Teaching the 2008 Presidential Election at Three Demographically Diverse Schools: An Exercise in Neoliberal Governmentality

This article describes the disparity in political instruction found in six government classes from three demographically diverse high schools during the 2008 Presidential Election. In general, students from working-class households or those in lower-level classes were rarely given opportunities to discuss politics at a national level or engage in analytical discussions of the election; students in middle-to-upper-class schools and those in advanced-level classes were privy to rich discussions of politics on a regular basis. Using Foucault's (1991) notion of governmentality as a guide, these findings are then discussed as symptomatic of a neoliberal approach to education in which students are trained for the presumed roles they will play in the nation's political economy as adults.