Make education institutions contributors to peace, not war

Brendan O’Malley  03 November 2023

For the past few weeks our news bulletins have been filled with distressing images of victims from both sides in Israel and Palestine, and warnings of a humanitarian catastrophe.

This comes on top of the ongoing tragedy of war in Ukraine and the conflict in Sudan.

I was invited to speak at the Magna Charta Observatory conference on ‘Universities and reconstruction of cities: the role of research and education’, held in Lodz, Poland, on 23-25 October.

The subject of this talk could not have been more timely. But current events also show that it could not be more challenging either.

But what do we mean by ‘reconstruction’ or indeed by ‘conflict’? Is reconstruction about removing rubble, rebuilding homes, schools, universities and civilian infrastructure?

Conflict can take many forms and damage to infrastructure is only one of many impacts. Students drop, teachers leave, families flee the area, education may be closed down indefinitely, education investment shelved for years.

There is fear, despondency and the psycho-social trauma affecting many individuals, sometimes for years.

Beyond that, the deep, bitter divisions in society are entrenched by war.

As Graca Michel wrote: “The destruction of educational infrastructure represents one of the greatest developmental setbacks for countries affected by conflict.” It hinders the ability of societies to recover after the war.

Mostly today, conflicts are between factions within national boundaries, not war across borders and when the fighting is over and the dead are counted, we can expect the divisions to be deeper than ever, and reconciliation a distant dream.

Even if we resurrect all the buildings levelled by bombings, rebuild all the walls smashed by rockets, fill every shell hole, smooth over every pockmark gouged by shrapnel, it may only count as putting a sticking plaster over the wounds of history instead of addressing the causes of the conflict that brought destruction and death.

Without real peace, anything you rebuild can be destroyed again, whether immediately if conflict is still simmering, or later as conflict resurfaces.

Although I am editor-in-chief of University World News, for this talk I am drawing not just on our articles by journalists and academic experts but on my many years of research leading the first three global studies on Education under Attack – as a consultant for UNESCO and later for a coalition of UN and other international NGOs, the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA).

Education under Attack is now a regular global report on targeted military and political violence against education institutions, students, teachers, academics and other personnel.

It is about bombings, assassinations, forced disappearances, illegal imprisonment and kidnappings, mostly in countries embroiled in conflict or authoritarianism – and mostly carried out by state armed forces and non-state armed groups.

Sometimes education buildings are attacked because they are perceived as being used as a camp or an operating base or a place for weapons storage for opposing troops.

An example of this is Israeli air strikes blowing up the buildings of the Islamic University of Gaza – a member of many international university networks – only a fortnight ago, alleging that it was being used for political and military purposes.

During my research (2006-14), I visited conflict zones, talked to leaders of schools and universities where institutions had been bombed, teachers or academics had been shot or blown up and education trade unionists had faced death threats or imprisonment – places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand, and the West Bank and Gaza.

I have also separately reported from conflicts and conflict-affected countries including Kosovo, Northern Ireland and Cyprus.

For the Education under Attack reports, we researched facts about the extent and nature of attacks, but we also gathered information about motives and impact. And we devised recommendations for governments, and education stakeholders on how to prevent education institutions, students and teachers or academics being targeted.

These reports were used to galvanise UN agencies and INGOs (international non-governmental organisations) to put attacks on education as a distinct item on their agenda and to be addressed through their programmes. They also influenced the work of the UN Security Council in making attacks on schools a higher priority in its monitoring and reporting and listing of parties involved in grave violations against children in armed conflict.

In follow-up projects we went out to conflict-affected countries such as Pakistan and the Philippines to pilot training guidance on how to protect education from attack.

Initially there was a lot of focus on schools and later we also developed a strong focus on higher education – with the Scholars at Risk network becoming a key partner.

Universities are the key providers of higher education so are concerned about how and why they are being targeted, but attacks on schools also matter to them, since not only do the schools provide their pipeline of potential students but universities train school teachers and university education researchers help to shape education policy and practice.

For schools and universities, I believe there are two key aspects of reconstruction after conflict. One is reconstruction of their own facilities and educational communities, the other is their role in the reconstruction of society around them and the establishment of lasting peace.

For both their own safety and as key education stakeholders, and as anchor institutions in their community or city, universities have a key role to play in the prevention or avoidance of attacks specifically targeting education and also resilience in the face of attacks. But they also have an important role to play in providing research, analysis and moral leadership on conflict throughout wider society.

