미국 신자유주의 교육사학자 다이안 래비치(Diane Ravitch)의 교육론

Diane Ravitch and the Neoliberal Education in the United States

This paper is an analysis on the work of Diane Ravitch, a renowned rightist scholar in education in the United States. Ravitch, a historian of education who served in the US Department of Education during the Bush and Clinton government as assistant secretary, is one of the leading figures in the literature of neoliberalism and neoconservatism in education. Little research is done on the academic work of Diane Ravitch despite her influence in the neoliberal/neoconservative reform literature. She has been an active writer and reformer rather than being spotlighted as an object of academic scholarship. Since the evolution of neoliberal education policy has marked decades of influence on education across nations, it is my contention that Ravitch's work is worth analyzing and discussing in depth. This paper critically examines the educational positions of Ravitch by analyzing the major arguments of her major work and discusses their implications. I approach her ideas and arguments by following the trajectories of her academic work, which is divided into three periods for the purpose of the research. Her ideas have evolved and shifted in the course of her career development, which is shown in the criticisms of the radical revisionist historians, “anti-intellectual” tendencies of postwar reforms, and her search for new remedies such as arguing for the “common culture(anti-multicultualism)” and establishing “content standards” in education. Some of the basic themes that emerge in her work are also discussed thematically, which include equal opportunity and meritocracy, quality and equality, public education and privatization. Diane Ravitch is a hard-line rightist scholar. While it is notable that the basic rationale for her argument lies in the cause of equal opportunity and enhancing public functions of education, her claims remain “rhetorical” due to the conceptual limitations and contradictions in the use of the terms.