Education in the Ponzi-scheme capitalist era : Scottish and Danish cases

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Adams, Paul and Krejsler, John Benedicto (2025) Education in the Ponzi-scheme capitalist era : Scottish and Danish cases. In: European Conference on Educational Research, 2025-09-09 - 2025-09-12, University of Belgrade.

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Abstract

This paper has its origins in two fields. The first is work on educational policy, politics, and links between the production of capita through the education system. The second stems from our belief that educational processes have been hijacked by a system which explicitly desires to create ‘workers’; i.e. those who subscribe to capitalist forms of educational normativity through an education system that devalues pedagogy as the formation of critical and socially minded individuals, and instead promotes the creation of homo-economicus. We here note how the rubric of the Ponzi-Scheme can be used to analyse the intent behind much national educational policymaking. In turn, we are concerned with holding up for scrutiny the ways in which those ‘in power’ utilise specific mechanisms to position education and those within as having specific roles to attend to the economy. Here we signal how economically mandated educational provision co-opts individuals to its cause through creation of personal financial debt and individual feelings of pressure to enter into and contribute to neoliberal development. Specifically, the paper, in section one, outlines capitalism and capital as defining features for the purposes of analysis. In section two, we identify the Ponzi scheme as the analytical lens through which we might begin to understand the deeply problematic nature of education policy and approaches. In the third section, we outline how contemporary Scottish and Danish education systems seek to enhance learners’ capital-intent, rather than enhance their desire and ability to effect meaningful societal change, through a quasi-Ponzi scheme orientation. In the final section before the conclusion, we begin to tease out the connections we see between Ponzi schemes as a capitalist mechanism (albeit one that capitalist societies do not permit by law) and education. In relation to the Scottish case, the National Improvement Framework (Scottish Government, 2016) seemingly focuses upon welfarism through incorporation of health and wellbeing as a metric to measure educational progress.. However, closer scrutiny challenges this position twice: first, evidence suggests that greater adoption of neoliberal policies has stalled health outcomes, and reduced them; further, improvements in health and wellbeing are lauded for economic valorisation for it is believed that such efforts uplift all boats. However, Scotland’s place in the UK challenges this through UK governmental policy and action: at all turns, NIF success is externally judged against the rubric of economic uplift which, through the prevailing capitalist system charts a causal line between education for the masses and fiscal enfranchisement of the few. In relation to the Danish case the Ponzi-like focus of scrutiny is as follows: Since the turn of the millennium education reforms have become increasingly linked to an imaginary of economic growth, which unfolds in a reports where economists play a leading role like in the report of the so-called ‘Productivity Commission’. This gets linked to waves of legal demands incentivizing students and educational institutions to finish education courses in time or suffer penalties. A particular technology is scutinized as exemplary for the Ponzi-mentality, namely the so-called ‘Education Zoom’-website which is an interactional website where students can ‘measure’ the consequences of their choice of education discipline in terms of probability calculations of life earnings, employment chances and so forth. This work identifies a new heuristic for the construction of curricula, teaching, learning, and assessment approaches as well as the relationship education has with society going forward. We seek to explore, how the idea of the Ponzi scheme can be deployed as a lens through which to examine the education system of Scotland and Denmark, and how such education systems have become positioned in ways that underscore a problematic turn for education policy. Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used For the purposes of our analysis, we deploy the Ponzi-Scheme as the analytic heuristic through which we signal educational policy intent. Features of Ponzi-Schemes are identified (underestimation of associated risks; selection of ‘facts’ supporting acquiescence to specific educational intent and practice; the over-presentation of education as the means to individual and hence societal progress; herding behaviour and framing bias on the part of those to be educated) and utilised as a mechanism through which to examine how those involved in education succumb to such positioning. Our approach deploys Ponzi-scheme literature to offer a new insight into how education has been corralled by policy and economic elites who offer seeming pathways to ‘students’’ economic and social elevation, when attendant policy seems more concerned with producing workers for national fiscal uplift. We explore this through an examination of recent policy developments in Denmark and Scotland, wherein we highlight synergies that exist between oft-maligned Ponzi-schemes and the approach taken by governments and corporations alike in creating messages of the importance of education. The study employs a varied number of empirical sources to document the increasing interplay between education and market thinking in education reform, such as government reports, evaluation reports, educational technologies at work, and various policy and research literature on the issue, with a focus upon the Scottish and Danish cases in a comparative perspective. In terms of overarching theory and research literature the study partly draws on studies with a particular focus upon Ponzi-like interaction between education and market thinking, and partly theory on capitalism in the 21st century where the financial sector linked to globalization has intensified and expanded the reach of market and growth thinking. Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings This paper, by deploying Ponzi-scheme analysis, draws attention to the subtle, yet commanding ways in which education is now positioned as the means to facilitate continued economic growth through the creation of ‘possibility’ for all, economically. We do not argue that education is actually a Ponzi-scheme as per definitions in the literature; rather we signal how using this as an analytic framework offers a new insight int the tensions and problems at the heart of the neoliberal, capitalist venture. We expect that the comparative study of Ponzi-like developments in Scotland and Denmark will yield important insights into how financial capitalism works its ways into the capillaries of pedagogy and education reform in a Scottish context that is more related to strong UK market ideology as well as in a Danish case which is considerably more embedded in Nordic welfare society thinking.

ORCID iDs

Adams, Paul ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8527-9212 and Krejsler, John Benedicto;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)