Economies of Education - 10 journal articles review summary

EDUCATIONAL STUDIES, 50: 167–186, 2014 Copyright C© American Educational Studies Association ISSN: 0013-1946 print / 1532-6993 online DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2014.880927

Economics and Education for Human Flourishing: Wendell Berry and the

Oikonomic Alternative to Neoliberalism

Joseph A. Henderson and David W. Hursh

University of Rochester

Neoliberal ideologies and policies have transformed how we think about the econ- omy, education, and the environment. Economics is presented as objective and quantifiable, best left to distant experts who develop algorithms regarding different monetary relations in our stead. This same kind of thinking—technical, numerical, decontextualized, and ostensibly objective—infiltrates how we think about education and the environment. For example, neoliberal education reform focuses on using test scores and markets as a way to measure and improve learning and teaching. Sim- ilarly, environmental issues are presented as problems to be solved through new technologies and market efficiency. In response, we critique neoliberalism using the philosophy of the agrarian poet and writer Wendell Berry who abhors how neoliberal- ism disconnects humans from one another and the traditions that sustain them in their communities. Rather than neoliberalism’s rootless entrepreneurial individual—homo economicus—we suggest that freedom, instead, resides in one’s ability to flourish in one’s place in the world. Such flourishing cannot occur without reinvigorating the traditions, including Aristotle’s oikonomics, that have allowed people to live sustainably in their social and ecological communities.

We face an economic crisis, but not in the sense that most people think. Economics has been defined by corporate executives, financiers, politicians, and academics to focus on monetary growth as represented by the obsession with corporate profits, stock market reports, and expansion of the Gross National Product. Economics is presented as an objective science where experts derive the meaning of various

Correspondence should be addressed to Joseph A. Henderson, The Margaret Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, University of Rochester, Box 270425, Rochester, NY 14627. E-mail: joseph.henderson@warner.rochester.edu

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statistical reports and develop economic policies. Even more alarming has been the rise over the last several generations of neoliberal economic policies that el- evate profits, markets, and the private sector above all other concerns, including human well-being and environmental sustainability. Neoliberal economic ratio- nalities have come to dominate all that we do while at the same time they are presented to the public as unassailable and inevitable. Consequently, for most people, economics is something best left to the experts even as economic theories and policies impact our families, communities, social institutions and the environ- ment. Therefore, neoliberalism undermines democratic dialogue and community participation as decision-making power shifts from the local and regional scales to the national and global.

In response, we suggest that we all need to engage in economic thinking, but not in the abstract and algorithmic approach described previously. Rather, we want to redefine the economy in the sense that farmer and author Wendell Berry (2012) does:

Not as economics but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s ecosystems and human neighborhoods. This is the economy that the most public and influ- ential economists never talk about, the economy that is the primary vocation and responsibility of every one of us. (37, emphasis in original)

This definition, harking back to Aristotle (1992), refers to household management, and our ability “to define and make, on the terms of thrift and affection, our connections to nature and to one another” (Berry 2012, 20). Berry and Aristotle, as we show, describe economy as central to our relationship with one another and the world, and not, as in neoliberalism, individualistic, reductionist, and rapaciously competitive.

In this article, we show how the narrow definition of economics and the even narrower economic policies of neoliberals have caused not only great harm in how we think about ourselves and our relationship with one another and the natural world, but also to our educational system. Therefore, we begin by describing some of the tenets of neoliberalism, which include the aim of creating competitive free and unregulated markets and reducing government spending to necessities such as national defense and police. By emphasizing competitive markets and all but eliminating social expenditures, neoliberalism radically transforms the nature of the individual and society, elevating the individual over relationships within a community, and evaluates nature in terms of its contribution to economic growth.

We then turn to how neoliberalism has affected the production and outcome of education policies. Over the last several decades, education policies have focused on privatizing education, developing educational markets so that schools compete

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with one another for students and, therefore, limiting community and family deci- sions to choosing between competing schools. Further, decisions over pedagogy and curriculum are shifted away from the local level and toward the national. For example, in the United States curricula and pedagogical decisions are increasingly made by the federal government (for example, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top) and national organizations (for example, the National Governors Associa- tion, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). Although the federal government and foundations may not be technically empowered to determine school curric- ula, they can do so by funding curriculum standards and resources, as the Gates Foundation did in developing the Common Core Standards, or through testing requirements that hold students and teachers accountable, or what Ball (1994) describes as “steering from a distance” (54).