Note that UN Sustainable Goal 16 is about the promotion of peace, inclusive societies with justice for all and accountable, inclusive institutions.

People are often not aware of the scale of the problem of targeted attacks on education worldwide. Here are some global figures from Education under Attack 2022 (GCPEA).

Global figures on attacks on education

2022: More than 3,000 attacks on education were identified in 2022, a 17 percent increase over the previous year, according to GCPEA.

Almost one-third of all attacks took place in just three countries: Ukraine, Myanmar, and Burkina Faso, with the war in Ukraine accounting for the majority.

2021-2022 More than 580 university students or personnel were injured, abducted, or killed worldwide, as a result of attacks on higher education, and another 1,450 were detained, arrested, or convicted. 80 attacks on higher education facilities (Education under Attack 2022).

2022-2023: Afghanistan denies higher education to all women.

Heavily affected countries

Among the countries most heavily affected by attacks over the years are:

2003-2008 Iraq 31,598 attacks on schools and universities, including 259 academics assassinated, 72 abducted and 174 held in detention (Education under Attack 2010).

2008-9 Gaza, in a three-week Israeli military operation 300 kindergarten, school and university buildings damaged (Education under Attack 2010).

2015: Kenya 142 students killed, 79 injured in Al-Shabaab attack on Garissa University College, others taken hostage (Education under Attack 2018).

February 2022-February 2023: 2,638 schools damaged, 437 destroyed in Ukraine; and 57 higher education institutions damaged, six destroyed, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Science and Education.

Attacks on HE and research freedoms

In higher education the methods of attack include all the physical attacks and threats to life mentioned above.

But they also include curbs on academic freedom and university autonomy. This can mean anything from banning people from attending international conferences and withdrawal of passports, to mass dismissals, unlawful detention without trial, imprisonment, torture and death sentences. And constant pressures on individuals to self-censor or openly support arguments they do not agree with.

These are methods used by anti-democratic, authoritarian or military governments who want to stymy open debate, clamp down on critical thought, and close down the space for alternative ideas to emerge.

Authoritarian governments will frequently enforce a restricted curriculum, banning certain subjects from being taught and banning certain topics from being researched or certain findings being published.

We see these methods used in very different situations all around the world, from Afghanistan, to Hungary, and Russia but also increasingly under right-wing governments in democratic countries, including certain states in the United States – witness the latest raft of measures restricting higher education passed in Florida, including the banning of funding for university diversity, equity and inclusion programmes.

In some states the national president has seized control of appointing university presidents – as did President Bolsonaro in Brazil, and President Erdogan in Turkey – instantly raising the pressure on universities to toe the government’s line.

The impact of threats to higher education was captured in 2006 by then UNESCO director general Koichiro Matsuura’s comment on the attacks on academics in Iraq: “By targeting those who hold the keys of Iraq's reconstruction and development, the perpetrators of this violence are jeopardising the future of Iraq and of democracy.”

Measures protecting education

The Education under Attack research showed that if you want to reduce the impact of attack and enable education to contribute fully to peace and development, there are broadly two approaches you can take.

The first is to improve protection and resilience in the face of attacks.

Protection measures can include everything from reinforcing walls, changing roofing materials to less flammable substances, ensuring all rooms have two exits to provide escape routes, and providing armed guards or military escorts.

They can include increasing deterrence in law by strengthening national and international law on attacks on education.

Or ending military use, which makes institutions a target. Even having military protection can make it a more likely target.

Or negotiating between armed parties to conflict to treat education institutions as safe spaces not to be used militarily and not to be attacked.

To date 118 states have signed up to a Safe Schools Declaration which commits states and other parties to measures to protect schools and universities from attack, including preventing use of education facilities for military purposes.

Mario Novelli and Ervjola Selenica, in an essay for Education under Attack 2014, underlined that a key step to defending higher education is to strengthen university autonomy and academic freedom.

Improving resilience

Resilience measures include changing location or switching to online provision, removing the institution as a target. A similar tactic can be used to help threatened students and academics.

Two good examples concerning institutions are two initiatives supported by the Open Society University Network funded by George Soros.

As Nathan M Greenfield has reported for University World News, the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) had 1,000 students enrolled, half of them women, when the Taliban seized power in August 2021. Before government control of Afghanistan evaporated a relocation to Qatar was negotiated and a virtual university set up.

