When learning becomes a fetish: the pledge, turn and prestige of magic tricks

Abstract

It is our contention that the process of higher education could be read as a commodity and in both Marxian and Freudian assumptions, a fetish. Instrumental in this discussion are; Marx's theorising of the commodity fetish (1867) that deceives by conflating the distinction between use and exchange value, and Freud's (1927) re-visiting of his theory of fetishism, where he considers the fetish in the context of dealing with separation and loss in everyday life. This paper highlights how the consequence of fetishised behaviour has led to violent outcomes, such as the policy decision to introduce a 'Teaching Excellence Framework' (TEF). We argue that the TEF may bring about the death of learning in HE and diminish the role of academic staff. Nevertheless, influenced by Winnicott, Cixous and Biesta, we offer a more hopeful 'Teaching that is Good Enough Framework'.

Digging our own grave: A Marxian consideration of formal education as a destructive enterprise

“…That education has become a commodity is not a particularly new idea. Ivan Illich (1971), Stephen Ball (2018) and myself and my colleagues (Bainbridge et al 2018) have all made similar claims. As a Marxian dialectic approach 11 would predict, the influence of commodification on thinking has, in turn, had considerable influence on educational systems around the world.…”

“…This article now moves on not only to highlight how capitalist market-driven principles alienate the learner from learning, but also to provide an alternative view that seeks to reject marketised neoliberal incursions into education policy. Using Marx’s own metaphor, this article seeks to expose capitalism’s magic trick that hides use value behind exchange value and accumulation of resources (for more details on “magic tricks” in higher education, see Bainbridge et al 2018 ).…”

“…Rather, it has exposed weaknesses and deceit already inherent within the education system. In Bainbridge et al ( 2018 ) we make the provocative claim that neoliberal practices have begun to bring about the death of human learning, tamed and controlled as it is by external managers and policymakers. Rather than deal with the difficult-to-measure use value of “subjectified” learning, education has been sanitised into a series of exchange value measures.…”

The rhetoric of the UK higher education Teaching Excellence Framework: a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of TEF2 provider statements

“…Barkas et al, 2017;Gunn, 2018;Royal Statistical Society, 2019) expressed doubts about the accuracy of the TEF as a measure of teaching quality and noted the inherent bias towards high status providers (Gillard, 2018). Other authors (Canning, 2017;Bainbridge, Gaitanidis and Hoult, 2018;O'Leary and Wood, 2018) directed criticism at the ideology behind the TEF: they see the TEF as a neoliberal project which reflects only managerial notions of teaching quality and is divorced from real teaching.…”

Education then and now: making the case for ecol-agogy

“…The internal logic of which will subsequently continue to confound human functioning. Thus resulting in seductive defenses that contribute to a micro and macro avoidance of the anxiety and risk that education represents (Bainbridge, Gaitanidis and Hoult, 2017). For example, learners can be reluctant to engage with intellectual challenge, while policy makers often seek to offer conceptions of the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment that avoid the complex nature of human teaching and learning.…”