Neoliberal policies, in spite of their considerable damage to economic equality, the environment, and education, remain dominant. In this paper, we suggest that neoliberalism has remained dominant in part because the power elite who benefit from the policies have gained control over both public debate and policy-making. By dominating the discourse and logic regarding economic, environmental, and education decision-making, neoliberal proponents have largely succeeded in marginalizing alternative conceptions. We then use critical theory and critical geography, or ‘historical geographic materialism’, to situate communities, cities, and countries within different scales and networks and analyse current neoliberal policies. Environmentally, neoliberalism elevates the market and profit above considerations of climate change and environmental sustainability. Educationally, learning is valued primarily in terms of its contribution to economic growth. Finally, we engage in the more complicated question of what kind of world we want to live in, remembering that rather than a self-perpetuating neoliberalism in which individuals are responsible only for themselves and all decisions are supposedly made by the market, we have responsibility for our relationships with one another and our built and natural environment.

Neoliberal economic and education policies have had, we will argue, devastating consequences for economic equality, the environment, and education. For example, global inequality between the rich and the poor has increased (Jomo & Baudot, 2007), the impact of climate change on the environment will be with us for centuries (Hansen, 2009; McKibben, 2010; Orr, 2009), and educational reforms have focused on efficiency and accountability at a cost to improving learning (Hursh, 2008; Ravitch, 2010).