This file includes the entirety of a capitalism K. That said, students may want to draw from other critique files to supplement the work here



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*** ALTERNATIVE

Perm Solves---2AC

Including other critical analyses in socialist or Marxist analysis is key to solvency – inclusivity is also a net-benefit to the perm


Breunig 11 (Mary, PhD, associate professor and graduate program director of social and justice equity studies at Brock University. “Problematizing Critical Pedagogy”, 2011. http://www.marybreunig.com/assets/files/Problematizing%20Critical%20Pedagogy.pdf, 7/4/17)//JM

McLaren and Farahmandpur (2000) argue that radical and critical theorists “have been disinterred from Marxist soil where they first drew breath, and their graves now sprout the saplings of postmodern theory” (p. 26). McLaren and Farahmandpur further assert that the postmodernization of the Left and its accompanying retreat from class struggle has resulted in a laissez-faire evangelism. Rather than joining in the chorus of post-Marxists celebrating the death of universalism and grand narrative, McLaren and Farahmnadpur (2000) believe that A critical reflexive Marxist theory – undergirded by the categorical imperative of striving to overthrow all social conditions in which human beings are exploited and oppressed – can prove foundational in the development of current educational research traditions as well as pedagogies of liberation. (p. 28) Hooks (2003) and Lather (2001), however, argue that repeated iterations of the preeminence of Marxist Social theory and the historical roots of the Frankfurt School ignore the feminist, anti-racist, and postcolonial educational projects that overlap with critical pedagogy, and discount the work of Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies programs. The practice of tracing the historical roots of critical theory back to the Frankfurt School only serves to maintain the reification of a “founding fathers” mentality of critical pedagogy (hooks, 2003). In hooks’ opinion (2003), this version of critical pedagogy is antiquated. Sandy Grande (2003) similarly asserts that an overemphasis on class-based agendas that fail to engage race relations only leads to further marginalization of the political potential for critical pedagogical praxis. Gore (1993), Lather (1998, 2001), and Kohli (1998) all assert that a contemporary conceptualization of critical pedagogical praxis should attend to issues related not only to class, but to some of the broader social issues that have historically been less acknowledged, including race, gender, and sexuality. In Lather’s (2001) view, the overlapping “projects” of feminist pedagogies, anti-racist education, and poststructuralism and their intersections with critical pedagogy will only strengthen the justice-oriented purpose of these pedagogies. Lather (2001) explores why critical pedagogy is still very much a “boy thing.” She believes that: This is due not so much to the dominance of male authors in the field as it is to the masculinist voice of abstraction, universalization, and the rhetorical position of ‘the one who knows,’ what Ellsworth (1997) calls “The One with the ‘Right’ Story.” (p. 184)

A2: Commons Alt---2AC

Their vision of the commons relies on socialism – that’s bad—several reasons why the alternative fails


Ozimek 17 - Adam Ozimek, economist at Moody's Analytics, covers labor markets and other aspects of the U.S. economy, 17 ("Socialism Is Bad," Forbes, 2-12-2017, Available Online at https://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2017/02/12/socialism-is-bad/#486060a3d799, Accessed on 7-7-2017 //JJ)
I get a worrying sense that socialism is becoming cool again. You can see it all over social media where people brag about joining the Democratic Socialists of America, and in the popularity of the socialist magazine Jacobin. If Trump fails terribly, I worry that left populism will be what replaces it and the end result will be a more socialist U.S. That’s bad because socialism is bad. Given the growing popularity of socialism, I think it’s worth talking about why socialism is bad specifically.

Matt Bruenig has written a useful piece on socialism that I think is a jumping off point. As usual with Matt, it’s written with clarity and specificity that is appreciated. Unlike a lot o vague paeans to how socialism is good and we should have it, Matt offers specific plans for how we could get to government ownership of business.

The plan calls for the gradual socialization of existing companies, and Matt tells me on twitter that this would apply only to large firms. It may be appealing to think of a massive, centralized company like Apple and assume that it wouldn’t matter whether the government slowly became the sole shareholders. After all (ignoring the importance of options in executive compensation for the moment) the shareholders aren’t doing the innovating, the employees are. What does it matter who the dividend checks go to?

One issue is that the government would not just own but control companies, and this plan doesn’t tell us what they would do with that control. And yes, Matt does see this control as a benefit and not a cost to be avoided. Would Apple be free to innovate with the government controlling it? Or would they be forced to onshore all their production? It would be a lot easier for Trump to push Ivanka's clothing line if the government owned and controlled Nodstrom, Sears, and K-Mart. It is hard to both desire control presumably as a means to some unspecified end and also to assume this control won’t have negative consequences for productivity.

