Description
Excavating to Educate under Hidden Neoliberal Value Systems
June Gorman (Co-founder of the Transformative Education Forum (TEF-Global), Board Project Director of Outreach for the International Model United Nations Association [IMUNA])
Educating in a world obfuscated by neoliberalism’s destructive value system, hidden by the argon, plastic lights of pornographically advertised psychosocial wounding that detours human emotional needs into empty hole-creating materialism, demands excavation down to the deepest rot under neoliberalism’s ‘pretty lies’. It is particularly true since these are emotionally, even spiritually, confusing hidden value systems that advertising itself was designed to artfully obscure and replace in capitalist, neoliberalism’s marketisation of all human ‘needs’: we are only what, and whom, we can buy.
Under the cover of Western Enlightenment’s left-brain-dominant education, based in intellectual rationalisation, neoliberalism easily hides this carving out of any moral core to create socially destructive, but very profitable, distracting aggressive competition, world conflict and ‘crises’. These crises pit humanity against its own cooperative sustainability, and ultimately the planet’s interdependent sustainability systems. Emotional intelligence then, rather than only rational cognition, is the sum of both spheres, actually the sum of whole brain connectivity across all areas, a sum subsequently much greater than its parts. But our education systems designed along Western patriarchal defined dominant intelligence models, increasingly demanding scientific and machine-like rather than psychological, empathetic human understanding of ourselves, ultimately reduces us to ‘things’ and our connection to each other to transactional only relationships. It results in a value-vacuumed marketplace in which we do not set the price or ‘rate of return’ and children, our future itself, become subsequently less worthy of an ‘investment’, except as future consumers. It is thus only in transforming education to understand and expose core value systems, that neoliberalism’s true venal and ultimately thanatotic corpse can be unearthed and understood.
