Corporatism and Education

By allowing the handover of our public schools to corporate America we have endangered children and the future of society.

The turnover, which is openly acknowledged in the U.S., is a perilous and costly trend. Its negative effects are measurable in the dropout rates of high school students who sense their needs being ignored while select elite students race on the fast track to the rich corporate subsidies, or professions, that society pronounces desirable and obtainable only by the best of the best.

This elitism is the underpinning of corporate-sponsored schools and has for years now damaged young lives. It has created a caste of undesirables whose real interests and passions are often dismissed as superfluous to the needs of big business.

To ignore and fail society’s rebels, overtly or subtly, has brought us our current troubles in the form of group-think and a constricted view of what constitutes success.

The encroachment of corporate power over public schools is as anti-democratic as a poor minimum wage and just as reckless. The implicit message under the corporate-sponsored school system is that if schools are not spewing out corporate workers the system has somehow failed society. This is the antithesis of reason and fair play.

Any time a corporate spokesperson informs us that education equals economic nirvana he is obfuscating, particularly if the effect of his empire is to create a class of automatons intent on depleting the Earth’s fossil fuels and generally degrading the environment.

While one of education’s noblest goals ought to be to enhance the self-actualization and socialization of learners, we have seen many recent instances where negative behavior among the powerful has ruined lives--theirs and their subjects. That is not exactly the sort of self-actualization and socialization we need to blindly embrace.

We are seeing the sad results of corporatism...a withering of freedom and democracy.

And I can't believe I'm still talking about this stuff.


TS