Reconsidering Common Sense: Vico and Education

Abstract

At the institutional level, government policy dominates public schooling. As such, there are certain themes that we can isolate as common to the operation of schools. This essay isolates the common theme of neoliberalism, which is embedded in policy and, therefore, influential to practice in schools. The extent to which neoliberal maxims operate as the assumptions of educational policy points to the great success neoliberal ideologues and the institutions that house them have had in the recent past. The notion of schools and their personnel as embodiments of the market is so deeply entrenched in the text of current policy and in the practices of testing and pedagogical techniques that its metaphoricity has become banal and has cemented into a sort of onto–teleological truism. Why does a person go to school? In order to get a good job. What is the purpose of schools in our society? To train our future workforce. In response to this relatively recent conception of schooling, one that stretches well beyond United States borders, a cottage industry of sorts has arisen that emphasizes the use of critical analysis to combat what its proponents view as the harmful effects of neoliberalism in education. Authors of this strain are quick to point out the faulty reasoning behind the analogy of markets and schools. For instance, to understand education as a commodity to be delivered to student– consumers forecloses other, more important relationships that teachers can foster with students, such as establishing a community of fellow contributors to the processes of education and citizenship.