'Corporations, Corporations, Education'
Blair's real priorities
The new Green Paper on education '14-19: Extending opportunites, raising standards' casts an interesting light on the government's priorities for education. Over all the details of how the curriculum and qualifications are to be reformed, economic considerations dominate. Third on the list of Education Minister Estelle Morris's priorities for education, ahead of 'a basis for citizenship and inclusion'is:
'...we must reap the skills benefits of an education system that matches the needs of the knowledge economy. It is estimated that by 2004 the UK economy will have a skill shortage of 150,000 network ICT workers alone. If our education system does not quickly respond to this demand for new skills the damage to national economic performance will be considerable.'
The view of education as primarily a means of providing trained workers to fuel the economy runs throughout the paper - the word 'employability' crops up often, as does 'work-related learning' and calls for the 'involvement of employers, including small and medium-sized enterprises [i.e. primarily large enterprises]' in education. At the core of this 'refocusing' is the government's capitulation to the demands of business - like most current economic thinking, it views helping business and the economy as an end in itself, even when, as here, it compromises the pursuit of human fulfilment.

Such thinking is not new. One of its main proponents is the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT). Since at least 1995, with the publication of its 'Education for Europeans: Towards the Learning Society' [1] the ERT has successfully pursued its agenda for the future of education, via six-monthly meetings with each new president of the European Union. The ERT's chair, Morris Tabaksblat, is also president of Reed-Elsevier, the Anglo-Dutch company intending to become the world leader in education and internet publishing.[2] BP chair Peter Sutherland heads the ERT's working group on external economic relations; he views education as 'a service to the economy.'[3]

Since the prevailing vision for the European Union is of 'a mass market'[4], education becomes merely 'a strategic issue in European competitiveness.'[5] The 'rightful place' of Europe is circumscribed within a single territory, that of the 'new market' of emerging technologies.[6] The urgency of educational reform is led by the urgency of global competition in this market. The saviour has descended in the form of information technology, but public sector education must be made to see the light, for, 'If the world of education and training does not use [Information Technology], Europe will become a mass market too late.' Too late, of course, to catch up with the US and Japan.

At the same time as transforming education service provision into a commodity to be bought and sold on the free market - under the Private Finance Initiative in the UK - corporate interests are seeking to tailor the school curriculum to their own ends, to provide productive workers with 'relevant' skills (who are also impressionable consumers) to serve the needs of the global economy.

Industrial lobby groups define those needs. Thus the precursor to the European Commission's November 1997 paper 'Towards a Europe of Knowledge' was the ERT's 'Investing in Knowledge: The Integration of Technology in European Education' the previous February, which outlined an 'information society' for a 'knowledge economy'. The type of knowledge they refer to is clear from the premise that their information society must garner it through closer co-operation with corporations. As the Reiffers Commission put it, education must adapt to the 'character of enterprise in the 21st century'[7]. This means it must be adaptable to an unstable economic environment, characterised by a dualistic labour market where, particularly in the US, there is a comparatively small high-skilled workforce in areas such as Information and Communications Technology [ICT], but a disproportionately large workforce with very low skills.

Following this logic, a high level of general education for large numbers of people is not economically justifiable. Instead, under 'education for enterprise' schools would provide basic-level core skills adaptable to fluctuating demands throughout a person's lifetime, tailored to each person's 'social destiny and financial capacity.'[8] The decentralisation of education into partially-autonomous competitive 'units' to make them more 'flexible' to economic demand entails a parallel fragmentation of the learning experience - shorter, more specialised yet less expert 'vocational' courses, presented in a variety of formats and settings to suit the skill demands of the labour market. As the OECD points out, 'this makes obsolete the locally-established institution...as well as it makes obsolete the teacher.' [9] Luckily, the ERT is on hand with the alternative: 'open-acess multi-media stations' [10], learning tools of which people must 'avail themselves...in the same way that they have television sets'. In the final enshrinement of corporate power, not only must we learn what is prescribed by the requirements of private profit, in the way that suits private profit, but we have to pay for the privilege throughout our lives.
The twin prongs of the effort to corporatise education - making profits from privatisation and tailoring the curriculum to produce worker-consumers - are not immediately compatible. Strategies need to be found to bridge the gap between making a quick buck and getting the right product. Two are currently apparent: the use of IT as a tool for standardisation and the penetration of schools by advertising and corporate sponsorship. IT offers the opportunity to partially replace teachers with machines, leading to vast savings when the same software is distributed to thousands of locations at virtually no cost beyond initial development. IT allows learning programs to be standardised - ('individually flexible' within a narrow scope) thereby facilitating the standardising of 'output'; and IT use in schools provides precisely the basic skills that corporations imagine the workers of the brave new call-centre world require. This is not to say IT should never be used in schools, but rather, as Nico Hirtt puts it, that there must be 'global reflection on a positive, pedagogic use of these technologies' - IT to benefit pupils not corporations.