Neoliberalism, by shifting educational policy away from the local level, turn- ing education into a competitive market, and using testing and test scores as a management technique, creates schools where students and teachers rarely focus on the relationship they have with one another and with the human and ecologi- cal community in which they are situated. In response to the neoliberalization of schools and society, we turn to the writings of Berry and Aristotle for insights for how we might return to and build on older, more grounded conceptions of the economy that focus on our relationships with one another and the environment.

FROM ECONOMICS TO OIKONOMICS

How we conceptualize economics impacts not only the way that we think about monetary issues such as the creation of services, goods, wealth, and inequality, but also the quality of our lives and the world around us. Therefore, figuring out how we are to live in the world in a sustainable and just manner requires that we begin to think in terms of oikonomics, which is the process and goal of engaging in dialogue in how to build economic, social, and ecological systems in which humans, other living beings, and the land community flourish.

Such an approach differs from dominant economic theories and research in both its goals and process. From the beginning, modern economic theory focused on how society produces wealth, with the physiocrats arguing that wealth was cre- ated through agricultural production and later Adam Smith (1776/1976) through trade and Karl Marx (1932) through manufacturing. Over the last few decades, capitalism has increasingly created wealth not only through products and services but also through financialization, where wealth is created through financial instru- ments, such as investments, rents, insurance, and loans, including mortgages and derivatives (Krippner 2005).

As the rise of capital created greater economic disparities (Hobsbawm 1975), the poor, women, and people of color contested the growing inequalities and

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demanded that government intervene to restore some semblance of equality and democracy. During the early part of the twentieth century, subaltern groups rallied along with social democratic economic theorists, such as John Maynard Keynes (1936), to implement governmental and economic policies to alleviate the growing inequalities, especially as a result of the Great Depression.

Just as social democratic liberalism gained dominance in the 1930s, neoliberal theory began to take form (Friedman 1952, 1962; Hayek 1944) and began to replace, but not eliminate, social democratic liberalism in the 1980s (Peck 2010). Rather than democracy and equality, neoliberalism promotes producing profits as the central goal. The quest for profits, neoliberals argue, requires that all countries develop free markets, decrease corporate taxes and governmental expenditures, and privatize the remaining public services, all serving to increase funds available for corporations to pursue profits (Tabb 2002). As Harvey (2007) comments:

The fundamental mission of the neoliberal state is to a create a ‘good business climate’ and therefore to optimize conditions for capital accumulation no matter what the consequences for employment or social well-being. This contrasts with the social democratic state that is committed to full employment and the optimization of the well being of all its citizens subject to the condition of maintaining adequate and stable rates of accumulation. (25)

Furthermore, neoliberalism transforms not only the role of the state and the pur- pose of the economy, but also how decisions are made and the nature of democ- racy. No longer is democracy defined as citizens deliberating the nature of the social/common/ecological good and how to achieve it, but rather democracy is de- fined as choosing between the existing products with education no different than any other product. Milton Friedman, a founding neoliberal economist, is quoted by Hirschmann (1970) as stating that “parents could express their views about schools directly, by withdrawing their students from one school and sending them to another, to a much greater extent than is now possible” (16). No importance is given to citizens sharing, reflecting on, and refining their ideas of what kind of world they want to live in or schools they want to learn in.

Although most individuals are left with choosing between what is on offer, increasingly education and environmental policies are decided at national, fed- eral, and international levels where corporate, philanthropic, and political elite have disproportionate monetary and cultural resources to negotiate and imple- ment policies. Consequently, venture philanthropic organizations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation; corporate elites, such as David and Charles Koch and their organizations such as the Americans for Prosperity; and the politically powerful, such as the Obama administration or the National Governors Association, have the economic and political power to fund or promote projects that reflect their vision of the world. Furthermore, because

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they primarily conduct their work out of public view and are generally unelected, they are largely unaccountable to the public.

Neoliberalism transforms the scale at which economic policies are developed—from the local to the national and global, and their purposes—from focusing on equality and quality of life to free markets. In response, we assert Berry’s and Aristotle’s notion of home economy, of oikonomics, that returns us to a broader definition of economics in which, writes Berry (2012), we “define and make, on the terms of thrift and affection, our connections to nature and to one another” (p. 20). We need to conceptualize economics in terms of the rela- tion between the “many human households to the earth’s ecosystems and human neighborhoods” (37), and increase democratic decision making at the local level so that we can understand our role within our human and natural communities.

