John McMurtry PhD, FRSC
The Case for Keeping the Corporate Agenda Out of the Nation's Classrooms
There is a widespread belief among educators and others that the public interest is best realized by government staying out of the market. The assumption is that the market works by an "invisible hand" which by the laws of supply and demand automatically translates market self-maximization into fulfillment of the common interest.
This metaphysic is the ruling superstition of our era, as I explain in my recent books. But it is programmed into students by teachers themselves as an unexamined assumption of their teaching and their curricula. This unexamined assumption, in turn, has opened classrooms to a more total dogma that the public sector itself, including education, should be accountable to market principles. Indeed it is even demanded that the primary function of education today be to "enable students to compete in the global marketplace." But this is a conclusion which represses the general contradictions between the global market model and sound education. Let us consider these concealed contradictions.
(1) The impartiality of good reasoning and research in education requires educators to address problems independent of their money payoff, and to permit no external interest to deter learned inquiry from the quest for knowledge and truth. In contradiction to this principle, the ruling principle of the corporate market is interest-biased by definition - seeking to maximize corporations' private money returns as a regulating principle of all thought, and selecting by every decision against any knowledge or advance of knowledge which conflicts with this goal.
Illustration: Consider a teacher presenting or a student studying the material of any subject who followed the rules of producing and selling a product for profit in the global marketplace - The anti-educational principles of thought and action would be: Do not address any problem which does not promise opportunity for profit. Reduce the cost of the work input to your product to the minimum possible. Treat the customer as always right.
(2) The free dissemination of knowledge required by education repudiates the demanding of a money price for the knowledge communicated to students or exchanged with colleagues, and the best educators and students work extra hard hours without expectation of monetary returns for the sake of education itself. In direct opposition to this foundational requirement of education, private patent and copyright control of every piece of knowledge and information that a corporation can legally monopolize is enforced, and the maximum price people are willing and able to pay is imposed on every service which can be identified, with no educational or other life service to anyone if it is not money-profitable.
Illustration: Consider a school or university which priced its knowledge transactions, required its agents to do no more than required by commercial contract with student buyers, and sought to privatize more and more of the school's and library's information for its own monetary profit. There could hardly be a more anti-educational regime.
(3) Independent literacy and problem-solving capabilities are required of teachers and students for recognition of either's educational attainment, and the value of each's recognized education corresponds to what each knows and can do autonomously. In profound contradiction to this principle of individual capability required by education at every level of its attainment, the agent in the competitive market requires only money demand - which establishes all market value - to pay for any good which is desired. At the macro level, the corporate market systematically develops more and more products and services to do people's thinking and acting for them. The increasing dependency of consumers on priced commodities produced for them is an inherent demand of global market development, and is recognized by neo-classical doctrine's foundational principle of "non-satiety", or unlimited consumer wants for services and commodities.
Illustration: If a student or a teacher followed the canonical rules of the global free market and voluntarily exchanged for any price that he or she could get the goods of course essays, tests and assignments, he or she as a student would be expelled as a cheat, and as a teacher would be dismissed for the grossest moral turpitude. If an educational system as a whole were to develop more and more people with such dependencies on others' work, this regime would undermine education at its foundations.
(4) In any educational institution worthy of the concept, problems of evidence or reason are discovered, opened to question and critically discussed to educate understanding, with no top-down interference permitted. In contradiction to this defining method of education, the corporate institution commands from the top what is and is not to be communicated by its agents, and repudiates any who transgress this chain of command as unemployable.
Illustration: If any principal, teacher or professor followed this managerial method of top-down command as their model of communication, and decided what was to be thought, said and done with the exclusion of critical dialogue or question on behalf of seeking truth, they would be supplanting education with coercive indoctrination and would be shown unfit to remain in a place of learning.
Conclusion: It follows from the basic contradictions between the corporate market and public educational principles that any form of education regulated to "compete in the global market" is to this extent subverted as education. What may still be called "education" will offer what corporate systems everywhere select for - a global market of consumers and workers who are operantly conditioned to predictable outcomes that maximize the private monetary interests of major stockholders without criticism or problems. Such a global market ideal is the most deeply anti-educational objective that can be imagined.