Last fall, AUAF welcomed 100 students in person to Education City, Qatar but of course most of its students have not been able to get out of Afghanistan so the university, supported by Bard College in the US, is offering an online dual programme set by the two universities. In this way, in the words of its president, Ian Bickford, AUAF is keeping open a “lifeline to the outside world” for its students.

Another example is Smolny College, which was the only liberal arts and science institution in Russia, situated within St Petersburg University, as a result of the university’s ties with Bard College. It inspired many other institutions to adopt teaching and curricular practices that it pioneered in partnership with Bard.

Two years ago Russia’s prosecutor general’s office declared Bard an ‘undesirable foreign organisation’ and a threat to the Russian constitutional order and criminalised contact with it. Smolny now survives as the Smolny Without Borders Project, an online project launched by Smolny staff, to give an opportunity for students from Smolny College and everyone else disrupted by war in Ukraine to continue their studies, albeit operating on a small scale with a limited number of programmes.

Scholar rescue schemes, such as those of Scholars at Risk and the Scholar Rescue Fund in the US and CARA in the UK play a key role in supporting scholars both via international solidarity campaigns – to raise the political cost of continuing the threats – and by helping to facilitate temporary posts abroad to keep threatened scholars working in an academic role but in a safer place.

The challenge for scholar schemes like this is how best to provide support without creating a brain drain. Is there some commitment from scholars to returning to their country – and, or incentives – to help rebuild it once conditions allow?

How education can contribute to conflict

We must also think about whether education itself is contributing to conflict and how we turn that around so that education becomes a driver for peace.

Many education institutions are attacked because they or the education system represent a form of education provision perceived as imposing alien culture, religion, language or values and, or discriminating against a particular ethnic or other minority group.

For example, in 2014 we reported the example of the school system in the insurgency in southern Thailand that began in 2004, in which three of the four provinces were ethnic Malay Muslim in a country that was 90% Thai Buddhist. Since 2005 there had been frequent incidents of school teachers and personnel being assassinated, sometimes in class in front of their students; and a number of schools were being attacked each year.

The authorities first responded with military measures, posting guards and military patrols until they realised that enabled rebels to hit two targets with one detonation, schools and teachers along with enemy soldiers.

It took years for them to accept that the policy of using schools as a tool of assimilation was part of the problem. They were banning Islamic schools, Muslim attire, Muslim names and the Muslim dialect and the teaching of local Muslim history; and they were imposing Thai Buddhist teachers and Thai national history.

Eventually an agreement to hire local Muslim teachers, create a sixth day of school per week to allow for Islamic studies and teaching Malay and the local language helped reduce the sense of education imposing an alien culture.

Mahidol University played a positive role in this process of reaching a compromise by running an action research programme designed to help Patani-Malay speakers in school retain their identity but also achieve a Thai national identity. They did this by using Malay in the first two years of schooling followed by Thai.

The importance of understanding motives

What this example and others we found show is, first, that if you want to prevent education being attacked – which can also mean if you want it to be available to play a key role in reconstruction – you first need to understand not just the methods but the motives of the attackers.

Second, you can prevent attacks or conflict in different practical ways, including defence and deterrence, but you can only build lasting peace if you address the motives and causes of violence, which usually involves addressing deeply held grievances such as systemically unequal or unfair treatment.

Third, before you try to contribute to building peace or to prevent attacks on education you should evaluate with an open mind whether and how your own institution might be contributing to conflict yourselves. You might be surprised at what you discover when you do.

How education can contribute to peace

Across education in general there are certain key factors that must be addressed by policy-makers and education authorities and institutions to prevent education contributing to conflict. These include unequal access to provision and resources, biases in the curriculum, discrimination in access and in appointments of teachers and academics and in appointments to senior posts.

Study places and resources must be allocated fairly and transparently, using objective criteria to ensure progress towards good quality lifelong education for all.

This may require extra investment in education for groups neglected in the past, for instance if their secondary education unfairly lacks investment they may not be passing university entry exams to get to tertiary level.

But also, education content and methods of teaching and learning must be adapted to promote peace, mutual respect and understanding, human rights and responsible citizenship. As the series of handbooks Protecting Education in Countries Affected by Conflict (which I co-wrote) published in 2012 by the Global Education Cluster says policies, curricula, textbooks and methods of learning need to be adjusted to achieve these aims.

How you approach contested history, flawed versions of which are a barrier to understanding and inflame desire for conflict, is a major challenge. Part of the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for instance, is the continuing narrative in many Russian texts of the notion that Ukraine is not a real country, and does not have a legitimate separate identity.