NEOLIBERALISM

Having provided an introduction to neoliberalism, we turn to giving a brief history of the rise of neoliberalism and its effects on elementary and secondary education in the United States, with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) as an exemplar. We then describe some of the internal and external contradictions of neoliberalism before turning to Berry’s substantial critique and suggestions for where we go from here.

Neoliberalism’s central tenet is that the minimally regulated free market in which individuals make economic decisions acting in their own interests produces the most efficient and economically just system (Harvey 2007). For neoliberals, the smaller the role government plays in society, the greater freedom people have to pursue their own goals. This conception builds on Adam Smith’s (1776/1976) liberal notion (thus, the root term for neo-liberal) of the invisible hand that asserts as individuals seek their own interests, their actions improve the lives of everyone in the community. Free markets, they argue, need little government regulation because they regulate themselves; individuals and corporations that operate reck- lessly will perform poorly or fail, and “spontaneously organizing social and market forces will somehow” serve to restrain corporations (Peck 2010, 22).

The two original centers of neoliberal thought were the Mont Pelerin Soci- ety in Austria with Friedrich Hayek as its leader, and the University of Chicago economics department, with Milton Friedman as the most visible proponent of ne- oliberalism. How they conceptualized neoliberalism is reflected in the titles of their most well-known books. Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom (1944), argues that free- market capitalism is essential for democratic freedom. Government planning and spending by definition limits individual choice and therefore freedom. Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and Free to Choose (Friedman and Friedman 1980), promoted neoliberal capitalism as the equivalent of freedom, although he

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sometimes admitted that the state should play a limited role in protecting people from corporations. For example, in 1951 Friedman wrote:

Neoliberalism proposes that it is competition that will lead the way. . . . The state will police the system, it will establish the conditions favorable to competition and prevent monopoly, it will provide a stable monetary framework, and relieve acute poverty and distress. Citizens will be protected against the state, since there exists a free private market, and the competition will protect them from one another. (Peck 2010, 4)

However, neoliberalism remained a theoretical construct until 1975 when Fried- man and his colleagues and students, the Chicago boys, had the opportunity to put their ideas into practice as they staffed key positions in the administration of Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet who, as Peck (2010) writes “set the country on a path of radical free-market reconstruction.” They immediately “went to war against inflation . . . driving the economy into recession, while at the same time setting about an uninhibited program of trade liberalization, tax reform, privatization, deregulation of foreign investment flows and monetary restraints” (108).

The first instantiations of neoliberal policies in the global north were in the United Kingdom under the Thatcher administration and in the United States with the Reagan administration. For both Thatcher and Reagan, the state existed to implement policies that would benefit corporate growth, so they cut corporate taxes, reduced public expenditures, and intimidated and destroyed labor unions (the test case for Thatcher was the coal miners, for Reagan the air traffic control workers, or PATCO). Although both used the neoliberal state to promote profits, Thatcher (1993), in response to the question of whether society had any obligation for people’s welfare claimed there “was no such thing as society, only individuals” (626–627).

Moreover, neoliberalism has significantly impacted educational policy in the United States at the local, state, and national levels, as we show by using Chicago as a case study of how politicians, in collaboration with the corporate elite and local and national foundations (such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Joyce Foundation), have significantly privatized public education and undermined local control. We then turn to examining recent policies such as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core State Standards initiatives. We show that both Chicago and federal policies are characterized by shifting the scale of decision making away from those who are most affected—students, parents, and teachers—and giving decision-making power to the economically and politically powerful: the corporate elite, politicians, and venture philanthropists via mechanisms of privatization, competition and choice.

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Chicago, which has a long history of corporate influence on the public schools beginning with the Commercial Club of Chicago in the late 1890s (Shipps 2006), has granted significant control over their educational system to the mayor, corpo- rations, and nonprofit foundations. For example, in 2004 the mayor, along with the Commercial Club, announced the introduction of Renaissance 2010 (hereafter Ren 2010), which aimed to privatize education, turn schools into educational markets, and hold students, teachers, and schools accountable through standardized testing. Moreover, the central feature of Ren 2010 was closing sixty of Chicago’s pub- lic schools and opening one hundred new schools: one-third charter schools and one-third contract schools (both run by outside vendors contracted by CPS) and one-third CPS performance schools (public schools subject to Ren 2010 policies and funding).

