ostensibly objective—infiltrates how we think about education and the environment. For example, neoliberal education reform focuses on using test scores and markets as a way to measure and improve learning and teaching. Similarly, environmental issues are presented as problems to be solved through new technologies and market efficiency. In response, we critique neoliberalism using the philosophy of the agrarian poet and writer Wendell Berry who abhors how neoliberalism disconnects humans from one another and the traditions that sustain them in their communities. Rather than neoliberalism's rootless entrepreneurial individual—homo economicus—we suggest that freedom, instead, resides in one's ability to flourish in one's place in the world. Such flourishing cannot occur without reinvigorating the traditions, including Aristotle's oikonomics, that have allowed people to live sustainably in their social and ecological communities.