The national faces of neoliberalism in education in rich and developing countries.

This symposium critically examines neoliberal capitalist globalization policies relating to education in five different countries, three in the Developing World, and two in The Rich World- Chile, Brazil, Pakistan, England and Wales, and Scotland. These present different models of neoliberal education “reform” developments. There are differences, but there are important global similarities in education policy developments. The papers ask a series of important questions, such as: “What neoliberal changes have taken place in education (e.g., privatization, vouchers, marketization, commercialization, school fees, new brutalist public managerialism, and the assault on critical thought, and on the comprehensive/ common school principles and on democratic control of schools)?” The papers examine four types of impacts: on (1) equality, equal opportunities and access to schooling and education (as experienced by groups differentiated by social class, race/ethnicity/language, gender, rural/urban location); (2) democracy/ democratic control of schools and education; (3) critical thinking, and analytical skills among students; (4) the rights/pay and condition of education workers- in particular those in private sector schools and universities in spaces vacated by state provision. This symposium comprises papers written to contest the legitimacy of neoliberalising government policy and its subordination to and participation in the neoliberal project of global capital, a project that Harvey (2005) calls “the class war from above” —the diversion and appropriation of welfare funding and wages into the pockets of a small minority of the superrich, `the masters of the universe’, the capitalist class. This ‘diversion of wealth and increasing differentiation in (e.g. education) p0rovision, have, of course, been thrust into the public limelight by the current crisis of capitalism and exposes of bankers’ and CEOs’ massive pay, pensions and benefits packages. The current crisis of capital accumulation, as predicted by Marx & Engels (1977 [1847]), will have impacts such as reductions in public expenditure (the social wage, including public/ state educational provision) as well as reductions in the actual wage of workers. The current, it is argued, will lead to the intensification of the extraction of surplus value, the progressing global immiseration of workers, by increasing inequalities in education provision, and the intensification of control of populations by the ideological and repressive state apparatuses (such as schools, vocational education and universities) indentified and analysed by Althusser (Althusser, 1971; Hill, 2004; Greaves, Hill and Maisuria, 2007). The symposium examines the current and possible future states of public/ state education.