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Emerging Perspectives 
ep.journalhosting.ucalgary.ca 
 

 
 
 

Market-Capital beneath the Skin of “Fear Factories”: The Autobiography of 
an English-Speaker-of-Other-Languages Educator 

 

Shuvo Saha* 

University of Alberta 

Curricular theorist Kent Den Heyer’s (2018) conceptualization of schools as “fear 
factories” has led me to contemplate whether and how the curriculum I experienced 
as a student might have cultivated fear in me. I have also wondered if and how the 
fear might have translated into my role as an English-speaking of other languages 
(ESOL) educator from the Global South. These wonderings led me to conceive this 
autobiographical study, wherein I reflexively examined my experiences of and with 
the curriculum as both a learner and a post-secondary educator from the Global 
South. I drew on my diary entries (Arndt & Rose, 2022; Bailey, 1990; Jarvis, 1992) 
to craft an autobiographical narrative (Pavlenko, 2007). I also made a collage 
(Davis & Butler-Kisber, 1999; Rijke, 2023) by gluing photos from the intersection of 
my personal and professional lives around a three-dimensional model of my head. 
Once the collage and the autobiographical narrative were complete, I interpreted 
them through the lenses of the critical theory of educational development (Rist, 2014; 
Walker, 2012). Reflecting on my own educational upbringing and professional 
experiences as an ESOL educator, I have found that apprehension has been 
developing within me since childhood. Also, a residue of apprehension remains in my 
adult educator life even today. The analysis suggests that the disability discourse and 
the developmental urge engineered a market-capitalist-oriented curriculum that has 
been the root of my educational apprehension. 

Key words: Curriculum studies, Educational apprehension, Critical theory of education 

Saha, S. (2025). Market-Capital beneath the Skin of “Fear Factories”: The Autobiography 
of an English-Speaker-of-Other-Languages Educator. Emerging Perspectives. 

 

 

*shuvo2@ualberta.ca 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  2 

Prologue 

During a 2023 Winter Term graduate course at the University of Alberta, I stumbled upon 

a reading about a contemporary educational impasse, in which the curricular theorist Kent den 

Heyer observed that “[s]chools, reflecting their surrounding communities, are to some extent fear 

factories, where the young learn to fear to fit in appropriately; we get socialized and we get 

appropriated” (den Heyer, 2018, p. 19, emphasis added through italics). This revelation about 

curriculum was all-consuming for me– I could barely stop thinking about how schools inflict fear 

and the educational impact this has on students. I placed myself in a learner’s shoes and asked 

how the school curriculum I experienced since childhood might have, if at all, cultivated fear in 

me. I also wondered if and how the fear might have translated into my becoming an ESOL 

educator from the Global South. Since I did not have a ready answer, I found it meaningful to 

adopt a semi-guided explorative path to examine my own lived experiences by following 

previous researchers’ footsteps in educational fear research. 

The Scholarship on Educational Fear 

Schools foster fear in students mostly by foregrounding academic failure. The fear of 

being unsuccessful and the pressure to conform to the societal value of success drive students in 

the UK schools to embrace academic challenges (Harber, 2004; Jackson, 2006; Putwain, 2009). 

Students’ fear mostly concerns exams and evaluations (McDonald, 2001). For example, 68% of 

the interviewees in Jackson’s (2010) study expressed anxiety of failure and performance-related 

anxiety over SAT tests. Another source of students’ apprehension stems from their middle class 

parents’ fear that their children will slide into the working class if they do not do well in school 

(see Power et al., 2003; Reay, 2001; Walkerdine, 2001). Additionally, cultural foreignness 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  3 

(Steed, 2011) of North American classrooms and foreignness originating from the complexities 

of the classrooms’ English-only policy (Bledsoe and Baskin, 2014), and the concern of being 

bullied (Bledsoe and Baskin, 2014) contribute to students’ fear. 

