Rate My Teacher and the Seductions of Neoliberalism

Remy Low | February 2009

Why the Rate My Teachers website is a product of the education system itself, not a result of its failure.

There has been much panic and publicity about the Rate my Teachers website, and rightly so. A website designed to increase the surveillance of teachers, opening up spaces for the abuse of information and slander without foreseeable consequences.

I myself found out about the existence of this website through the school grapevine, though I have not personally visited it at the time of writing, nor intend to. It has been said that the website presents a threat to teachers, staff and schools. Indeed it does, but the question here is to what extent we as educators are responsible for such a phenomena.

There is perhaps an unspoken fear that the website will highlight the 'failures' of our schools and education system. However, I think quite the opposite. Reminiscent of Mary Shelley's great novel, I believe the very existence of this website is a Frankenstein-esque tribute to the 'success' of present societal ideas of what an 'education' consists of. The question for us as Christian educators is, rather, should we also be paying tribute to this very conception of education?

For a long time in western education we have assumed a liberal, or rather neoliberal, basis for educating. I have presumed that the key goals of educating were to inculcate this mentality. Education based on this compelling logic that is woven into our very beings goes something like this:

  • Teachers present students with a buffet of options

  • Teachers present efficiency and maximum utility as a goal

  • Teachers present ethics and morals as a secondary consideration or a factor in the decision-making

  • Teachers tell students to "make up their own minds" or "think for themselves" based on the choices they are given

  • Teachers tell students that informed consumer sovereignty is the main game in the free market of life, and that individuals are the basic elements of society

  • Teachers train them to be 'active and informed' members of society via mechanisms such as 'citizenship' studies and 'consumer choice' studies, training them to fit in with the present social order well.

In late modern capitalism, the advances in information and communication technologies have enabled this neoliberal subject—i.e. the sovereign consumer and individual driven by the logic mentioned above—unfettered access to information that precipitates 'good choices'. Here, 'choice' is defined as the freedom of individuals to make up their own minds on a range of goods based on the information provided.

Under this logic, the Rate My Teachers website is merely a logical conclusion of what we have been teaching. If students are customers and sovereign individuals, and we are the service providers, then why shouldn't the consumer have unlimited information on the product that they are paying for?

I do not believe that the Christian worldview sustains such an illusory regime of 'individual free choice'.

Before I point out my contention, please be aware that I am not arguing for 'indoctrination' and 'authoritarian moralism', not at least in the straw man version intelligently designed by Richard Dawkins and others of the New Atheism ilk. Rather, I am suggesting that the making of 'choices' do not precede the formation of a character competent to make those choices. For example, if you don't know the craft of motor mechanics, then don't choose a replacement brake pad for yourself! And please don't touch my car.

Perhaps we should question the logic of what we are teaching, and the characters that we are implicitly or explicitly forming. What types of characters are we forming in our daily practices, pedagogies, assignments and curriculums as a schooling community? Are we making efficient, rational choice citizens who seek to maximize their freedoms? Are we creating clever and choosy consumers? Are we forming private individuals with the right to live in peace, security and comfort? Or are we developing members of that community called the church, the people of God, whose members are characterized by a radical love?

I can put my point no better than the brusque theologian Stanley Hauerwas:

I can think of no more conformist message in liberal societies than the idea that students should learn to think for themselves. What must be said is that most students in our society do not have minds well enough trained to think. A central pedagogical task is to tell students that their problem is that they do not have minds worth making up. That is why training is so important, because training involves the formation of the self through submission to authority that will provide people with the virtues necessary to make reasoned judgment.

Hauerwas is right. Students (and teachers) must first be inducted into the craft of responsible and reasonable judgment before firing off. Character formation sits prior to judgment. Perhaps I am too postmodern to accept that people are neutral, objective blank slates before they make choices. Such a presumption of individual choice does not constitute freedom, but rather is a subtle system of normalization that the French theoretician Michel Foucault termed 'governmentality'. That simply doesn't rate for Christians who are governed primarily on the story contained within scripture.

To resist the logic of 'choice' would be truly radical in a day and age where any utterance remotely negative of this 'freedom' in our neoliberal social order is construed as un-Australian, un-patriotic, occidental or even terroristic. Yet, as the Rate My Teachers website has shown, perhaps this type of 'freedom' isn't all that it's cut out to be.

Remy Low is a social science teacher at Covenant Christian School in Belrose, Sydney. This article is used by permission from the July 2008 Christian School Journal.