Second, even if we could easily socialize every large company in the U.S. without negatively affecting them, this does not tell us about the future large companies who don’t exist yet. If socialism was in place in 1995 would we have Google today? If we were socialist in 1975 would we have Apple today? Why would small business founders grow their businesses knowing that this would cause them to be socialized? This is especially true given that you can’t socialize the globe at once and companies on the cusp of growing large enough to be socialized would be free to locate in, say, New Zealand.

Fast growing, small companies are a very important source of new job creation and innovation. More productive firms are more likely to grow, and less productive ones more likely to exist. Telling firms to stay small or be socialized is going to give small, successful companies incentive to avoid the important growth dynamics that are essential to a productive economy. To take one recent example for how costly inefficiencies like this can be, Garicano, Lelarge, and Van Reenan examine laws in France that affect only firms with 50 or more workers. They find that this creates more small firms than would otherwise be the case, and the distortions lower GDP by 3.5% by increasing unemployment and keeping productive firms below their optimal size.

Indeed, a broad literature shows that the inability of small successful companies to grow is an important factor that holds back economic development. Hsieh and Klenow show that in the U.S., as manufacturing firms age they get bigger. The effect can be seen in the graph below, from Charles Jones “The Facts of Economic Growth”. Hsieh and Klenow estimate that if U.S. firms expanded as slowly as they do in India and Mexico, total factor productivity in the U.S. would be 25% lower.

Because he is Matt Bruenig, I know exactly how he will reply to this: if reducing firm size along some margin is bad, then making firms be bigger must be good so let’s just mandate all firms be large somehow. Of course this ignores the fact that it is not arbitrary size that is good, but a system that incentivizes the most productive firms to grow and the least productive to shrink or exist. It is the productivity increasing selection mechanism of capitalism that matters, and not just the mere outcome of firm size that should be mandated by politicians like some kind of dial to turn up or down.

Their authors concede commons fail – they also admit the alt is just memes


Helfrich 16 (Silke, one of the most popular “communing” movement authors. “Patterns of Commoning, 10/21/16. http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-10-21/patterns-of-commoning/, 7/5/17)//JM
B: What do you see as the main weaknesses of the commons movement and how could they be overcome? H: Its lack of self-consciousness about its own activities, successes and unmet potential. It is something that we can overcome by turning the commons into a meme… slowly but persistently. Another weakness is the risk of being overrun and eclipsed by populist movements, which – if you look at them closely – recycle stale old stews of oversimplified answers. The commons offers fresh approaches. But its success will require wider attention and focused action.

A2: Commons Alt---Ext---Not Pragmatic

Their authors are unqualified to advise how to solve capitalism – plus they personally describe the alt as memes


Bollier and Helfrich 15 (Dave, Silke. The two most popular “communing” movement authors. Google search “communing”— their book is one of the first results. Dave Bollier is also the person their Cody card is interviewing. Patterns of Commoning, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=_bzhCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT69&lpg=PT69&dq=%22Silke+Helfrich%22+%2B+%22meme 22&source=bl&ots=X6JAkoDAXM&sig=655jeiPDEayRuOrSSnjMyCOLtao&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj4ioiQ4fLUAhUV22MKHcgQAmMQ6AEIPzAI#v=onepage&q=%22Silke%20Helfrich%22%20%2B%20%22meme%22&f=true, 7/5/17)//JM
There are many reason that we need to develop a pattern language of communing. Pattern languages are capable of finding the treasures within our implicit knowledge, which too often go ignored or unexpressed. Specific patterns of communing will help us to get beyond counting and measuring everything and instead encourage us to focus on deeper more “enlivened” relationships. Patterns provide useful tools for conflict-resolution and help make insights discovered elsewhere visible as possible ways out of our problems without mandating rigid solutions; they respect our freedom and need to make decisions and shape our livelihoods for ourselves. The process of developing patterns of commoning can be a wholly natural and even playful process available to anyone. It is a way of learning a common vocabulary while disseminating a meme, as if in passing: commons. As a way to cultivate a greater self-awareness of the realities of communing, pattern languages can significantly accelerate the cultural transformation now underway, helping embryonic forms of communing become new social norms and expanding the practices of communing so that a commons-based society can emerge.

