Idiots Rather Than Persons? The Crisis of Education in the Neoliberal Era

Abstract

Once a place for educating citizens, the university is increasingly giving in to the overwhelming weight of neoliberalism. While democracy is giving way to post-democratic and populist regimes wherein democratic forms are preserved while its substance is abandoned, the university is progressively adopting formalistic approaches for the mass-production of useful workers, self-centered individuals incapable of critical and independent thought. These narcissistic individuals (“idiots,” in the sense of the Greek ?????) fail to assume their role as tolerant, participative, and emphatic citizens. This work traces the parallels between the political and the academic, asserting that, in the end, both rest on the same rejection of a robust notion of the human person and her dignity, which is at the basis of any democratic experiment.