Neoliberal education and the neoliberal digital classroom

This article explores some aspects of the relation between neoliberalisation and the increasing use of digital technologies in school classrooms. It does this in relation to a specific case – a specific school, classroom and a fictionalised child – Sarah, who stands as a historical singularity and an exemplary space of relations. Sarah’s classroom and her learning experience are analysed as an example ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ through the exploration of some of the chains and relays that join up ‘learning’ in her classroom to strategies of education reform, to edu-business profitmaking and to private equity investing. Together these chains and relays constitute what we term as a neoliberal dispositif of learnification. The paper offers some starting points for the analysis of this dispositif