The alt inevitably gets coopted – commoning is a joke


Oyarzun 15 (Lucia Jalon, editor of Displacements: an X’scape Journal. She researches the political, body, spatial, and the commons. She’s also an architecture and professor of architecture in Spain. “Common Spatialities: The Production of the Multitude”, Spring 2015. journals.library.tudelft.nl/index.php/footprint/issue/download/16/366, 7/5/17)//JM

*Edited for sensitive and/or ableist language


This movement has led to many contemporary authors – from Antonio Negri or Paolo Virno to Jean-Luc Nancy or Giorgio Agamben – to talk about a ‘crisis of the common’. As the concept is hollowed out, ghostly impressions of it fill our everyday world. Once understood as a shared abstract dimension, the bond that gave coherence to our social life, the common is now a meme in the hands of the market, the media or the post-democratic political scenario. The common has been turned into a spectre of what it once was at the precise moment that it has become the core of our new economic system. Many names have been given to this new productive order: immaterial, cognitive or postFordist capitalism among others. But all definitions point to the same circumstance: our languages, communications, affects and knowledge, as well as our ability to produce space through their unfolding, are its driving force. And so, just as the productive and produced condition of the common has come to the fore, so has its seizure [capture]. A seizure [capture] of the common enacted through the emptying of its meaning. A hollowing out that conceals the processes of expropriation, privatisation and manipulation that are taking it over.5

A2: Critical Pedagogy Alt---2AC

The way critical pedagogy advocates deliver their new curriculum drives away teachers, the key actors of their alternative


Neumann 13 (Jacob W, assistant professor of Curriculum and Instruction at University of Texas-Pan American. “Critical Pedagogy’s Problem with Changing Teachers’ Dispositions Towards Critical Teaching”, 12/4/13. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs10780-013-9200-4.pdf, 7/4/17)//JM

The first issue the school change literature raises is that of audience. To whom do criticalists write? Too often it seems like that audience is not teachers in local schools, but other academics who already agree with their positions. The language criticalists often use is one indicator here. Knight and Pearl (2000) contend that the language found in critical texts can make critical pedagogy seem to be ‘‘expressed in a secret code…that has its own brand of exclusiveness’’ (p. 210). Because of this dense language, Weiner (2007) holds that ‘‘the primary audience for critical pedagogy [is] not the oppressed but the privileged’’ (p. 61). He reasons that the people most versed in critical language and theory are people educated in graduate programs and notes that such advanced education is rarely available to people living under oppressive conditions. Thus, Weiner argues, ‘‘critical pedagogy [is not] a pedagogy of or for the oppressed, but rather a working theoretical paradigm for those educators who might or might not want to work with oppressed people’’ (p. 61). As importantly, rather than addressing teachers in neighborhood schools, criticalists consistently address themselves to other ‘‘critical educators.’’ Additional descriptors are often attached that extend that label, such as ‘‘transformative critical educators’’ (Kincheloe 2007) and even ‘‘revolutionary educators’’ (McLaren 2005). The criticism about critical pedagogy’s exclusive language and analysis lingers (Edwards 2010; Ellsworth 1989; Knight and Pearl 2000); indeed, as Weiner (2007) puts it, ‘‘rarely is critical pedagogy spoken and discussed outside of academic institutions or with people who operate outside of the discourse itself’’ (pp. 59–60). The issue here is that many criticalists language themselves towards a small audience. Most educators would not subscribe—nor even aspire—to the types of labels that criticalists tend to use. Regardless of whether or not they themselves are capitalists, most Americans, and thus most teachers, seem to believe the story of American capitalism and would probably resist dismantling our capitalist system. When McLaren (2007) declares that critical educators are the gravediggers of capitalism, when de Lissovoy (2007) and Martin (2007) cast critical pedagogy as a revolutionary project, when Kincheloe (2007) equates critical pedagogy with ‘‘transformative ideological education,’’ to whom do they speak? Abstraction, of course, is a crucial component of critical pedagogy, as it is in most discourses and disciplines. Freire (1998b) argued that ‘‘within the theoretical context, we must distance ourselves from the concrete world in order to perceive how theory is built in the practice exercised in the concrete world’’ (p. 76). For Kanpol (1995), abstraction acts as a ‘‘language of possibility,’’ which is ‘‘the beginning point that a teacher uses to redefine the classroom as a political space’’ (p. 106). Kanpol contends that this ‘‘language of possibility allows students and teachers to share and understand their respective voices in light of structural configurations, such as race, class, gender, and age’’ (p. 106). However, as far back as 1989, Henry Giroux lamented that ‘‘radical educators have abandoned the language of possibility for the language of critique’’ (Giroux 1989, p. 130). He claimed that ‘‘the role that teachers, students, parents, and community people might play in waging a political struggle regarding the public schools is rarely explored as a viable strategy’’ (p. 130). Giroux put a strong emphasis on the importance of teachers, encouraging critical educators to redefine the ‘‘roles that teachers might play as engaged critics and intellectuals in both the classroom and as part of a wider movement for social change’’ (p. 132). Out of this language of possibility, Giroux articulates a ‘‘theory of resistance’’ that ‘‘helps bring into focus those social practices in schools whose ultimate aim is the control of both the learning process and the capacity for critical thought and action’’ (Giroux 2006, p. 39). Here, as in Freire (1998b), theory helps educators to create analytical distance from the everyday and commonplace and recognize that ‘‘meaning is located both in the various dimensions of subjectivity and behavior and in ‘texts’ and classroom practices that structure, limit, and enable human action’’ (Giroux 1997, p. 87). It allows us to more fully examine the politics of language and interpretation in schools that act as ‘‘a mechanism for the political control of knowledge’’ (Apple 1996, p. 35). The question of audience, however, arises when critical educators emphasize critique and resistance at the expense of lived experience and belief. To change teachers’ dispositions involves changing their beliefs. Instead of trying to find common faith with educators within shared priorities for change (Neumann 2011), too many criticalists situate a political emphasis for critical education that sits in opposition to the political beliefs most Americans hold. For example, Stanley (2007) argues that critical pedagogy is marginalized in American educational discourse by external factors, ‘‘only one element to suppress left-liberal (particularly radical) political, cultural, and economic reform efforts’’ (p. 372). Even granting the existence of a political effort to suppress left-liberal reform efforts, Stanley nonetheless discounts the degree to which criticalists often marginalize themselves: they ignore what common sense and experience in schools tells us—that most educators care about students and value critical and analytical thinking, but have no desire to take part in revolution. And when Stanley laments critics’ ‘‘tendency to reject any radical analysis of mainstream education out of hand…[and to] dismiss Marxism as a discredited and bankrupt theory’’ (p. 372), he invokes a philosophy most Americans do not believe in. This is a problem that speaks directly to the question of critical pedagogy’s audience. In a similar example, Kincheloe et al. (2012) argue that standard judgments against Marxism as economistic, productivist, and deterministic betray an egregious and scattershot understanding of Marxist epistemology, his critique of political economy, and Marx’s dialectical method of analyzing the development of capitalism and capitalist society. (p. 17) Marxism may well serve as an effective analytical tool within the confines of the academy. However, the problem with such arguments, from a practical point of view, is that most people, and most teachers, I suspect, are just not interested. Most teachers, at least in the United States, are not Marxists, have no interest in Marxist theory or analysis, and have neither the time nor the inclination to learn it. Thus, in blurring ‘‘the distinction between the teacher as educator and the teacher as political activist’’ (Liston and Zeichner 1987, p. 12), in directing critical pedagogy mainly towards ‘‘critical educators,’’ and in consistently invoking the language of Marxism and ‘‘revolution,’’ critical pedagogy isolates itself from the larger body of teachers in schools. It has been argued that critical pedagogy stripped from its Marxist roots is ‘‘dimmed [of] transformative potential’’ (Martin 2007, p. 341). But how much transformative potential does a critical pedagogy steeped in Marxist language and ideals, in revolution, and in political activism actually and practically hold if its language turns people away from it? While McLaren, for example, consistently advocates for ‘‘revolutionary social change’’ (2005), those arguments do not impact neighborhood schools in part because they usually fall upon ears deaf to such language.

