Fifteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

In this integrative literature review, I interrogate how capitalism co-opts education to systematize poverty. I utilize a unique methodological combination of critical history, critical pedagogy, and personal narrative to investigate the following research questions: 1. How does capitalism co-opt education to maintain the socio-economic status quo and systematize poverty? 2. How might social foundations of education (SFE) reverse the status quo and prepare educators to engage social inequities such as poverty? I pressed my research questions upon a diverse range of historical-scholarly texts and uncovered the primary perpetrator of poverty’s systematization is capitalistic education’s ideologically driven meritocratic construction of commonsense in which the capitalism-democracy marriage, the cult of standardization, and the neoliberal marketization of everything are all deemed normative. I also discovered that SFE’s roots as an academic discipline focus on the inequitable ideological impact of capitalism put it in a unique position to address and redress these systemic inequities.