Abstract:
What would education look like if every graduate were guaranteed a job, paying a living wage? This is a political possibility in most countries in the world today (van Tol, 2024); Modern Monetary Theory demonstrates that, provided a country has sovereignty over its currency, which most now do, it faces no nominal constraints on spending and can always choose to guarantee jobs and maintain full employment (Wray, 2015). Yet a key policy of neoliberalism has been just the opposite: to pursue and maintain levels of un- and underemployment (Mitchell & Fazi, 2017). Perhaps the greatest irony of our time is that these two events were roughly concurrent: just as governments gained sovereignty over their currencies in the 1970s, providing them with new means to maintain full employment, neoliberal policies began targeting rates of un-employment.
This presentation examines this contradiction and argues that the impact of neoliberal unemployment policies on education have been both unnecessary and detrimental, bending the purpose of education toward job-training and conferring employability skills, as though unemployment were an educational problem, rather than a political economic one. With reference to history, it also imagines what education might look like if governments were to use their currency sovereignty to pursue full employment anew. A central contention is that a return to full employment would enable other purposes of education to rise to the fore, in particular the pursuit of active and informed citizenship, which has been an Australian educational policy goal for over three decades, and is now much needed to address our interrelated social and ecological crises.
References
Mitchell, W., & Fazi, T. (2017). Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World. Pluto Press.
van Tol, J. (2024). Education and full employment in the Capitalocene: Political possibilities, ecological imperatives. The Journal of Environmental Education, 55(2), 180-190. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2023.2259838
Wray, L. R. (2015). Modern Money Theory: A primer on macroeconomics for sovereign monetary systems (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.
This presentation examines this contradiction and argues that the impact of neoliberal unemployment policies on education have been both unnecessary and detrimental, bending the purpose of education toward job-training and conferring employability skills, as though unemployment were an educational problem, rather than a political economic one. With reference to history, it also imagines what education might look like if governments were to use their currency sovereignty to pursue full employment anew. A central contention is that a return to full employment would enable other purposes of education to rise to the fore, in particular the pursuit of active and informed citizenship, which has been an Australian educational policy goal for over three decades, and is now much needed to address our interrelated social and ecological crises.
References
Mitchell, W., & Fazi, T. (2017). Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World. Pluto Press.
van Tol, J. (2024). Education and full employment in the Capitalocene: Political possibilities, ecological imperatives. The Journal of Environmental Education, 55(2), 180-190. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2023.2259838
Wray, L. R. (2015). Modern Money Theory: A primer on macroeconomics for sovereign monetary systems (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.