Which language is the medium of instruction or perhaps of admission test is another issue of contention, potentially disadvantaging whole sections of the population in a muti-ethnic country.

In some conflicts these issues may need to be worked out before or as part of peace agreements.

Universities can have an important role in providing the research into understanding conflict and understanding particular conflicts to aid the search for compromises and solutions. International research can help encourage intercultural dialogue and understanding.

To echo the words of Sara Clarke-Habibi in an article for University World News (but put them in the current context of a protracted war in Ukraine and an explosive situation in Israel and Palestine with so many civilian lives at risk): university leaders can use this moment to reflect on how their institution can contribute proactively to the reduction of inequalities, frustration, radicalisation and violence in society.

Perhaps they can begin by considering “how they can better tailor the education and training they provide to contribute to individual and societal resilience, conflict transformation, sustainable development and socially just peace”.

This may mean, for instance, not confining peacebuilding to a particular discipline or department but taking a whole-institution approach, adopting conflict sensitive policies and integrating peacebuilding values, skills and competences across disciplines.

It also requires universities to work in partnership with communities to raise awareness, set peacebuilding agendas and develop capacities for societal change.

Brendan O’Malley is editor-in-chief of University World News. This is an edited version of a keynote speech he made at the Magna Charta Observatory conference, held in Lodz, Poland, on 23-25 October.

Billionaires Who Aim to “Disrupt” Education May Get a Chance Even If Trump Loses

One of Harris’s biggest donors and closest confidants is a billionaire for whom education “disruption” is a core cause.

By Derek Seidman

November 3, 2024

Source: TruthOut




If reelected U.S. president, Donald Trump, echoing other Republicans, has said he would shut down the Department of Education. All signs point toward a second Trump term expanding school privatization efforts and discriminatory policies carried out during the first Trump term under hard right billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

But even if Trump loses, the longtime wealthy backers of corporate education reform stand to have sway within a Harris administration.

Megabillionaires have donated and fundraised enormous sums toward Vice President Kamala Harris’s election. Many of these big donors have been key drivers of corporate education reform efforts over the past two decades, from funding charter schools to throwing millions into local school board elections.
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Some also come from Silicon Valley and have vested interests in the new frontier of corporate penetration of public education, which has taken the form of educational technology — or ed tech — products and, increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI).

“The neoliberal project to make education a profit center has really shifted,” education author and activist Lois Weiner told Truthout, with earlier efforts focused on charter schools and standardized testing. “Now we have another wave,” she said, “and that’s ed tech.”

One of Harris’s biggest donors and closest confidants is billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, for whom education “disruption” is a core cause. Powell Jobs oversees the Emerson Collective, a private LLC aimed at reshaping U.S. education, including through a venture capital arm with ed tech investments. News reports suggest that Powell Jobs could stand to influence Harris’s education policies, which the vice president has said very little about.
Silicon Valley and Corporate Education “Reform”

Corporate education reform — or what author Diane Ravitch has called “corporate disruption” — is a decadeslong, bipartisan political effort, led by billionaire donors and government officials, to restructure schools to function more like businesses and, often, privatize public education.

“It’s the neoliberal idea that everything should be thought of as markets, including education,” University of Illinois Chicago education scholar Kenneth Saltman told Truthout. “Students are clients, parents are consumers, schools are businesses and school districts, sometimes metaphorized as a stock portfolio, are a competitive industry,” said Saltman.

Corporate school reform efforts intensified in the early 2000s with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law and its high-stakes testing regime, and persisted under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, which continued the focus on raising test scores while promoting charter schools and pushing states to compete for federal funds.

Many of the biggest backers of corporate education reform are billionaires from the tech world, including Powell Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings and John Doerr. Collectively, they have poured billions of dollars into a range of political, philanthropic and business efforts to restructure or “transform” education.

For example, a host of billionaires that included Powell Jobs, Hastings, Bloomberg, as well as Eli Broad, Jim and Alice Walton, John Arnold, and many others, donated millions to charter school efforts and pro-charter school board candidates in California in the 2010s.

Billionaires have also put hundreds of millions into their own nonprofit or private initiatives. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have bankrolled charter schools from California to New Jersey, often to little effect, critics say.

Some billionaire donors, like Zuckerberg with his Chan Zuckerberg Initiative , have turned toward “philanthrocapitalist” vehicles to pursue their agenda: private firms that give off a philanthropic veneer but operate as opaque LLCs rather than more transparent nonprofits, seeking to influence education policy while often also having business interests tied to education markets.