Students’ curricular anxieties boil down to a single, overarching concern of missing out 

on economic growth due to not staying educationally competitive, which would lead to them 

failing academically. Neoliberal educational culture posits that failure stems from a lack of 

investment in “one’s own human capital through education” and overlooks the impact of any 

structural injustice, such as the capitalist exclusionary practices based on class hierarchy 

(Harvey, 2005, p. 65). As a remedy, neoliberal education prescribes lifelong learning with the 

promise of assured competitiveness and financial prosperity through organizational documents 

such as Lifelong Learning for All (1997), published by the Organization for Economic 

Co-operation and Development (OECD). According to the model of lifelong learning, active 

educational pursuit from early childhood to retirement is the key to enhanced job opportunities 

and thus economic possibilities (OECD, 1997). 

Walker (2012) associates the economic model of education with that of the human capital 

model which prioritizes individuals’ skill sets to be transacted in the labor market for profit, 

placing consumption at the core of economic activity (Chiappero-Martinetti and Sabadash, 

2010). This model treats education as a means to economic growth and reinforces the 

economization of education by making correlations between “better educated” countries and 

their higher standards of life (Keeley, 2007). The economic model of education is politically 

compatible with market-oriented education (Lanzi, 2007) and market society (Polanyi, 1944). 

This makes it successful at strengthening its stranglehold on public education. 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  4 

Hypnotized by market-education discourse, students embrace the cosmetically noble 

spirit of lifelong learning and overlook its exclusive focus on “economic rationale and the 

development of human capital” (Biesta, 2013, p. 65). By enrolling into an endless number of 

professional degree and certification programs, the lifelong learners dive into the whirlwind of a 

version of education that promises economic growth. The growth rhetoric of education 

characterizes growth as an innocent but necessary outcome of market-oriented learning that 

continues throughout one’s life. Education that tags with the lifelong aspect and turns into the 

compound of “lifelong education” (Field, 2006) becomes the only valid form of education. The 

“silent explosion” of lifelong education into individualized lifelong learning that is devoid of any 

form of relationality (p. 45) eventually places the students in a lonesome and 

apprehension-provoking course of formal education. 

The development discourse plagues educational institutions and their policies as well, 

which, in turn, cultivates fear. Teacher education programs are under the threat of being moved 

from universities to training schools in accordance with the popular theory that teaching is a 

vocational skill (Biesta, 2013). Policymakers’ and politicians’ increased attention to teacher 

education across the world signals the governments’ controlling mindset over educational 

institutions “through a combination of curriculum prescription, testing, inspection, measurement, 

and league tables” (p. 121).  According to Biesta, to avoid falling behind and achieving low 

rankings, schools are inclined to follow the OECD’s methods for comparing educational 

performance. This leads the schools to adopt standardized systems such as the Programme for 

International Student Assessment (PISA). The schools’ tendency to have uniformity, Biesta 

argues, is “driven by fear, that is, driven by a lack of courage to think and act differently and 

independently” (2013, p. 123, emphasis added). 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  5 

What Made Me a Reflexive Autobiographer 

Although I felt drawn to scrutinize my own life stories to understand how schools 

instigate fear, I was hesitant to study my autobiography, questioning its onto-epistemological and 

axiological relevance. Fortunately, I came across educational researcher Robin Usher’s text in a 

Winter term doctoral seminar which resolved my doubt about the reflexive practice. Usher 

(1996) informed me, “...research is not simply a matter of representing, reflecting or reporting 

the world but of ‘creating’ it through a representation” (p. 34). In this non-procedural and 

relational practice of making knowledge claims, the researcher’s actions shape the research 

result(s) (1996). I found evidence of the relationship between the researcher and the research 

process in Steier’s  rhetorical question, “Why do research if you cannot say anything about what 

is out there and all research is self-reflexive? Why do research for which you must deny 

responsibility for what you have ‘found’” (1991, p. 10, italics in the original). These ideas built 

up the premise for me that researchers themselves are integral to the knowledge derived from 

research (Usher, 1996) and that it is crucial to “reveal, understand and analyse not only the 

product of knowledge but its production and therefore, its producer” (Aldridge, 1993, pp. 53–54, 

italics in the original). 