Besides turning schools over to private vendors and subjecting them to the policies and funding decisions of a board composed of unelected corporate elite, the closed schools were usually located in economically poor neighborhoods of people of color, where the schools and adjacent buildings were bulldozed and the neighborhood rebuilt and gentrified (Lipman 2011; Lipman and Hursh 2007).

Today, almost ten years after the announcement of Ren 2010, parents, students, and teachers have even less democratic input in their schools. Instead, there is an interlocking relationship between the Joyce Foundation, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the Obama administration, Teach for America, and other foundations promoting replacing the publicly administered schools with charter schools (Horn 2013; Lipman 2013). The unelected Chicago Board of Education recently announced that they would close an additional 50 schools and open over 20 new charter schools. It would also lay off 3,000 teachers while paying $1.6 million to bring in Teach for America novices. Another $20 million has been allocated for an academy for principals (Meegan 2013).

Neoliberal discourses and practices are also reflected in federal education poli- cies. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (2001) aims to improve educa- tion by having schools compete with one another for students, assessed through standardized test scores, with low-scoring schools reorganized and partially or completely privatized as they are taken over by education management compa- nies or converted to charter schools. The more recent Race to the Top program, which replaces NCLB in a some states, further shifts control away from the local and state levels as the federal government requires that states lift the cap on the number of charter schools permitted, implement a teacher assessment system in which students’ scores on standardized tests make up the major part of a teacher’s assessment, and adopt the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) that provides teachers with a scripted teacher-proof curriculum, in which one size fits all.

The CCSS initiative reflects the degree to which discussions over what or how we teach has shifted to powerful but unaccountable groups. The efforts to create the CCSS is headed up by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO)

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and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) with funding to develop the standards from the Gates, Walton Family, Mott and Broad Foundations, and school districts and state departments of education funding implementation. Checking the CCSS web site reveals that no names are provided of individuals administering the project, and contacting CCSS leads viewers to the CCSSO and NGAC web sites.

While deciding what and how to teach has significantly shifted to unknown individuals at the national level, students and their families are increasingly po- sitioned as entrepreneurial individuals who are responsible for seeking, based on test scores, the best schools for themselves. As Leitner et al. (2007) explain:

A neoliberal subjectivity has emerged that normalizes the logic of individualism and entrepreneurialism, equating individual freedom with self-interested choices, making individuals responsible for their own well-being, and redefining citizens as consumers and clients. Margaret Thatcher’s notorious ‘there is no alternative’ seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. (1–2)

Neoliberalism has undermined community and deliberative decision making, along with nonmonetary values. Teachers, restricted by standards, standardized testing, and curriculum determined at the state and national levels, have few oppor- tunities to engage students in open-ended and often political questions regarding contemporary and controversial issues like environmental sustainability, for ex- ample. That authority now resides elsewhere. In the same way that neoliberalism undermines teachers, students, families, and community members deliberating educational aims and processes, questions regarding the environment and sustain- ability are increasingly difficult to raise within schools and society.

NEOLIBERALISMS’ CONTRADICTIONS AND FAILURES

However, neoliberalism was, and remains, contested, in part because of its inter- nal and external contradictions. First, although neoliberals claim that government (the state) should play almost no role in society, neoliberals have used the state to promote corporate interests by privatizing formerly public institutions such as uni- versities, schools, and prisons; regulating and attacking workers; and facilitating corporate control over nature (see Castree 2010 and Linzey 2004). Furthermore, the hope that corporations could effectively regulate themselves evaporated during the most recent financial crisis, when it was revealed that banks made unsecured loans and sliced and diced mortgages into suspect derivatives (Crouch 2011). As both Friedman admitted and past-chair of the Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan grudgingly testified before the United States Congress, markets of- ten fail to regulate themselves. Neoliberals desire a minimal state but need the

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state to serve their interests and save them from themselves (Johnson and Kwak 2010).

Second, neoliberal ideology primarily values profit, freedom, and choice. Therefore, things for which no monetary value can be assigned or that restrict individual freedom are slighted, ignored, or omitted from the calculation. Conse- quently, nature can be ignored except for its contribution to economic growth and the planet’s resources treated as if they are infinite. Therefore, questions about how to create a sustainable planet are ignored and issues such as global warming are slighted except for the impact they might have on corporate profits (Speth 2008). Further, neoliberalism assumes what Zencey (2012) calls the infinite planet model, ignoring that we exist within a closed ecological system with finite re- sources. Neoliberalism subverts our ability to develop a sustainable society. As described, corporate CEOs, wealthy philanthropists, and powerful politicians have the power to frame and limit deliberations and choices to what is available in the market.