These billionaire-driven “reform” efforts ultimately work to “redistribute control over decision making away from the public and concentrate it with tech corporations and superrich individuals atop these supposed philanthropic institutions,” said Saltman.
Silicon Valley, Laurene Powell Jobs and Kamala Harris

While some Silicon Valley billionaires are supporting Trump, tech elites, including longtime backers of education “disruption” efforts, are among Harris’s top donors.

These include Gates and Bloomberg, who have each donated $50 million to support Harris’s election, and Hastings, Doerr, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Sheryl Sandberg, and others who together have donated tens of millions in their attempt to get the vice president elected.

But more than any other Silicon Valley billionaire, Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, stands to have significant influence in shaping a Harris administration.

Powell Jobs is worth over $15 billion and is one of the wealthiest and most influential people in Silicon Valley. She has backed Harris for over two decades and has contributed millions toward her presidential run. Over the years, Powell Jobs has fundraised and donated millions more toward Democratic candidates more broadly.

Powell Jobs is “one of Ms. Harris’s most essential confidantes” and “has emerged as a powerful player behind the scenes” of her campaign, says The New York Times. The two have attended each other’s intimate family events — Powell Jobs was “one of about 60 people” to attend Harris’s 2014 wedding to Doug Emhoff — and “they have gone on personal trips together, with Ms. Harris at times flying on Ms. Powell Jobs’s private plane.”

Because of all this, writes The New York Times, Powell Jobs “is positioned to have extraordinary influence, or at least access, in a potential Harris administration.” And no cause may be dearer to Powell Jobs than education reform.

Corporate education reform advocate Marc Porter Magee told The New York Times that if Harris wins, “[Powell Jobs] and her staff could emerge as important players in an administration that has yet to define its K-12 agenda.” “Some have wondered whether, if Ms. Harris wins the election,” wrote the Times, “Ms. Powell Jobs might want a formal role in the administration, such as secretary of education, one of her top issues.”
The Emerson Collective

Powell Jobs carries out much of her agenda through the Emerson Collective, a private company she founded in 2004.

Emerson supports the XQ Institute, a nonprofit chaired by Powell Jobs that calls itself the “nation’s leading organization dedicated to rethinking high school.” Russlynn Ali, an Emerson managing director and XQ’s CEO, previously worked for pro-charter groups like the Broad Foundation, as well as working under Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan from 2009 to 2012.

While its ambitions are lofty, XQ has been criticized for spending lavish amounts on public relations gimmicks and competitions while falling short of its promise to reinvent schools.

“The most discomfiting aspect of XQ is its super-staged self, the distance between what it is, in reality — which is to say another school-reform effort by a big-name philanthropist — and what it rather grandiosely claims to be,” noted a 2019 New York Magazineprofile of Powell Jobs.

Other key players in Emerson’s top leadership also come from the corporate education reform movement and elite Democratic Party circles.

Among them are former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a managing director at Emerson; and Emerson’s senior director of campaigns and deputy chief of staff, Robin Reck, who consulted for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Laura & John Arnold Foundation and Walmart — all backers of corporate school reform.

Another Emerson managing director and top aide to Powell Jobs is David Simas, a former Obama staffer and Obama Foundation CEO.
“Privatizing Schools From the Inside Out”

Emerson Collective also has a venture capital arm that invests in a range of educational ed tech start-ups and businesses such as Amplify, which provides “next-generation curriculum and assessment”; Outschool, which offers “interactive online classes kids’ love of learning”; and others.

Critics of corporate education reform have warned that the corporate-driven infiltration of ed tech products into schools threatens student learning, teacher autonomy and democratic control over public education.

Investors have poured billions into ed tech, including a record high of $20.8 billion in 2021. While ed tech start-ups have struggled more in recent years, Morgan Stanley still projects global ed tech spending to reach $620 billion by 2030.

Through their steady infiltration into schools, ed tech interests are “privatizing schools from the inside out with heavy contracting,” said Saltman.

Companies like Microsoft and Google, and apps like ClassDojo and Khanmigo, are among the many tech players and products penetrating K-12 education, sometimes making their product free to use, critics say, with the longer-term aim of creating consumer dependencies that will translate into profits and market dominance.

“The race is on between the tech giants right now to lock themselves into school processes to such a degree that it becomes impossible to root them out,” Alex Molnar, director of the National Education Policy Center, told Truthout.