As I dived deeper, I learned that personal reflexivity helps surface the value-informed 

subjectivities underlying the researcher’s process (Usher, 1996). Every research project is “often 

an expression of personal interests and values. Thus the topics one chooses to study are likely to 

derive from personal concerns” (Wilkinson, 1988, p. 494). Usher (1996) observes the 

researchers’ omnipresence in the research methods they employ, the way they gather data, and 

the procedure by which they assess the research significance. Therefore, prioritizing data and 

aiming to achieve neutrality by excluding subjective elements from research means holding a 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  6 

subjective stance based on certain beliefs (1996). This being said, personal reflexivity does not 

exclusively involve only the “personal”. Reflexivity rather unveils the tacit “assumptions, values 

and biases” (Wilkinson, 1988, p. 495) attached to the research practice by making the researcher 

find answers regarding “[w]hat kind of world or ‘reality’ and what kind of knowledge is being 

constructed by the questions I am asking and the methods I am using?” (Usher, 1996, p. 37). 

Toward Methodologizing the Autobiographical Inquiry 

Reflexively examining whether and how my school curriculum cultivated fear in me as a 

learner and translated into me as an educator took me to my distant past as a child and student 

and the relatively recent past as an educator until 2022, when I left Bangladesh to pursue 

doctoral studies in Canada. I have consulted two types of data to study my lived experiences of 

schooling as a learner and an ESOL educator in relation to the notion of fear. The dataset consists 

of autobiographical narrative data (Pavlenko, 2007) documented in my personal diary (Arndt & 

Rose, 2022; Bailey, 1990; Jarvis, 1992), and a collage (Davis & Butler-Kisber, 1999) curated 

from photos from the intersection of my professional and personal life, glued around a 

three-dimensional model of my head (see Appendix A). The objective of examining my personal 

narrative is to delve into the “subject reality”, which sets out to explore “how ‘things’ or events 

were experienced by the respondents” (Pavlenko, 2007, p. 165). Concerning the subject reality 

for this study, I aim to interpret my own lived experiences of educational events both as a student 

and an educator and understand the relationship between fear and educational events. To me, 

anything in and beyond school that fosters “free intellectual pursuit, spiritual growth, or even 

critical consciousness” (Baszile, 2017, p. vii) is educational. On the other hand, collage values 

multiple, distinctive understandings beyond a singular ‘Truth’ in unimagined ways (Rijke, 2023). 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  7 

Collage also helps “suspend linear thinking and allow elusive qualities of feelings and 

experiences to be addressed tangibly” (Davis & Butler-kisber, 1999, p. 1). 

The Way My Schools Became Fear Factories 

My Apprehension as a Student 

The stepping stone to understanding how my schools (including post-secondary 

institutions) turned into fear factories is the type of curriculum offered at the institutions. My 

father largely influenced my academic learning principles. He was born in the countryside but 

moved to the capital city, Dhaka, with my grandparents to build a fortune. My father pursued 

post-secondary education, secured a job, married my mother (who was born and raised in the 

countryside), and settled down in the city. With the passage of time, my parents found confidence 

in the version of education that had “its roots in nineteenth-century industrialism and was 

conceptualized…under the general purview of market capitalism” (Donald, 2019, p. 5). My 

parents also grew apathetic about rural life, as they came to see it as “backward”. Accordingly, 

they inculcated me with the predominant idea that rural education lacks the necessary curriculum 

foundations that would ideally enhance “the freedoms that people actually enjoy to lead the kind 

of lives they have reason to value” (Dreze & Sen, 1995, p. 13). Thus, as a young learner, I was 

oriented to a primarily market-economy-focused education. 

The market-capital-centric education propagates that “liberal market ideology is the key 

to human freedom and happiness” (Donald, 2019, p. 5). According to this education philosophy, 

the value of formal learning is primarily limited to developing necessary skills to secure “good 

jobs”. Therefore, I learned that without a good job I would be doomed to poverty. I also learned 

that economic freedom was the end goal of being educated, although my formal schooling 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  8 

neither did explicitly define a good job, nor taught what would change one’s status from “poor” 

to “rich”. 