As Berry and Aristotle describe, economics and the environment are intimately related as economic ideologies shape ecological relationships. However, over the last four decades neoliberalism has become the dominant economic ideology and structure, so dominant as to appear natural. Such normalization serves to hide alternative economic (and thus ecologic) arrangements:

A whole set of propositions is being imposed as self-evident: It is taken for granted that maximum growth, and therefore productivity and competitiveness, are the ul- timate and sole goal of human actions; or that economic forces cannot be resisted. (Bourdieu 1998, 30)

However, it is we, as humans, who create our economic structures and our rela- tionships with the world. Such an acknowledgement means realizing that human decisions might be otherwise and that there are ecological implications of our social and material arrangements. Wendell Berry helps us sort out those impli- cations as he challenges neoliberalism’s privileging of monetary values over all others, and the individual over relationships, while, at the same time, its faith in technology. Berry provides a means for challenging the tenets and processes of neoliberalism by articulating an alternative arrangement based on the wisdom of Aristotle and rooted in the flourishing of local community.

WENDELL BERRY AGAINST NEOLIBERALIZATION

To understand Wendell Berry and his philosophy, the reader should know that, in addition to producing a prodigious body of written work, he has been farming the same plot of 200-year-old Berry family land since 1965 (Peters 2007). Working

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from rural Kentucky, he is a philosopher of place who roots his writing in his experience cultivating the “land community” (Berry 2012, 23). He is perhaps best known for his creative fiction and poetry, but is also known for numerous collections of essays that critique the cultural assumptions and actions of humans in modern society (e.g., Berry 1977, 1992, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2012). A robust excavation of Berry’s work is beyond the scope of this article (see Bonzo and Stevens 2008; Mitchell and Schlueter 2011; and Peters 2007 for a more thorough review and analysis). Although Berry did not have the term available to him for much of his career, and as far as we can tell never uses it, he has been writing a forceful critique of neoliberal ideology for some time. We focus on three themes that Berry has woven through his writing over the years: a critique of the neoliberalism’s faith in technocratic expertise as undergirding progress, a critique of the notion of the autonomous liberated individual, and an embrace of the importance of relationships, of people to one another and to the environment.

Neoliberalism’s Misplaced Faith in Technoscientific Salvation

Berry, who as a farmer lives with the vagaries of weather and disease, understands the limits within which humans live. Consequently, he questions the notion that expert knowledge alone is capable of solving all problems and, indeed, that they are solvable:

If modern science is a religion, then one of its presiding deities must be Sherlock Holmes. To the modern scientist as to the great detective, every mystery is a problem, and every problem can be solved. A mystery can exist only because of human ignorance, and human ignorance is always remediable. (Berry 2001, 27)

Although Berry is not critical of the entire scientific endeavor, he is consistently critical of those who pretend to control nature, including human nature. This ethic of human domination is troubling for Berry primarily because it does not work, as his years of farming evidence:

For example, the technical means that have industrialized agriculture, making it (by very limited standards) more efficient and productive and easy, have also make it more toxic, more violent, and more vulnerable—have made it, in fact, far less dependable if not less predictable than it used to be. (Berry 2001, 11)

This is not a critique of the scientific endeavor per se, but of a creeping scientism at the expense of other, more local and embodied ways of knowing. “We should abandon the idea that this world and our human life in it can be brought by science to some sort of mechanical perfection or predictability” (Berry 2001, 135).

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Yet, we have seen this faith in science throughout the last century of education in the United States as many have aimed to root educational practices within techniques of scientific efficiency (Callahan 1962; Kliebard 2004) in a search for the “one best system” (Tyack 1974). During that time, we have witnessed the increased use of mental measurements such as IQ tests (Gould 1981; Hursh 2008), standards, standardized testing, and scripted lessons, all efforts to control the education process and normalize students (Ball 2013).

The use and misuse of science is especially reflected in the 2001 NCLB that cites a narrow definition of educational science over 100 times and uses the language of scientific evidence and progress to warrant a program of narrowly prescribed educational reforms (Berliner 2002). Similarly, Obama’s more recent Race to the Top program imposes standardized testing at every grade and subject as a means of holding teachers accountable. Most alarmingly, many urban and rural students (i.e., students of color and/or living in poverty) have been subjected to regimented pedagogical approaches (Kozol 2005) that intend for all the students to be learning the same curriculum at the same time in the same way.

