Fanfare for the Common Good – The New Republic

Meadow sees the breakdown of any genuine sense of community among evangelicals as representative of the breakdown of community life all across America, at every level. For this he blames the Lockean philosophical tradition, with its emphasis on property rights and self-sovereignty, to which he opposes an ethic of solidarity with fellow citizens. But the authors of other books in my collection have found the source of contemporary political disorder in a more recent and insidious doctrine, that of neoliberalism, with its scorn of government and worship of private markets.

In Teacher Education Policies in the United States, a chapter in the book Navigating the Common Good in Teacher Education Policy, Barbara Bales explains that over a 25-year period beginning in 1992, the federal government systematically usurped oversight of teacher training from local school districts around the country and concentrated it at the federal level. The most jarring transition commenced in 2001, with the advent of the George W. Bush administration and the punitive neoliberal policies that characterized the No Child Left Behind Act and its audit-based accounting system. Bales quotes from a paper by education professor Ken Zeichner, who asserted that teachers had become instruments to further the spread of global capitalism in its current forms and lend support to elements of the current system such as free markets and trade agreements, economic rationalism, increased surveillance of workers, and greater privatization of public services. In his book For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America, Charles Dorn, a professor of education at Bowdoin College, lambastes American universities for the corporatization of higher education, which he holds responsible for a crisis that includes soaring tuition costs, limited student learning, the decline of the humanities, increasing class stratification, and the unmaking of the public university. In From Commodification to the Common Good: Reconstructing Science, Technology, and Society, philosopher of science Hans Radder notes that since the commodification (i.e., patenting) of academic research, which he vehemently opposes, is part of a widespread pattern of profound social and economic development (in particular the rise of neoliberal doctrines and politics), there is no easy answer to the question of whether it can be stopped. Still, he says, the recent, more widely acknowledged criticisms of neoliberalism may be a sign of forthcoming change.

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Fanfare for the Common Good - The New Republic