Kidnapping Public Schooling: Perversion and Normalization of the Discursive Bases within the Epicenter of New Right Educational Policies

Abstract

Public schooling has been kidnapped. The author examines how this happened – since we all know very well who did it. How did public schooling become a hostage of world's neo-rightist political processes? This article attempts to unveil some of those strategies that underpin the very core of the neo-rightist current triumphalistic posture. To understand the way neo-rightist political processes encompassed public schooling at such a frightening pace it is necessary to situate neoliberal policies based on what has been called the third hegemony of historical capitalism. Also it is necessary to be aware of (a) how particular key concepts and practices have been cleverly and gradually twisted and perverted, positively hijacked from the social sphere, and coined within an economic flavoured materiality, and (b) how the new rightist triumphalism is deeply enmeshed within the politics of the common sense and the role that the media plays in building a particular commonsensical framework. The article ends by taking the Portuguese reality as an example, not only denouncing the poor record of some of the graduate and teaching education courses within the universities and colleges, but stating the need to rescue democracy by reinventing it.