Critical pedagogy dismisses knowledge already held by teachers – driving them away and destroying alt solvency


Neumann 13 (Jacob W, assistant professor of Curriculum and Instruction at University of Texas-Pan American. “Critical Pedagogy’s Problem with Changing Teachers’ Dispositions Towards Critical Teaching”, 12/4/13. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs10780-013-9200-4.pdf, 7/4/17)//JM

Valuing Teachers’ Knowledge The second issue the literature on school change raises involves teachers’ already existing knowledge. Too often criticalists fail to approach teachers as reasonable, caring professionals who hold valid beliefs about education that must be approached on teachers’ terms. Teacher knowledge can be said to exist at multiple levels: as ‘‘personal practical knowledge’’ (Clandinin 1986) that operates within and is shaped by a ‘‘professional knowledge landscape’’ (Clandinin and Connelly 1995, 1996). Personal practical knowledge ‘‘is knowledge that reflects the individual’s prior knowledge and acknowledges the contextual nature of a teacher’s knowledge. It is a kind of knowledge carved out of, and shaped by, situations’’ (Clandinin 1992, p. 125). Teachers’ personal practical knowledge is lived within professional knowledge landscapes that shape what counts as ‘‘effective teaching, what teachers know, what knowledge is seen as essential for teaching and who is warranted to produce knowledge about teaching’’ (Clandinin and Connelly 1996, p. 24). Within professional knowledge landscapes, teachers live and tell a variety of interwoven stories about their lives and practices of teaching. Within their inclassroom spaces, ‘‘interpersonal places where teachers experience a measure of moral and intellectual freedom in their interactions with students’’ (Craig 2009, p. 1042), teachers live and tell what Clandinin and Connelly (1996) call ‘‘secret stories,’’ ‘‘stories that are not readily visible to people outside their classrooms’’ (Craig 2000, p. 16). However, when teachers move out of their classrooms into the out-of-classroom place[s] on the landscape, they often live and tell cover stories [borrowing from Crites 1971], stories in which they portray themselves as experts, certain characters whose teacher stories fit within the acceptable range of the story of school being lived in the school. (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996, p. 25) Additionally, teachers are constantly confronted with stories coming down the ‘‘conduit,’’ the one-way flow of prescriptions and mandates with which teachers are compelled to react. These ‘‘sacred stories’’ (again borrowing from Crites 1971) are ‘‘theory-driven view[s] of [teachers’] practice’’ told by researchers, policy makers, and others that are ‘‘funneled into the school system for the purpose of altering teachers’ and children’s classroom lives’’ (Clandinin and Connelly 1996, p. 25). If critical pedagogy is to gain an increased presence inside local schools, it must negotiate entry into this multi-storied landscape. Reform efforts ‘‘must take account of what teachers are ready to teach or ready to learn to teach’’ (Schwab 1983, p. 241); thus, those efforts must also take into account what teachers already know and do. All too often, however, critical pedagogy fails to recognize that teachers ‘‘pay attention to a broad range of potential influences in curriculum enactment’’ (Craig 2009, p. 1041). Instead of explicitly valuing teacher knowledge, criticalists spend considerable effort critiquing teachers’ always already existing knowledge and practice inside classrooms. Seldom in the literature does critical pedagogy approach existing teacher knowledge as a thing to be valued in and of itself. Shulman (1983) argues that, ‘‘within the classroom, the teacher is constantly torn among competing and incompatible pedagogical demands’’ (p. 497). Their personal beliefs, the stories of school within which they work, the nature of their specific professional knowledge landscapes, and mandates from the conduit are but some of the factors teachers must balance in their work with students. To summarize these competing demands as the effects of global capitalism or the influence of corporate interests, as critical pedagogy is wont to do, is to diminish both the value of the knowledge and beliefs that teachers always already hold and the importance of the knowledge landscapes within which they work. At first glance, criticalists appear to agree with Clandinin and Connelly (1992) that teachers are ‘‘curriculum makers.’’ Critical pedagogy often elaborates the role of the teacher in engaging students in complex and challenging content and ideas. Criticalists might argue that they do align themselves with teachers. For example, Monchinski (2009) claims that ‘‘in the end the specific context of your classroom, your students, your subject, and your personality—what you’re comfortable and not comfortable with—will help shape any critical pedagogy in your everyday classroom’’ (p. 141). However, deeper inspection finds that criticalists too frequently espouse a narrower view of curriculum, one emphasizing specifically defined purposes rather than teachers’ and students’ localized needs and perspectives. Indeed, critical pedagogy routinely invokes its own sort of reductionism. The excerpt below provides a vivid illustration of this tendency. Here the authors criticize a critical pedagogy that ‘‘limits itself’’ to encouraging teachers to bridge the gap between student culture and the culture of the school, to engage in cross-cultural understandings, to integrate multicultural content and teaching across the curriculum, to develop techniques for reducing racial prejudice and conflict resolution strategies, to challenge the meritocratic foundation of public policy that purportedly is politically neutral and racially color-blind, to create teacher-generated narratives as a way of analyzing teaching from a ‘transformative’ perspective, to improve academic achievement in culturally diverse schools, [and] to affirm and utilize multiple perspectives and ways of teaching and learning. (McLaren et al. 2004, p. 139) The authors claim that ‘‘these attempts are welcomed, as far as they go, but that they do not go nearly far enough’’ (p. 139). For many teachers, these systematic initiatives would require huge changes in their teaching contexts, as well as require much, if not all of their personal practical knowledge to implement. But for McLaren, Martin, Farahmandpur, and Jaramillo, efforts such as these are not sufficient unless they are also accompanied by systemic challenges to global capitalism. This reductionism ignores three crucial interrelated aspects of teachers’ lives. First, it ignores the position that curriculum emerges ‘‘as an account of teachers’ and students’ lives together in schools and classrooms’’ (Clandinin and Connelly 1995, p. 392) and advocates for an almost technical-rational (Scho¨n 1983) approach to educational change: change efforts are useful and valid, appropriate even, if they look like this. This critical pedagogy risks presenting itself to teachers who do not already share its beliefs as yet another prescription funneled down the conduit, risking disconnection with those teachers at the most personal level—with the secret and cover stories that they live and tell every day. Second, it ignores the fact that ‘‘regardless of whether teachers personally approve of the communal story and whether it fits with the personal teaching narratives they are creating, compelling reasons exist to at least appear to be living the socially authorized story or stories’’ (Olson and Craig 2005, p. 163). Teachers face real and substantial pressures in the classroom that affect their very job security. Much, perhaps most of this pressure comes from mandated accountability demands that cannot be ignored and can make teachers feel subsumed by the test. For example, Vogler (2005) cites a U.S. History teacher who claims that ‘‘I use the entire academic year preparing my students for the United States history subject area exam. My choice of instructional delivery and materials is completely dependent on preparation for this test’’ (p. 19). Smith (1991) goes so far as to argue that ‘‘because multiple-choice testing leads to multiple-choice teaching, the methods that teachers have in their arsenal become reduced, and teaching work is deskilled’’ (p. 10). In my own research, I have heard one teacher lament that I have to do the mile wide and inch deep type approach, because I’m given all these criteria and all these objectives, and it’s such a sprint from the first day of school all the way to the TAKS test [the Texas high-stakes accountability test in effect at the time]. (Neumann & Meadows 2011) Given these pressures, it makes sense that teachers are intensely interested in questions of method. Thus, when criticalists such as Bartolome´ (1994) disparage teachers’ concerns over methods as a ‘‘methods fetish,’’ they ignore the fact that teachers have a vested interest in prioritizing methods and create distance between themselves and the constituency they are ostensibly trying to attract. Further, ‘‘setting oneself apart as teacher/intellectual/leader can easily foster an arrogance which assumes to know what empowerment means for teachers or students’’ (Gore 2003, p. 339). Third, this reductionism glosses over the fact that teachers develop their teaching through years of practice and experience. Throughout this time, teachers work to develop a sustainable personal model of teaching practices (Kennedy 2006) that is hard-won through extensive reflection, learning, and trial and error. Teachers, then, have good reason to perceive projects that require substantial change in behavior as unsuccessful (Clandinin and Connelly 1992).

