Mapping the Contours of Neoliberal Educational Restructuring: A Review of Recent Neo‐Marxist Studies of Education and Racial Capitalist Considerations

Abstract

AbstractIn this article Clayton Pierce reviews three books representative of the recent neo‐Marxist literature on education: David Blacker's The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, John Marsh's Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way out of Inequality, and Pauline Lipman's The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City. His analysis of these books focuses on how each author remains consistent or advances traditional Marxist interpretations of the role of education in capitalist society. In addition, he puts the arguments of each author into conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois's analysis of schooling in a racial capitalist society — what he called caste education — as a way to generate discussion around some of the inherent limitations of Marxist studies of education. Here, Pierce is particularly concerned with the ability of neo‐Marxist analyses of the neoliberal restructuring of education to articulate how white supremacy is preserved even in revolutionary critiques of capitalist schooling.