This month, we speak with Larry Johnson, associate professor in the Social Foundations of Education Program at the University of South Florida, Saint Petersburg. In his pedagogy, Johnson focuses on the complex relationship between education, culture, and society with the goal of exploring policies and practices from historical and contemporary perspectives that address structural inequality, and transforming educational institutions into sites for social justice. Johnson is notably a long-time proponent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and variously mobilizes MMT’s insights when training our teachers-to-be. In our conversation with Johnson, we discover just how constrained the US system of public education is by wrong economic thinking and what it would mean to think otherwise. Together, we ask: How do federal interest rates shape US education policy? What do standardized tests have to tell us about neoclassical economics and the nature of money? Why is the rhetoric of education in the United States so narrowly focused on preparing students for careers? How do classist and racist myths of taxpayer financing create unequal schooling? And how could we ever reasonably hope for the political economy of education in the United States to ever be otherwise? Pondering such questions, Johnson opens a window onto his longstanding advocacy for radically rethinking US public education through the lens of endogenous public money theory.
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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com