A2: Floating PIK---2AC

Negatives can’t fiat substantial portions of the aff mechanism –

  1. Aff ground – PIKs subsume central aff offense and destroy any ability to leverage the 1AC – kills fairness, which frames education

  2. Topic education – allows neg to shift the debate’s focus to minutia instead of the 1AC

  3. Unpredictable – Their standard is infinitely regressive – they can pick any affirmative subtheme – we need offense on the link

Voting issue – deterrence and time investment

No solvency – ­­­___________ is key to effective resolution of our harms

PIK fails in its own framework – their links are too broad to merely subtract one frame.

A2: General Alt---2AC

Capitalism is so entrenched in schools it destroys all space for critical thought


Hill 09

Dave Hill is Research Professor (Emeritus) in Education at Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, England, and also Visiting Professor at the Kapodistrian and National University of Athens, Greece, and in the Social Policy Research Centre at Middlesex University, London.Ravi Kumar teaches in the Department of Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi, India, and is associated with the Global Centre for Advanced Studies as part of its faculty. He was previously a Visiting Faculty member at Anglia Ruskin University and taught at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. 2009 (“Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences”, Accessed 7/4)


The increasing subordination of education, including university education, and its commodifi cation, have been well documented (e.g., Levidow, 2002, Hill, 2001a, 2002, 2004a, b, 2007; Giroux and Myrsiades, 2001; Giroux and Searls Giroux, 2004; Ross and Gibson, 2007; Rikowski, 2007; CFHE, 2003).4 One aspect is that other than at elite institutions, where the student intake is the wealthiest and most upper-class, there is little scope for critical thought. Scholars have examined, for instance, how the British government has, in effect, expelled most potentially critical aspects of education from the national curriculum, such as sociological and political examination of schooling and education, and questions of social class, “race” and gender for what is now termed teacher training, which was formerly called teacher education. Across the globe and more so in the newly liberalized economies such as India there is a trend towards looking down upon social sciences on the grounds that they do not produce an employable population. The mantra is of job-oriented courses, which is refl ected when many universities and colleges transform their history courses into travel and tourism courses (The Hindu, 2004). The change in nomenclature is important both symbolically and in terms of actual accurate descriptiveness of the new, “safe,” sanitized and detheorized education and training of new teachers (e.g., Hill, 2001a; 2004a; 2007). Even in those parts of the world where the neoliberal processes were set in motion by the 1990s we fi nd not only that teacher education is transformed into teacher training, but that even the training period has been progressively declining (Sadgopal, 2006; Kumar, 2006c). What can be more disastrous than the systematic degeneration of the role of a teacher to a member of the informalized workforce, which lacks job security and works with a meager salary of as little as twenty-fi ve dollars per month in some of the provinces in India (Leclercq, 2003). McMurtry (2001) describes the philosophical incompatibility between the demands of capital and the demands of education, inter alia, with respect to critical thought. Governments throughout the world are resolving this incompatibility more and more on terms favorable to capital. One example in England and Wales is the swathe of redundancies/dismissals of teacher educators Neoliberalism and Its Impacts 19 specializing in the sociology, politics, and contexts of education following the conforming of teacher education and the imposition of a skills-based rigidly monitored national curriculum for teacher training in 1992–1993. One dismissal was, for instance, of one of the authors (Dave Hill) himself. At a stroke, numerous critical teacher educators were removed or displaced. So too were their materials/resources—no longer wanted by the government. Thus, at the College from which I was dismissed, the Centre for Racial Equality, was closed down—its resources no longer required by the new technicist, detheorised, anticritical “teacher training” curriculum (Hill, 1997b, c, 2003). At a more general level, Mathison and Ross (2002) note that [the] university’s role as an independent institution is increasingly threatened by the interests of corporations in both subtle and obvious ways. “Globalization, “—which Bertell Ollman (2001) defi nes as “another name for capitalism, but it’s capitalism with the gloves off and on a world scale. It is capitalism at a time when all the old restrictions and inhibitions have been or are in the process of being put aside, a supremely self-confi - dent capitalism, one without apparent rivals and therefore without a need to compromise or apologize”—has transformed internal and external relations of university from teaching and research to student aid policies and pouring rights for soft drink manufacturers. Decreased funding for higher education has made universities increasingly susceptible to the in- fl uence of big money and threatens the academic freedom and direction of research.

