Towards a critique of neoliberal education - Interview with Christian Laval

Abstract

Christian Laval, French sociologist and professor at the University of Paris or Nanterre La Défense (Paris X), argues that "the only real emancipatory modernity relays in the autonomy of education in relation to the power of capital". In an interview granted in January 2020, during a huge strike by workers against a pension “reform”, but also during the great mobilizations against “reforms” of high school and of the academic research in France, the author articulates the task of examining the configuration the “new capitalist school” with a policy proposal that denies the future and the “modernization” of education imprisoned by competition. As the neoliberal way of life, capitalist competition finds in educational system a fundamental support, either through the formation of subjectivity, or in the objectivity of the new configuration of “marketization” e “commodification” of education. Both naturalize a competition and create a new disposition between individuals and the State through education. Thus, in the interview with the author, we approached the relationship between the change in the State form and in the function of education that no longer aim the formation of an individual with rights, but to reduces each individual into a "capital manager of himself".