Molnar says that data collection is a key interest driving ed tech, with the promise of “personalized” digital education increasing surveillance of students and teachers while allowing companies to gather loads of data to turn into future profits.

“Data is of commercial value, whether or not it has immediate commercial value now, so there is an incentive for companies to turn kids into data production engines,” adds Saltman.

Saltman also says a major problem with corporate ed tech and its techno-utopian promise to redefine education is that it degrades learning by, he writes, presenting “knowledge as delinked from the social world” and “the subject as an atomic consumer of decontextualized fact.”

“All of these technologies make it virtually impossible to teach in ways that are contextual and deal with the relationship between student subjectivity, knowledge and the broader social context,” Saltman told Truthout.

Defenders of democratic public education say a newer concern is the expanding infiltration of corporate-driven AI applications into schools through everything from personalized “tutorbots” to AI lesson-planning “assistants.” Top ed tech investors like GSV Ventures are now hosting major conferences, sponsored by longtime school privatization backers like the Walton Family Foundation, on “the intersection of all things AI in Education.”

A March 2024 report from the National Policy Education Center found that “the adoption of largely unregulated AI systems and applications” would “force students and teachers to become involuntary test subjects in a giant experiment in automated instruction and administration that is sure to be rife with unintended consequences and potentially negative effects.”

Saltman has written that AI applications are also means for expanding surveillance of students and teachers. “It’s not clear to me that there are AI-based forms of pedagogy that are advantageous over in-person teaching and learning,” said Saltman. “There are lots of ways these approaches are worse,” he added, including that “they erode teacher autonomy.”

Molnar sees a “substantive danger” in AI’s race into schools, which he called an “opaque, unaccountable mechanism that has been developed and is controlled by corporate interests for their own purposes.”

“We’re going to have a very high cost socially because of Silicon Valley,” says Molnar. “As these systems become enmeshed in schools, you essentially are giving monopoly control over a democratic institution to these corporations, which is very dangerous.”
Toward Democratic Education Technology

The concerns over ed tech aren’t inherently about the increased use of technology in education. Saltman says if education technology were separated from corporate profiteering and “attentive to social context and the relationship between student experience and the broader social world students inhabit,” it could potentially be beneficial in schools.

“Unfortunately, I think that technology in education has largely been used to replicate and worsen some of the worst tendencies of the prior era,” he said, referring to earlier iterations of corporate school reform.

“It’s bad because it’s not democratic,” adds Weiner. “It’s a continuation of the neoliberal project’s attack on democratic schooling.”

The Democratic Party platform supports things like increased funding of public schools and free and universal preschool, and opposes the use of private school vouchers. Running against Trump, Harris has been endorsed by major teachers unions, and groups supporting public education have praised her past record on a range of topics, including supporting improving teacher pay and increased fundings for schools. Harris’s campaign website itself says little about K-12 education or what her education department would look like.

With so much fundraising and donations flowing toward Harris from billionaire education disruptors like her close friend Powell Jobs, critics of corporate education reform worry about the implications for the education policies of a potential Harris administration.

“What’s concerning is the possibility of people, with tremendous financial interests in getting their products into public schools, having the capacity to influence educational policy,” said Saltman.

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Decision 2024: Neoliberal Fascism or Neoliberal Business as Usual?

Trump’s rise the result of the ongoing erosion of the political culture in the U.S. under neoliberalism, which has essentially become the dictatorship of big financial capital.

By CJ Polychroniou

November 3, 2024

Source: Common Dreams


Trashware Art Kamala Trump Debate Boxing Vector 03 By Setvin



With just a few days left until Election Day, the fact that the race to the White House between U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump remains extremely tight is truly mind-boggling. Reason dictates that the Democrats should be set to win a landslide, but what could very well happen instead is the return of Donald Trump to the White House.

Unfortunately, there are some good reasons why this is a tightly fought election. First, the cold truth is that Kamala Harris is not an inspiring leader. What’s even worse is that she is a flip-flopper. She’s changed her position on fracking and on the infamous border wall (she is now against fracking natural gas bans and seems to be leaning in favor of building more border wall) and hasn’t done enough to explain her policy positions on several issues, including Medicare for All. Rational voters would not fail to take notice of such shortcomings in a presidential candidate.

Second, Kamala Harris represents a party that has lost the working class and is perceived as being one with the elites. Harris’ own campaign has been too focused on winning over wavering Republicans, preferring to share the stage with Liz Cheney and billionaire Mark Cuban over progressive icons like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez (D-N.Y.), and attacking Trump as a threat to democracy.

