Knowledge for Sale - Busch, Lawrence

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Résumé :
Preface to the English Language Edition xi
Acknowledgments xix
The Market for Knowledge 1
Crises 3
Climate change 3
Rising and more volatile food prices 4
Water shortages 5
Rising energy costs 5
Widespread obesity 6
Financial crises 7

Liberalisms and Neoliberalisms 11
Human knowledge is always limited 15
An irrefutable logical model can transcend the limits of human knowledge 15
Institutions must be reshaped so as to fit the logical model 17
The ability of States to intervene in markets must be limited 17
Social justice as both a concept and a set of policies is rejected as a mirage 18
Selves are to be reconstructed as isolated and entrepreneurial 18

Beyond Neoliberalisms 21
The self is social 21
Each institution promotes certain kinds of selves and rejects other kinds 22
People, institutions, and things make society together 23
Communities of scholars and invisible colleges are essential to the creation of knowledge 24
Markets are forms of governance 24
Educated citizens are essential for democracy...

Biographie:
redefining higher education as a search for the highest-paying job...

Sommaire:
How free-market fundamentalists have shifted the focus of higher education to competition, metrics, consumer demand, and return on investment, and why we should change this.

A new philosophy of higher education has taken hold in institutions around the world. Its supporters disavow the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and argue that the only knowledge worth pursuing is that with more or less immediate market value. Every other kind of learning is downgraded, its budget cut. In Knowledge for Sale, Lawrence Busch challenges this market-driven approach.

The rationale for the current thinking, Busch explains, comes from neoliberal economics, which calls for reorganizing society around the needs of the market. The market-influenced changes to higher education include shifting the cost of education from the state to the individual, turning education from a public good to a private good subject to consumer demand...