Standardized testing and common standards function as technologies of control that are used by external others (the supposed experts) to shape what happens in schools. Berry (1992) states, “as the technological, economic, and political means of exploitation have expanded, communities have been more and more victimized by opportunists outside themselves” (121). For Berry, communities abrogate their authority to outside experts in the name of scientific progress: “The religification and evangelizing of science . . . is now commonplace and is widely accepted or tolerated by people who are not scientists” (2001, 19). By claiming the mantle of technoscientific authority and narrowly defined “data- driven instruction,” neoliberal school reformers have undermined the ability of local communities and local people to effectively shape and govern the education of their children.

The process through which standards, standardized testing, and accountability are used to restrict the what teachers and student do in schools has become a defin- ing characteristic of neoliberal education policy, as local educational institutions are increasingly governed by policies created by unelected representatives, includ- ing corporate executives, philanthropists, state departments of education, and the federal department of education (Ball 1994, 2012; Hursh 2007). By forcing schools to turn governance decisions over to external (and increasingly democratically un- accountable actors), local communities have been systematically disenfranchised from the decision-making processes that historically shaped the schools in their communities. For Berry (2004), this process is particularly troubling, because it removes the responsibility from the people who actually live within the affected communities: “It is wrong for people to be excluded from decisions that affect their lives” (181). Ironically then, neoliberalism makes people less free to author the decisions that shape their lives.

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The Fallacy of Rootless Individualism and the Significance of Communitarian Freedom

Another dominant thread running through the decades of Wendell Berry’s writing is his cultural critique of the dominant autonomous individual metaphor. This imaginary person is supposedly free of the bonds and limits of space, time and local culture. It is this same supposedly liberated individual that classical liberalism seeks to develop, that critical theory attempts to liberate from oppression, and that neoliberalism glorifies in the marketplace. For Berry, the rampant individualism that pervades the larger culture (including its manifestation in recent educational and economic policy logics) severs the bonds between people and the communities on which they depend for survival (Edmundson and Martusewicz 2013). Removing these relational bonds destroys the cultural memory that has shaped a place, and, in turn, the cultural memory of its people, their land, and the relationships that have maintained the community over time. This process is antieducational and anticonservative, for it erodes the knowledge required for people to achieve communal activities:

The general assumption now is that everybody is working in his or her own interest and will continue to do so until checked by somebody whose self-interest is more powerful. That nobody now trusts the politicians or their governments is probably the noisiest of present facts. More quietly, people are withdrawing their trust from the professions, the corporations, the education system, the religious institutions, the medical industry. (Berry 2001, 94)

Neoliberalization processes focused on individual autonomy sever the traditional threads of communal trust that hold together communities, institutions, and ulti- mately the ability for people to actively govern themselves and their communities. It would be ironic (if it was not the intent) that in the name of economic freedom, neoliberal ideologues have actually undercut the ability for governing institutions to function in addressing the vexing problems that we currently face, thereby making us all less free.

By limiting freedom to the narrow confines of market exchange, neoliberals neglect to address conditions of human flourishing as they relate to the communi- ties that sustain them. All of this was foreseen by Berry, who wrote in 1992, “As the emphasis on individual liberty has increased, the liberty and power of most individuals has declined. Most people are now finding that they are free to make very few significant choices” (151). For Berry, freedom is thus not some rootless individualistic characteristic devoid of one’s place in the world. Similarly, John Dewey (1938/1963) wrote, “There can be no greater mistake . . . than to treat freedom as an end in itself” (63). Instead, freedom’s importance resides in the

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relatedness of our activities and to one another. As progressive educator George Dennsion (1969) wrote:

Freedom is not motion in a vacuum, but motion in a continuum. If we want to know what freedom is, we must discover what the continuum is. ‘The principle,’ Dewey remarks, ‘is not what justifies an activity.’ We might say something similar about freedom: It is another name for the fullness and final shape of activities. We experience the activities, not the freedom. (4)

Freedom, then, is relative to one’s ability to flourish in their particular community. Neoliberalism, with its excessive focus on homo economicus, represents a narrow and impoverished conception of humans within larger contexts and is antithetical to such an idea.

Recently, communitarian conceptions of freedom are beginning to challenge the dominance of neoliberal framing (e.g., Alperovitz 2013; Blond 2010; Dionne 2012). However, neoliberal policies that promote individuality undercut these more local and collective projects. For example, in her ethnographic research on climate change denial, environmental sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard (2011) found that the pervasiveness of the individualistic mindset made taking collective action to address climate change in a local community setting increasingly difficult, if not impossible. Relating this work to the United States, she writes “Americans are so immersed in the ideology of individualism that they lack the imagination or knowledge of alternative political means of response” (Norgaard 2011, 192).

