Abstract
Camilla Fitzsimons’s new book, Community Education and Neoliberalism, aims to map the shifting terrain of community education in Ireland, offering an account that both explores the impacts of neoliberalism and contemplates ways it can be opposed. The need for such a book is urgent. The Irish state’s response to the 2008 global economic crash occasioned savage public expenditure cuts to the community sector and realigned community education toward labor market activation. The state’s emphasis on accreditation and centralized regulation of provision potentially infuses a crude business logic into formerly public spaces. Neoliberalism has generated both anxiety and resistance among community education practitioners in Ireland. Fitzsimons provides a groundbreaking analysis of these transformations, making an important intervention in a policy debate of global relevance.
The book is structured in two parts. Part 1 explores the contested meaning of community education. It historicizes the emergence of community education in Ireland, tracing its origins to grassroots, women’s, and community development movements. In doing so, Fitzsimons underlines just how widely recent policy prescriptions diverge from community education’s collective, equality-based foundations. Part 2 critiques the impact of neoliberal policies on day-to-day practice. Fitzsimons outlines the European lifelong learning agenda and its prioritizing labor market activation above all else. While recognizing the right of participants in community education to have their learning formally recognized, Fitzsimons problematizes the means employed to achieve those ends. Qualifications frameworks, learning outcomes, and quality assurance procedures have shifted power away from local groups toward centralized accrediting bodies. Similarly, the apparent professionalization of community education has been accompanied by increasingly precarious working conditions, redundancies, pay cuts, unstable contracts, and damage to educators’ personal well-being.
The book’s scholarship is rigorous and vitally articulates community practitioners’ voices “from below.” Between 2011 and 2013, Fitzsimons surveyed over 220 practitioners from across Ireland’s community sector. This survey provides a quantitative overview of recent developments while subsequent focus group interviews with 35 practitioners allow for rich qualitative analysis. To my mind, no existing study of community education provides this degree of sustained analysis. We are presented with a series of attitudinal measurements concerning critical issues, including accreditation, professionalization, and community sector co-option, as well as diverse self-understandings of good teaching practice. Drawing on relevant theorists of pedagogy and power, notably Freire and hooks but also Foucault and Gramsci, the author questions and problematizes practitioner responses. Moreover, Fitzsimons carefully engages and refutes hegemonic counterarguments to her thesis, a dialogic approach that speaks to a reflective teaching practice.
The resulting analysis is at once complex and compelling, a nuanced examination of the tensions and contradictions running through state policy and community education practice. By foregrounding the voices of practitioners, the research effectively reveals a great deal of the social suffering inflicted by austerity policies. Seventy percent of respondents, for example, claimed it was usual for them to work more hours than they were paid for. Peter Dorman’s excellent illustrations accompany each chapter and convey these frustrations with biting wit and humor.
What then is to be done? Fitzsimons argues for a radical approach to community education, one that foregrounds the importance of critical group work as dialogic, problem-posing, and equality oriented. In the concluding chapter, she outlines several strategies for rekindling community education in neoliberal times. These include rethinking strategic relations with the state, strengthening practitioner networks, reinvigorating the political among practitioners, community campaign work, and forging alliances with university allies. While the book’s theoretical asides and strategic proposals are somewhat eclectic, this is partly a function of the author’s intention to provoke conversation among practitioners rather than to outline an overarching direction for future action.
Community Education and Neoliberalism has some limitations. Notably, as Fitzsimons acknowledges, the book does not include the voices of those engaging in community education. Hence, assumptions are made about practice without consulting the communities the book purports to support. Within the scope of the book, however, the labor movement’s absence is odd. Historically, the labor movement tended to stimulate community education, notably in neighboring Great Britain, but its contribution in Ireland is not explored. In the present day, as the author recognizes, trade union–endorsed industrial action features in anti-neoliberal resistance yet similar collective action within the community sector does not emerge from practitioner discussions or from Fitzsimons’s questioning of their responses. Like the dog that did not bark in the famous Sherlock Holmes case, this is a curious silence and further engagement with these themes would be welcome.
Offshore tax avoidance, banking scandals, and slum housing conditions—I refer to today’s newspaper headlines only—all serve to underline how Ireland’s neoliberal state is more in need of education from its communities than they are from it. Fitzsimons has expertly documented the damage wrought by neoliberal policies on the collective, equality-based ethos of community education in Ireland. Her groundbreaking, accessible analysis is essential reading for those interested in community education and its future. In Ireland and abroad, students, educators, and policymakers will benefit from paying it close attention.