Neoliberalism, Education and the Ethics of Extinction

Abstract

This paper addresses the complex relationships between neoliberalism, the climate crisis and education. It is a consideration of education as it is, and as it might be otherwise. It is argued that neoliberalism - as a set of social and economic relations; a framework of expectations and legitimations; a form of government; an ethical system; a particular version of human nature; and a set of specific subjectivities – is ‘responsible’ in many ways for the climate crisis and that as an ethical system it forebodes our extinction as a species. Neoliberalism extolls the virtues of individual autonomy and human exceptionalism. It does not simply create an ethical system that posits the exploitation of nature as ‘natural’ but the ideal of the fundamentally self-interested individual curtails any collective transformation of the resulting conditions of existence.  The human is set over and against nature. Nature is there to be tamed, made obedient and exploited.  Furthermore, the paper makes the argument that education in its current iteration – as schooling – is complicit with neoliberalism in the production of unsustainable subjects. Despite decades of a discourse of and policies for sustainability education the modern school is still producing subjects who view the world, ‘their’ world, as one of growth and progress, and see happiness as founded on material acquisition, mobility, consumption and waste. That is, schools produce ‘unsustainable subjects’ – quintessentially economistic, self-interested subjects. Over and against this the paper adumbrates a ‘different’ education that rests on and reproduces an ethics of life continuance and an ecological subjectivity. An ecological education that begins from the basis of respect for our place in the world and the rights of others who are also there. This is an open field of learning oriented to survival and collective flourishing which fosters the care of the self, of others and of the planet. This rests on a fostering of ethical learners with a healthy suspicion of the present, while at the same time being able to acknowledge their own fallibility. It necessitates ethical activity that re-politicises all those aspects of our everyday life that are related to the ‘petro-economy’; and the questioning of common-sense; and experimentation with new ways of living that begin from the care of the self, of others and the environment, opening the possibility of new and better ways of life in common; based upon a post-human intelligence that looks toward a new and different horizon. That is, a very emotional intelligence that is different from but connected to reason or rational intelligence and that is invested with moral emotions, such as empathy and care. Rather than a site of discipline education might become a range of opportunities and invitations for critique, and a transformative and ethopoietic pedagogy. This is not simply a matter of what to do but crucially, what to be.