Counteracting such conditions requires rolling-back and reversing the dominant large-scale processes and policies that shape the social and material dimensions of people’s lives and control them from a distance. For Berry (2004), such action requires nothing short of reimagining the current incarnation of our economy to move away from global dependency and toward the security provided by local, agrarian1 communities:

Agrarians would insist only that any manufacturing enterprise should be formed and scaled to fit the local landscape, the local ecosystem, and the local community, and that it should be locally owner and employ local people. They would insist, in other words, that the shop or factory owner should not be an outsider, but rather a sharer in the fate of the place and its community. The deciders should have to live with the results of their decisions. (121)

Berry’s philosophy contains helpful starting points for thinking about how we might begin to reclaim the land and communities in ways that could be more sustainable. In the following section, we use Wendell Berry’s writing to contend that a cultural reorientation toward conserving cultural and ecological traditions is a necessary step toward environmental and social sustainability.

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Reviving Oikonomic Relationships

In Book I of The Politics, Aristotle distinguishes between two types of economic arrangements: oikonomia and chrematistike (Aristotle 1992, 1.8, 1256b, 27–34), with the former referring to sustaining use value relative to one’s household economy and the latter referring to maximizing wealth value for its own sake. The ecological economist Herman Daly (2010) distinguishes between these two economic dimensions in their modern form:

Oikonomia is the science or art of efficiently producing, distributing, and maintaining concrete use values for the household and community over the long run. Chrematis- tics is the art of maximizing the accumulation by individuals of abstract exchange value in the form of money in the short run. Although our word ‘economics’ is derived from oikonomia, its present meaning is much closer to chrematistics. (x)

An excessive cultural focus on chrematistike perverts community dynamics, for “the poor become too destitute to participate in the political functions, while the rich in turn have the opportunity to opt out of their communal duties” (Dierksmeier and Pirson 2009, 423). As we have shown, one sees this dynamic at work in the modern United States where, under neoliberal policies, economic, political, and educational inequalities have become exacerbated (Hursh and Martina 2003). Ne- oliberalism, with its ideological imperative that every aspect of human existence subsume to the supposed wisdom of abstract and placeless market rationality, represents an excessive cultural emphasis on the chrematistike dimension of eco- nomics. The cultural move away from oikonomia has exacerbated what Berry (1977) refers to as the unsettling of America as communities have gradually lost the ability to govern themselves and have instead abdicated that responsibility to outsiders.

Via Aristotle’s framing, Wendell Berry can be understood as attempting to pivot the culture away from the destructive aspects of chrematistike and toward oikonomia (Daly 2010; Shiffman 2011). For Berry, and Aristotle before him, human flourishing does not occur from isolated wealth accumulation processes in an attempt to transcend one’s place in the world. Instead, it is necessarily rooted where one lives, in sustaining the use value of one’s household over time based on the wisdom of the past and with an eye toward the future. It is in this cultural stewardship of one’s cultural and environmental place over time that economic and environmental sustainability is then rooted:

The problem of sustainability is simple enough to state. It requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay—what Albert Howard called ‘the Wheel of Life’—should turn continuously in place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted. For this to happen in the stewardship of humans, there must be a cultural cycle, in harmony with the fertility cycle, also continuously turning in

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place. The cultural cycle is an unending conversation between old people and young people, assuring the survival of local memory, which has, as long as it remains local, the greatest practical urgency and value. This is what is meant, and is all that is meant, by ‘sustainability.’ The fertility cycle turns by the law of nature. The cultural cycle turns on affection. (Berry 2012, 23)

Returning to an oikonomic conception of economy would require local actors retaking control of decision-making as it relates to their educational, economic and environmental livelihoods.