Neoliberalism is incomparable with democracy as it alters society’s balance of power overwhelmingly in favor of big capital, transforms citizenship into an exercise of consumer choice, and undermines policy initiatives aimed toward the common good.

Both strategies appear to have backfired. First, because working-class people represent a much larger segment of the electorate than wavering Republicans, and because cozying up to anti-Trump Republicans and receiving the endorsement of the warmongering Cheneys has alienated progressives. Second, exhorting citizens to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket because Trump represents a threat to democracy isn’t making inroads with average folks who are mainly concerned with how to make ends meet. Most adult citizens have no confidence in U.S. institutions and in fact mistrust the electorate system, which is why millions of citizens do not bother to vote and the voter turnout in the U.S. trails that of many other Western countries.

Third, Harris has not distanced herself from the Biden approach on Israel and Gaza, which has been nothing short of a moral catastrophe, and has subsequently alienated the young, progressive and non-white voters who overwhelmingly sided with President Joe Biden in 2020. Not only that, but she and the Democrats have managed to create the impression among a large swath of voters that they are now the real warmongers, which is not far from the truth.

In the meantime, Trump’s support has remained stable and defined in spite of what he says. Trump exerts a cult-of-personality influence over his followers like no other populist leader in the Western world. Of course, this is the result of the ongoing erosion of the political culture in the U.S. under neoliberalism, which has essentially become the dictatorship of big financial capital. Neoliberalism is incomparable with democracy as it alters society’s balance of power overwhelmingly in favor of big capital, transforms citizenship into an exercise of consumer choice, and undermines policy initiatives aimed toward the common good.

Neoliberalism must be understood not only as an economic project, but also as a political and cultural project. And nowhere else in the Western world is civil society’s neoliberal transformation so pronounced as it is in the United States. Even the right to unionize, a fundamental human and civil right, faces massive challenges due to the political power of the corporate world. This is because democracy in the U.S. has always been of a very fragile nature and the consolidation of democratic ideals has faced resistance and opposition down to this day. Under such circumstances, the rise of the authoritarian strongman government that Donald Trump represents must be seen as an inevitable outcome.

Indeed, the unwavering appeal of Donald Trump among his supporters, in spite of all his crimes and scandals, speaks volumes both about the nature and scope of the cultural divide in the U.S., as well as about the political and economic effects of neoliberalism. This is the only way to understand why the white working class and less-educated voters, the traditional base of the Democratic Party, have flocked to Republicans in recent decades and now represent Trump’s base. White working-class and less-educated voters broke ranks with the Democratic Party when the New Democrat faction severed completely its ties with the “New Deal” policies and embraced in turn economic policies that are the backbone of the neoliberal project.

By the same token, the old stereotype of the Republicans as the party of the rich and the elite no longer holds sway with many voters. And there is ample evidence to explain why this is the case. Virtually all of the wealthiest congressional districts across the country are now represented by a Democrat, while it is the Republicans who claim to represent the people who struggle.

In the end, it is probably not mind-boggling at all that election polls show a very close race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, more than 80% of registered voters said that the economy is the most important issue for them in the 2024 presidential election. And in a final Financial Times poll, voters expressed preference for Trump over Harris to lead the economy.

Of course, analyses that expose Trump’s myths about the economy and warnings by experts that his own economic plans would worsen inflation and wreak havoc on U.S. workers and businesses while increasing the gap between the haves and the have-nots either do not reach his supporters or simply leave them unfazed. In either case, indifference to truth is a symptom of our extremely polarized times and, in a society that has lost its vision for the common good and has allowed in turn the rich to hijack the political system, all that matters now is that people believe in their own reasoning. Demagogues like Trump are fully aware of the existing social realities and not only exploit the available circumstances but make an art out of the belief that reality is what you make of it.

As sad as it may be, the 2024 presidential election is a choice between neoliberal fascism and neoliberal business as usual. Some would say there is still a difference between the two options; others might call it irredeemable politics. But these are the only two choices that U.S. voters have.


CJ Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He has published scores of books and over one thousand articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).

Pre-primary education “chronically” underfunded as richest nations drift further away from 10% aid goal

New research shows proportion of international education aid for early childhood learning fell to just 1.1% post-pandemic, far short of an agreed 10% target.

