The amoeboid neo-liberalism and the rising state commercialism in education.

Abstract

Recently, the pros and cons scholars of educational marketization all refer to the enormous influences affected by neo-liberalism. Without doubt, it occurs to the related researches that the function and characters of market will create a decisive impact on education development. Nevertheless, according to this authors` study, neo-liberalism is not the way as it was, it is because the role of the state has been shifted from shrinking back to swelling out in terms of the ways of manipulating policies. The state is no longer the rolled back actor as a small government following the original neo-liberalism context, but becomes an invisible hand behind serial discourses and standards making. This study has taken England for an example to review the spread of marketization in education, especially under New Labor`s authority. Context and developed discourses on neo-liberalism are analyzed before examining the related policies in England. The result of the research argues that, though neo-liberalism still firmly wins its high value in running education, it has been through an ingenious change in terms of spreading processes. Under New Labor`s authority, serial legitimate discourses from public sector were released and formed another new ideology. The boundary of public and private sector of running education, especially in secondary education, has been redefined. This change has turned England into a new type of "neo-liberalism" territory. Based on the involvement of public sector in manipulating serial privatizations, it reveals the phenomenon of "state commercialism".