When my daughter, my partner, and I walked into the large high school gymnasium that crisp fall Saturday, we were immediately overwhelmed. It was our very first high school fair, and my eighth-grade daughter was exploring her options. As we walked around the gym, we were surrounded by schools. Glossy brochures, shiny leaflets, and nifty swag adorned the tables as eager school representatives regaled us with dizzying statistics of high school graduation rates, college attendance, and career and internship prospects. 

While my family’s focus was on exploring different high schools in New York City, the sociologist in me couldn’t help but notice we were standing in the middle of a veritable marketplace with each school selling us its wares. Schools were competing against one another in real-time. Families were potential customers shopping around for a quality education. Each high school emphasized one selling point in particular: how their school would help prepare my daughter for the working world. In other words, how they would best prepare my daughter to be a worker in the labor market.

It’s no surprise that education mirrors the marketplace. In the United States, education functions within, and arguably as an extension of, capitalism. Scholars like Michael Apple and Henry Giroux have argued that neoliberalism structures education with increased privatization of schooling, promotion of market-based ideologies like school choice and competition, and education’s growing emphasis on career training. Parents, educators, and researchers have bemoaned the multi-million dollar profitability of high stakes testing regimes for years. And higher education has long been a sordid neoliberal affair with soaring and exclusionary tuition prices.

But the neoliberal educational marketplace isn’t colorblind. In What’s Race Got To Do With It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality, Edwin Mayorga and Bree Picower charge that education is not only neoliberal project, it is a racial neoliberal project as states continue to divest from traditional public schools and charter school expansion displaces traditional public schools through economic dispossession of Black and Brown schools and communities.

Currently, the Trump Administration is proposing to cut 15% of an already meager federal educational budget as it concurrently prepares to roll out federal educational grants to advance “patriotic education” in schools by suppressing the histories, knowledges, and truths of people of the global majority, queer folks, and/or those who are economically dispossessed.  In our racial capitalist world, education is possessed by the market inside and out.

At the high school fair, it was apparent that racial neoliberalism doesn’t only contour the infrastructure of education; it is embedded and reflected within school culture, teaching, and curriculum. It shapes how schools think about our children and what they prepare our children for in the future. So many school representatives thought that what we wanted to hear was how they could swiftly and efficiently prepare today’s children to become tomorrow’s workers. And because this was a fair for New York City public school students where about 85% of the student population is of color, most of the families and children they were talking to were of the global majority. In so many words and actions, they were telling us that for our children, career training was a priority.

In “Social Class and School Knowledge,” sociologist Jean Anyon argues that teaching and curriculum are instruments of capitalistic socialization in training the affluent to become powerful leaders while teaching the poor and working class to become obedient and docile workers. While Anyon argued this point in the 1980s, it still rings true today. Schools, teaching, and curriculum are instrumental in training students to adopt positions within racial capitalism. And today, this is coupled with increasing political attacks on curriculum in K-12 schools, rampant federal funding cuts to research in higher education, and mounting efforts to ideological control and censor academic freedom in colleges across the nation.

I see this in higher education too. As a lecturer and academic advisor at a large urban public university, I see the increasing efforts and money dedicated to encouraging our students (who are mostly first-generation students of color) to pursue careers while still enrolled in college. More and more, I’ve been encouraging students to explore their career options and pathways early on, and I’ve struggled with what this means, what this does, and who it supports.

Now, this isn’t to deny the reality that many economically dispossessed students of the global majority need secure employment to support themselves and their families. They need careers. After all, the most common question students ask me during advisement is, “what can I do with sociology?” And as the first in my family to go to college at the same institution I now teach in, I know this reality all too well. I was privileged to have a single mother of four who supported my interest in ideas over vocational pursuits.  Even with her support I had to work throughout college to help support myself and my family.

Why is there an emphasis on career infused teaching and curriculum at the expense of thinking for the sake of thinking (and not productivity)? Why can’t we do both? Is it even possible? Or does career prep and vocational training sit in irreconcilable tension with critical thinking and becoming?

Schools, including liberal arts colleges like my own, are morphing into vocational academies as they increasingly center and institutionalize career training and socialization at the expense of supporting the students’ critical consciousness and self-actualization. And perhaps that’s the point. And it’s time we start expanding how we think about the racial neoliberalism that characterizes education. It’s not just about the material dimensions of how racial neoliberalism shapes education. It’s about how students are taught, what they learn, and how they are prepared to be a part of the world.  It’s why my 13-year-old daughter was asked “what career does she want to pursue” at a high school fair. It’s about challenging how education, from the inside out, maintains and reproduces racial capitalism in word and deed.