A2: Teacher Alt---2AC

The neg’s alternative overlooks the realistic attributes of working with teachers.


Neumann 13 (Jacob W, assistant professor of Curriculum and Instruction at University of Texas-Pan American. “Critical Pedagogy’s Problem with Changing Teachers’ Dispositions Towards Critical Teaching”, 12/4/13. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs10780-013-9200-4.pdf, 7/4/17)//JM
Teachers have good reasons for resisting grand, large scale change efforts (Cuban 1982, 1986, 1993). Elsewhere (Neumann 2013a) I examine structural obstacles to critical educational change. Here, my focus in on an equally, if not more important factor in implementing critical change in schools: teachers’ dispositions towards critical teaching. ‘‘Because teachers ultimately decide what is covered in the classroom’’ (Schwille et al. 1983, p. 376), they are the key to successful critical change in schools. Yet, too often, it seems, critical educators approach teachers’ dispositions in ways that are at best unproductive and at worst harmful to critical change efforts. The gap between critical pedagogy’s rich life inside scholarly texts and its essential absence from K-12 schools has been much discussed in the literature. Any database search will demonstrate that the language of critical pedagogy has begun to penetrate fields from business (Barnes and Keleher 2006) to dance (Ottey 1996) to speech communication (Cyphert 1996). But when one looks inside K-12 schools, critical pedagogy is still virtually non-existent. Not only is ‘‘critical pedagogy…almost completely absent from the debates on schooling as they take place in institutions of power’’ (Weiner 2007, p. 59), ‘‘very few teachers…are even aware of its existence’’ (Knight and Pearl 2000, p. 222). A variety of explanations have been offered for this disconnect. Many scholars have attributed the gap to a perceived lack of suggestions for implementing critical pedagogy in classrooms (e.g. Eisner 2002; Knight and Pearl 2000; Seltzer-Kelly 2009; Wardekker and Miedema 1997). Other scholars have noted the dense language criticalists use as an obstacle to classroom implementation (Edwards 2010; Knight and Pearl 2000). Still other scholars, perhaps most notably Ellsworth (1989), have highlighted a tendency for criticalists to conceptualize critical pedagogy as a totalizing discourse which ‘‘offers only the most abstract, decontextualized criteria for choosing one position over others’’ (p. 301). Unlike the above analyses, this paper highlights factors that are frequently overlooked in the critical literature. We know from the literature on change in schools that for change efforts to be successful, teachers must be intimately involved in the change process. According to Schwab (1983), ‘‘teachers will not and cannot be merely told what to do;’’ they ‘‘must be involved in debate, deliberation, and decision about what and how to teach’’ (p. 245; original emphasis). Indeed, Silin and Schwartz (2003) claim that ‘‘almost everyone agrees that without the commitment of teachers, curricular change has little chance of taking hold let alone being sustained over time’’ (p. 1586). Thus, change efforts must be practical, must take into account teachers’ knowledge and beliefs, and must fit into teachers’ already crowded work lives. A small percentage of critical pedagogy texts do illuminate ‘‘teacher-friendly’’ examples of critical teaching (e.g. Cowhey 2006; Peterson 2003; Souto-Manning 2010; Wink 2005). Too much critical pedagogy, however, suffers from the problem of totality. It attempts to be a radical grand theory, providing answers, in the last instance, to questions of oppression and schooling. But people’s lives and the problems that they experience on the ground don’t know from ‘in the last instance.’ (Weiner 2007, p. 63; original emphasis) For example, I find this totality often implied by McLaren (1998), who, even as he advocates for a critical pedagogy ‘‘grounded in the lived experiences of students’’ (p. 452), simultaneously argues that ‘‘emphasiz[ing] local narratives over grand narratives’’ is a practice ‘‘built upon a number of questionable assumptions’’ (p. 442). The problem with such positions is that they allow criticalists to come across, as Schwab (1983) put it, as ‘‘professors of curriculum [who]…seek to fight the revolution in Moscow and telegraph it to the provinces’’ (p. 242). Such positions allow for easy slippage from dialogue to imposition within critical advocacy, something that Paulo Freire (e.g. 1970, 1998a), for example, expressly argued against and which the literature on school change makes clear is least likely to produce lasting change in schools. In other words, to de-emphasize local narratives can easily lead to de-emphasizing the practical and affective narratives that teachers live and tell about their teaching practices, the narratives that are crucial to producing any meaningful critical change in schools.