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

International aid for pre-primary education has fallen further behind an agreed 10% spending target since the COVID-19 outbreak, according to new research.

The report, compiled by academics at the University of Cambridge for the global children’s charity, Theirworld, highlights “continued, chronic” underfunding of pre-primary education in many of the world’s poorest nations, after years of slow progress and pandemic-related cuts.

Early childhood education is widely understood to be essential to children’s successful cognitive and social development and to breaking cycles of poverty in poorer countries. In 2017, Cambridge research for Theirworld resulted in UNICEF formally recommending that 10% of education aid should be allocated to pre-primary education. Last year 147 United Nations member states signed a declaration agreeing to the target.

According to the new report’s findings, aid spending is falling far short of this goal and any progress towards the target ground to a halt following the COVID-19 outbreak. The most recent figures, from 2021, indicate that the proportion of education aid spent on pre-primary education internationally during the pandemic dropped by approximately (US)$19.7 million: from 1.2% to 1.1%.

The report identifies several reasons for the decline, notably spending cuts by the World Bank’s International Development Association, EU Institutions, and by the governments of wealthy nations, such as the UK.

Professor Pauline Rose, Director of the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education said: “Hundreds of millions of children around the world are missing out on high-quality pre-primary education despite clear evidence that prioritising this will improve their life chances. The overall trend is very worrying.”

“Although some progress has been made towards the 10% target, it started from a very low base. Other education levels are still being prioritised amid a general decline in aid spending. International commitments to pre-primary education are good, but we need concrete action.”

The United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals include the ambition to provide all children with proper childcare and pre-primary education. Over the past seven years, Theirworld and the REAL Centre have systematically monitored aid spending, tracking progress towards this goal.

The new report was compiled using the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s creditor report system, which gathers information about the aid contributions of both individual countries and international agencies such as UNICEF and the World Bank.

It shows that over the past two decades, the proportion of education aid spending that goes to pre-primary education has never exceeded 1.2%. Between 2020 and 2021, spending on the sector dropped from $209 million to $189.3 million: a decrease of 9.4%, compared with a 6.9% fall in education aid overall and a 0.9% decline in total aid spending. In 2021, aid spending on post-secondary education – the vast majority of which never leaves donor countries – was 27 times higher than that spent on pre-primary, despite widespread acknowledgement of the need to invest in the early years.

The report nevertheless also shows that the 10% target is attainable. UNICEF, which has consistently prioritised pre-primary education, spent 30% of its education aid budget on the sector in 2021. Italy increased spending from $2.6 million to $38 million. The majority of this was allocated to the ‘National Strategy on Human Resource Development’ which focuses on supporting the Jordanian government in strengthening its education system.  

The research shows that pre-primary aid is highly concentrated from a few donors, leaving early childhood development in poorer countries particularly vulnerable to sudden fluctuations in those donors’ spending.

Much of the pandemic-induced drop in spending, for instance, occurred because the World Bank cut its investment in pre-primary education from $122.8 million to $70.7 million. Other donors, such as Canada, EU Institutions, France, Norway and the UK, also reduced spending in this area. In 2021, eight of the top 35 education donors allocated no funds to pre-primary education at all.

The UK’s contribution was lacklustre for the world’s sixth largest economy, due in part to the Government’s controversial decision to reduce overall aid spending from the UN-recommend target of 0.7% of Gross National Income to 0.5%. Between 2020 and 2021, its education aid spending dropped from $703.67 million to $584.95 million. Aid to pre-primary was particularly badly hit, falling from an already low $5.6 million in 2020 to just $1.8 million in 2021, equivalent to a mere 0.3% of its reduced education aid budget.

The report also shows that pre-primary education spending tends to be focused on lower-middle income countries rather than the very poorest nations. In 2021, just 15% of aid in this area went to countries classified as “low income”, while 52.7% was allocated to lower-middle income countries.

As a result, some of the world’s least-advantaged children have little prospect of receiving pre-primary support. Eritrea and Sudan, for example, received no pre-primary education aid in 2021. In many other poorer countries – such as the Central African Republic, Chad, Niger and Syria – the amount of aid per primary school-aged child was less than $5.

Rose said the finding pointed to the need for a model of “progressive universalism”, where those most in need receive a greater proportion of aid spending. “The biggest gaps are in the poorest countries, and particularly among the very poorest and least advantaged,” she said. “Increasing spending on pre-primary alone will not be enough. We also have to make sure those in greatest need are prioritised.”

The full report will be available on the Theirworld website.