None of what we have described here has been inevitable. Neoliberal policies have resulted from a particular set of assumptions about the nature of the world and the human relationship to it. Berry summarizes the current situation thusly:

The land and the people nevertheless have suffered together, as invariably they must. Under the rule of industrial economics, the land, our country, has been pillaged for the enrichment, supposedly, of those humans who have claimed the right to own or exploit it without limit. Of the land-community much has been consumed, much has been wasted, almost nothing has flourished. But this has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone. (2012, 38)

Contesting neoliberalism and supplanting it with more sustainable modes of ex- istence would then involve resisting this sense of aloneness. Rejecting neoliber- alism’s atomism implies building new and different educational, economic and environmental relationships. Recent research in sustainable governance (Dietz, Ostrom, and Stern 2003; Ostrom 1990, 2009) shows that smaller communities are able to achieve sustainability when the rules governing resource use are tied to local conditions and local citizens have ownership in their creation and mainte- nance over time. These innovations are often stifled because current markets are artificially propped up to favor politically powerful corporations and institutions. Rolling back their structural advantages would restore a more egalitarian level of competition to markets and would work to stimulate the growth of locally sustainable communities. Further, it would cripple neoliberal capture on policy- making and return governance responsibilities to those who actually live in the communities.

Emphasizing less complex markets that empower rather than dominate individ- uals, we can begin to think about policies that reorient local economies within the larger global economic structure. When contrasted against the current neoliberal project, such an undertaking would be a fundamentally conservative endeavor, for it would reorient individuals back toward the traditions that once shaped their communities. Such change would be resisted, for it directly threatens established neoliberal power structures. Reformers and educators working within these al- ternative models need to be aware of this reality and consider the implications.

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Regardless, the failure of neoliberal policies on a number of fronts will continue apace. Changing society via constructing alternative models in the face of such failures is necessary if we are to sustain resources and communities for future generations.

Some immediate actions would begin to deal with a complex economic system that is creating such ecological and social devastation. At the local level, individu- als can resist larger market forces by subverting them entirely through the creation of local-scale economies and ownership cooperatives. We are already beginning to see this in the United States with the dramatic increase in local food networks and the reinvigoration of farmers markets (Alperovitz 2013). By decoupling at least part of an individual’s capital from the global economy, one is able to create and invest in local businesses that directly support their communities. By sourcing food locally, for example, we would move closer to Berry’s vision of a smaller-scale, oikonomic economy. For another environmental writer, Bill McKibben (2007), this is a wise move given future climatic trends:

In a changed world, comfort will come less from ownership than from membership. If you’re a functioning part of a community that can meet at least some of its needs—for food, for energy, for companionship, for entertainment, for succor—then you’re more secure. (120)

No one solution would be easily generalizable from a policy perspective, and instead each ecological region or community would determine what works and educate future generations accordingly. This would require a citizenry capable of understanding their place in the world at multiple levels, and education could facilitate such an understanding. The educational and environmental philosopher, Randall Curren (2009), argues that such an education must include teaching chil- dren how to think for themselves, must ground them in the realities of their local environments, and also prepare them for global cooperation. It would then not make sense to standardize educational curriculum or practices as in the current neoliberal reforms, as each unique ecosystem will require a unique set of cultural skills and traditions to adapt to the changing world. By focusing education on issues relevant to social, economic, and ecological citizenship, learners would be able to understand the costs associated with specific individual and community ac- tions. Sustainability occurs at multiple scales, so an education of future citizenship should account for this diversity of experiences (McKenzie 2012).

RETURNING HOME FOR THE FUTURE

Wendell Berry’s philosophy can help us understand both the causes of, and solu- tions to, problems of sustainability and education within particular communities.

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“Berry’s simple advice to all caring, do-gooders is to root themselves in their cho- sen places, repairing, regenerating, and healing their households and communities” (Prakash 1994, 145). Rather than assuming the decontextualized universals that neoliberal ideology takes for granted and promotes, we are to instead find freedom in the communities and ecosystems that provide our sustenance, and ultimately, our flourishing.

Such a transition will not be easy, especially given our observation at the outset that most people avoid engaging in thinking about economics. When they do, they focus on the prevalent economic theories that concentrate on corporate growth, the stock market, and productivity, and slight environmental externalities. However, because we live on a finite planet in which our individual actions affect other humans and both our local and global environment, we need to reconceptualize economics, education, and the environment around us, and we cannot continue to neglect the state of our human household within nature. Berry’s notions of relatedness to one another and to the earth provide a starting place.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the CNY Humanities Corridor Research Workshop in Philosophy of Education at Syracuse University in August 2012 and at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA, USA in April 2013. We thank participants for helpful feedback in planning the current version. Specific thanks to Ken Strike, Randall Curren and Mark Kissling for their early comments.

Note

1. Berry uses the term agrarian to refer to a locally focused food-based economy. Such economies are not necessarily rural in nature, as Berry (2012) acknowledges.

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