I grew up perceiving the neoliberal model of education and reduced interaction with 

natural life as the panacea for impoverished agrarian life. Cultivation of the idea that rural life is 

an impediment to economic growth leads to seeing problems and their solutions through the lens 

of market calculus, according to Morarji (2010). The market economy establishes agriculture and 

rural life as residual, unfeasible, and compulsion-driven against realistic and profitable urban 

life. This engineers the destabilization of rural communities and allows neoliberal education’s 

exclusionary and alienating aspects to inflict anxiety on rural schooling (Morarji, 2010). Thus, as 

a child I received schooling under a type of curriculum that spread the fear that my fellow 

students and I would miss out on access to economic privileges if we failed to pursue a 

mercantile form of urban education. 

At the root of my apprehension were also “root metaphors” of individualism and progress 

(Bowers, 2010).  The root metaphors provoked me to see the interdependent fountain of 

knowledge as a barrier and irrelevant to becoming an autonomous individual who aspires to 

economic growth. As a learner, I was concerned with missing out on becoming a self-sufficient 

individual who fits into the “New Class” (Gouldner, 1979). Gouldner informs that the new class 

is a dominant one made up of intellectuals. This is a “third class” that emerged out of the class 

struggle (Szelenyi, 1982) between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (Gouldner, 1979). In such a 

“capitalocentric” (Haraway, 2014) context, the root metaphors put me into “double bind 

thinking” in which “assumptions from the past continue to frame current thinking” (Bowers, 

2010, p. 4). To secure membership in the new class, I kept aloof from any intergenerational 

knowledge and skills. This, in turn, made me an alienated, “anomic individual who lacks the 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  9 

community’s fund of knowledge of how to live in ways that are less dependent upon 

consumerism” (p. 4). This explains why I did not master any of the intergenerational knowledge, 

such as basic carpentry, growing gardens, and needlework, which my parents and grandparents 

possessed. Curricular theorist den Heyer (2023e) argues that today’s guiding root metaphors 

inherently reflect a positivist pattern of thinking. The root metaphors consider hierarchical 

scientific models, stripped of subjectivity, as the only way to make sense of the natural world, in 

which modalities such as play, drama, and arts are redundant. 

In contrast, the “beaver bundle” knowledge system (Mandel & Tearney, 2015) recognizes 

that humans are constantly in the process of evolving with living and non-living beings in the 

natural world wherein the onto-epistemic knowledge relationship between humans and the 

environment is one of admiration and reciprocity (Haraway, 2014). Knowledge is likewise a 

relationship for den Heyer (2023a). In reference to Donna Haraway’s “methodological 

individualism”, den Heyer portrays the relationship as evolutionary, one that can be reconfigured 

into an infinite number of relationships. With the proliferation of market-capital-centric 

curricular frameworks, the relational character of knowledge is waning (Donald, 2011) and 

making way for “historical materialism” (den Heyer, 2023d). 

The market-economy-oriented curriculum further circulates the fear of economic 

regression by constructing a “developed” vs “underdeveloped” binary with the help of a 

development measurement tool called Gross Domestic Product (GDP). I was inculcated with the 

idea that education leads to development. In other words, the transitive idea of development, 

which indicates action performed by one dominant actor over the dominated, correlates with the 

concept of “underdeveloped/ underdevelopment” (Rist, 2014). In hegemonic discourse, the idea 

of development appears as a byproduct of the “developed” vs “underdeveloped” dichotomy, in 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  10 

which the “underdeveloped” is merely an incomplete or embryonic form of the concept 

“developed” (Rist, 2014). Rist (2014) analyzes that neocolonial development discourse 

calculates underdevelopment using GDP as the standardizing tool. Failure to meet the economic 

standard leads to denigrating labels such as “poor” or “underdeveloped”, the fear of which 

pushes an individual to pursue the developmental model of education (Walker, 2012). Feminist 

economist Marilyn Waring (2017) critiques this type of unidimensional economic fabrication 

through GDP on the grounds that it portrays an inaccurate image of development. GDP also fails 

to address the crises related to primary healthcare, environmental cleanliness, and so forth, and 

flattens the extremities of capitalocentric practices (Haraway, 2014). 