Teacher and other members of the public are attached to squo schools in ways the alt doesn’t resolve.


Neumann 13 (Jacob W, assistant professor of Curriculum and Instruction at University of Texas-Pan American. “Critical Pedagogy’s Problem with Changing Teachers’ Dispositions Towards Critical Teaching”, 12/4/13. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs10780-013-9200-4.pdf, 7/4/17)//JM
Teachers’ Beliefs about ‘Real School’ and ‘Real Teachers’ The third issue raised by the school change literature is that teachers can hold a strong affective investment in the very forms of teaching and schooling that critical pedagogy seeks to change. While the critical literature takes for granted the position that dominant constructs of schooling and patterns of teaching are inherently harmful to society, Mary Metz (1989) illustrates how teachers will sometimes go out of their way to endorse those same forms. As even a casual observer of American schooling can testify, patterns of teaching and structures of schools are remarkably similar across the country. A number of historical studies examine this now ‘‘natural’’ phenomenon and stress influences such as the factory model of schooling and the impact of Carnegie units on high schools (e.g., Callahan 1962; Katz 1971; Tyack 1974). Metz, however, argues that affective factors among individuals also play an important role in maintaining this broad consistency across schools, thus contributing to their resistance to change. Metz describes a study by the National Center of Effective Secondary Schools of eight Midwestern urban high schools: six public, two Catholic, and all spanning a range of socioeconomic levels. Metz’s team found basic, and essential, differences among the schools; yet, across these diverse contexts, Metz holds that ‘‘it seemed that the schools were following a common script’’ (p. 76). While each school’s ‘‘script’’ varied in important ways, ‘‘the play was in some sense recognizable as the same play in all schools’’ (p. 76). In fact, Metz notes, it was where the production was hardest to coordinate and perhaps least easily recognizable as the same play that was being produced at schools where action meshed more smoothly, that the school staffs were the most insistent that their production followed the script for ‘The American High School,’ varying from others only in details. (p. 76) Given the widely voiced dissatisfaction with public schooling and acknowledgement that the structures of schooling do not work well for too many students, Metz asks, why do these structures persist so widely and commonly across school contexts? It is understandable that the larger public does not seek fundamental changes to schools. Dominant schooling patterns hold broad institutional signifi- cance (Reid 2003) and resist easy alteration in the public mind. Education professionals, however, are much more likely to have the practical and theoretical knowledge to envision new patterns of schooling that might better benefit greater numbers of students. As Metz argues, If the common script has not been able to produce good results with large proportions of students in recent years, it would seem reasonable to try altering the script. It requires explanation that neither teachers, nor other education professionals, nor policymakers…consider such a possibility. (p. 81) Metz finds an answer to this question in the affective value people attach to dominant patterns of schooling, claiming that the common script ‘‘serves symbolic purposes as much or more than the technical purposes for which it was overtly designed’’ (p. 81). Metz calls this symbolic purpose the affective investment in a ‘‘Real School.’’ To illustrate this point, let me draw from Metz’s comparison of two of the schools studied.


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