Education as Gift

This article proposes framing education as gift. Such a framing challenges a neoliberal view of education. It is argued that there is a core element in education which is destroyed when education is commodified. That core element has to do with relationality and contextualised understanding which is at odds with education construed as an industry or market in instrumental and economic terms. Attention is paid to how the neoliberal agenda is implemented through a range of assertions and discourses in everyday practice and policy. The contribution of this article is to link education, gift, social justice and indigenous epistemologies to challenge neoliberalism at the level of everyday practice and discourse and to show how the apparently reasonable view that a student who pays fees is in some sense an entitled customer leads to a form of violence in which student, educator, university and host society are all profoundly diminished. It is a matter of social justice relevant to those who are marginalised in dominant discourse which includes the indigenous population of many countries and, in most societies, women and, increasingly in our globalised world, international students.