| This dissertation interprets our current cultural educational practices of marginalizing civic education and the humanities and enacting charter school laws under "free-market" rationale as representing the erosion of the "public" in public schools in the name of a particular (i.e., neoliberal) conception of freedom, which neglects democratic goals and democratic control of the schools in favor of "market ideology." Market ideology holds a neoliberal conception of freedom as a supreme value. By examining the neoliberal philosophy of freedom as presented by Friedrich A. Hayek in his work, The Constitution of Liberty, it is shown that within Hayek's philosophical framework an ethical dilemma arises between democratic public goods and freedom (i.e., concern for the public good is seen as the greatest threat to liberty). And freedom most often wins. What results is economic oppression, and public spaces---such as schools, the media, and the environment---being eroded in the name of freedom. Therefore, making sense of "freedom" from a neoliberal standpoint contributes to the erosion of the "public" in public schools.;Using the American pragmatism of primarily John Dewey, yet also G. H. Mead, Richard Rorty, and other more current pragmatic thinkers, this project seeks to re-construct the meaning of freedom so that it is consistent with democratic public goods, not antithetical to them. Using pragmatism as methodology means that this is not an inquiry into what "freedom" really is, but rather this dissertation is about the meaning-making experience of the significant symbol "freedom," and the reconstruction of that experience for particular ethico-politico purposes.;The reconstruction of "freedom" that I seek will not be easy because the neoliberal conception of freedom is part of our dominant, cultural discourse of freedom. This neoliberal notion of freedom logically fits within certain other central elements or philosophical tenets within what Charles Taylor calls the "modern Western identity." These include core beliefs about (1) the ontological status of the individual, (2) the aim of an onto-epistemological project, and (3) the source of moral authority. Thus, I claim the dominance of the neoliberal discourse of freedom is partially due to the internal consistency of its specific meaning of freedom with these three central elements of the current, modern Western philosophical framework. |