However, while pursuing post-secondary education back home in Bangladesh, I 

experienced intergenerational fear. At East West University, a professor in the graduate course 

Teaching Practicum preached that a teacher should always respond with the phrase, “I am doing 

well” or something similar when students ask, “How are you doing?” This professor made it 

clear that “I am doing well” is the appropriate response even when a teacher does not feel good 

physically or emotionally. Almost 10 years later, when I look at the teacher’s statement through 

Ranciere’s (2000/ 2004) notion of “Distributions of the Sensible”, I can sense his fear. Social 

order, which Ranciere metaphorized as police order, determines what sensible is and what is not 

by approving particular kinds of bodies and disapproving others. den Heyer (2023b) exemplifies 

that the Euro neoliberal model of family defines family as a combination of man, woman, and 

child(ren). Exceptions to this norm, e.g., gay or lesbian parents and child(ren), are rejected as 

family. Likewise, police order patronizes a particular version of sensible and sensibility, and 

dismisses anything deviant as nonsense. Therefore, my professor’s sanctioning of what feelings 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  11 

and how these feelings a teacher should share in the classroom are a manifestation of fear of the 

police order prevalent within the educational institution. 

Traditional curriculum, which marginalizes learners’ subjective experiences and presets 

educational goals in a one-size-fits-all manner (Pinar, 2020), creates a similar hierarchical binary 

between “able” and “disabled” learners (Erevelles, 2005) and engenders apprehension in the 

latter, treating them as inferior. This is exactly how the slow pace of my handwriting got me 

categorized as a “slow” learner in the school. Being singled out as a slow learner haunted me for 

years, even during my post-secondary education. Goffman (1963) analyzes this act of identity 

creation as society’s manipulative effort. The deficit characterization is done so gently and subtly 

that the learners with “disability” begin to believe that they are incapable of attaining so-called 

success. Erevelles (2005) argues that the capitalist system categorizes a segment of the 

population as psycho-somatically, socially, and technically unfit for economic gains: exclusion of 

the unfit body of people as surplus helps reduce operational cost and thus maximize profit. 

Educational practices imbued with Euro-American male chauvinist attitudes (Bowles & 

Gintis, 1976) aid the capitalist form of structural marginalization. The goal of such 

marginalization is to legitimize the social privileging of certain races, classes, and gender in the 

workforce (Erevelles, 2005)  and ultimately to favor the corporatocracy (Baszile, 2017; Elfreich, 

2019; Pinar, 2012). For example, liberal multicultural education in Canada erases Indigenous and 

non-Anglo Saxon perspectives in promoting whiteness (Abawi & Brady, 2017), while a 

neo-liberal form of education promotes an anti-Blackness principle (Giroux, 2003). History 

further suggests that education has had links to oppression, for instance, in actualizing cultural 

assimilation through residential schools in Canada (Bombay et al., 2014; Wilk et al., 2017).  In 

disability discourse the privileged-class-designed education system, actually an “instrument of 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  12 

oppression” (Freire, 1968), commits “abjection” of the vulnerable– a process by which the 

disable “body becomes separated from another [able] body” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 10). den Heyer 

opines that this has to do with privileging the capitalist system rather than the intrinsic aspect of 

disability (2023c). Hence, responses such as “not so good” or “I am not doing well” from a 

teacher might be categorized as signs of disability or vulnerability, which could threaten that 

teacher’s position, including possibly being excluded from the profession, leading to economic 

suffering. My teacher feared economic loss from showing signs of “disability”. He did not want 

his students to risk such a loss, and thus, in his efforts to offer me help, my teacher passed on to 

me his own intergenerational fear. 

My Apprehension as an Educator 

The curricular fear induced by the development and disability discourse has had 

implications for my curricular practices as an educator, as demonstrated in this anecdote about an 

experience from my professional life. It was fall 2019, a cool weekday morning in my former 

university office in Bangladesh, and still, I was sweating. This was unusual, as were my previous 

semester’s faculty evaluation reports. An hour earlier those had been handed to me in a brown 

envelope with the word “confidential” typed on it. As I broke the seal, removed the reports, and 

glanced at them, I could not believe my eyes. They locked on to the percentage— 67 — my 

poorest-ever evaluation performance, nowhere close to the average score of 87% for all of the 

teachers in the institution. My appalled eyes took in that my students, whom I had supported in 

the classroom and during office hours, accused me of failing to cover all the content in the 

syllabus. For the first time in my teaching career I came to know that I was not available for 

consultation outside the class, and added to that, I did not use technology while teaching. I 

realized my senses were slowly being numbed by the feelings of shame and mistrust on the 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  13 

students. By no means could I accept that my efforts to help the students even when I was 

extremely sick were taken for granted. Those days when I had high fever, but still showed up in 

early morning classes and met students in the office in the afternoon went into oblivion.  I placed 

the evaluation reports inside the envelope, cast the packet in the dark locker, and got busy with 

the official work I needed to complete. 

This particular event captures my education anxiety in two ways. First, the economized 

model of education that had shaped me since childhood instilled in me a score fetish and the 

tendency to synonymize it with achievement. To me, the accumulation of material goods became 

the primary measure of success which I believed could only be achieved, as Williams (1999) 

puts it, by adhering to the tenets and principles of market capitalism. Accordingly, I developed 

the belief that if scores, irrespective of whether they were of educational assessments or of 

faculty evaluation, were not “high” enough, opportunities to grow economically would be halted, 

and I would lose opportunities, including the opportunity for promotion in job. 

Second, the growth-oriented education, actually the fear of falling behind, constantly 

pushed me to keep working for progress. The idea of advancement was so strongly entangled 

with productivity that any essential break, e.g., sick leaves, stimulated the feeling of missing out. 

The fear of missing out was so intense that I would show up even if I was running a fever of 40. 

This feeling was aggravated by the annual performance appraisal that counted the number of 

classes missed/not conducted: more misses meant more negative scores. I feared that the 

appraisal would negatively impact annual increments, pay raises, or even job security during 

periods of faculty retrenchment. Thus, the market-capital-shadowed education shaped my 

ontological understanding of what it means to be a human being (Donald, 2019) in market 

economic terms. 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  14 

Implications and Conclusion 

Although apprehension was at the core of my score fetish and money-economy-driven 

ontology, it remained opaque in all the curricula I came across as a child, a student, and an 

educator. This implies that the traditional curriculum nurtures fear as an abject, which is 

analogous to psychoanalyst David Lewkowich’s analysis of teacher’s sweat being considered an 

abject in teaching (2015). Abject as a “sensation and attitude” (Gross, 1990, p. 87) bears a 

repulsive and thus expulsive image (Kristeva, 1982). Therefore, the abjected fear remains covert 

in the curriculum. For educators, the curricular practice of masking fear as an abject turns out to 

be “disguised love, and…defense against an unwanted, unconscious desire to appear as distant, 

overly intellectual, conventionally professorial…” (Lewkowich, 2015, p. 43). Suppressing fear 

through abjection cuts out the relational and experiential properties it carries, paving the way for 

an anthropocentric curriculum. This dominant and reductionist curriculum is responsible for 

giving birth to what Donald (2019) identified as homo economicus—the “rational, 

individualistic, utilitarian, calculative and instrumental” human species (Houston, 2010, p. 842) 

that reinforces market capitalism. 

Being intergenerational in nature, fear not only affects the curricular experiences of 

students but also the curricular practices of educators. The market-capital operates fear opaquely 

in the curriculum in a way that the fear helps money economy keep circulating. Instead of 

producing creative minds, the resultant growth-oriented education moulds learners into uniform 

beings who can be governed by the principle of production and prepared to serve the capitalist 

industries in a money-economy-driven consumer culture (Harouni, 2015). I do not intend to 

reject education outright, but I want my readers to see through schooling’s market-capital aspect 

with a view to inspiring curricular activism. Active involvement in personal, professional, and 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  15 

community spheres as a mode of resistance requires various intangible skills and resources that 

inclusive education can provide (Walker, 2012). To achieve this inclusivity it is crucial that we 

raise critical questions about the version of curriculum that patronizes the economic growth 

model of education and disseminates fear-stricken, consumerist knowledge. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 



Saha/ Emerging Perspectives (2025)  16 

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Appendix A 
 

The Collage 
 

 
 
Note. The collage represents the inside part of my head containing the imprints of my fear 
 

 
 