Walsall is already experimenting with a few of these concepts for the future. The earlier the better for Sandbank Nursery School, where 3-5 year olds 'are encouraged to discuss the use of electronic machines', and 'visit banks and travel agents to see ICT in use', following which they use a computer in a role play. A chilling vision of a dualistic e-future emerges from the information that while children use the mouse to click on shapes for matching games, 'more able pupils are given access to the keyboard' normally 'placed behind the computer' to write their names and display labels.

Kevin Satchwell, head of Thomas Telford School in Walsall, aims to monopolise learning for post-primary children across the West Midlands with a series of 'clone' schools modelled on Thomas Telford. Satchwell was knighted in June 2001 for his 'services to education'. Perhaps that should be the service done to him by the 1,000+ schools who bought his online ICT course for £3,000 a time, enabling him to sponsor the new Walsall City Academy in 2001 with £1m, alongside Tarmac plc and The Mercers' Company of London. A portion of the £1.2m profit made by Thomas Telford's 'business arm' in 2000 will underwrite local schools' conversion to 'specialist' status.[11]
Walsall recently contracted out most of its education services to Serco, whose other contracts include asylum seeker detention centres and the electronic tagging of criminals. On the 'Walsall Grid for Learning', a teachers' website run by Serco, gems can be found such as a suggested template for creative writing using IT for 12-15 year-olds. This is to be 'a writing frame with hidden text', after whose use 'most children should be able to write creatively'. Based on a story being studied, children would write as a character, clicking on show/hide markers to reveal 'teachers' tips'. This exercise 'enables the weaker children to have help from a teacher without the need for the teacher to be present.' As for the less able, they 'could be given drop-down fields with multiple choice selections'[12]. The meaning of the word 'creative' is a little obscure here. Far from providing children with the basis to create new knowledge through experimentation and the challenge of previous assumptions, the model above eventually imposes a range of pre-set options. This is good training for consumer-citizens within the current democracy, where rigged options circumscribe the horizons of a notional 'choice' within which we exercise our so-called 'consumer power'.

Advertising and sponsorship in schools not only bring in revenue and provide free materials, but 'train' pupils as consumers and colonise previously neutral space, as Naomi Klein discusses at length in No Logo. In October 1998 the private consortium GMV Conseil produced 'Marketing in Schools' for the European Commission. Here it suggested that with 'safeguards' (surely not regulation?), school-based marketing 'opens [pupils] up to the world of business and the realities of life and society'.[13] GMV stated further that some corporate-produced advertising is also 'good quality material' for education, and noted the 'good practices' of existing ventures. Perhaps they mean the good practices of Scottish Enterprise, who distributed the US Biotechnology Industry's science magazine 'Your World' in 600 Scottish schools so that pupils could learn about 'Creating Better Plants' and growing GM soya beans at home, as well as the dangers of organic farming, while remaining ignorant of widespread opposition to GM technology.

The government's 'Connexions Card' is another innovation combining the IT and advertising approaches. It is the keystone of the all-new 'Connexions' (bet they failed the spelling test) careers service administered by PFI favourites Capita (see CW Newsletter 6). The new education Green Paper sums up how the Card works:

'6.17 The Connexions Card uses leading-edge smart card technology to encourage and motivate young people to stay in learning after compulsory schooling. It aims to do this by giving access to a range of discounts (for example on public transport, books and equipment); rewarding attendance and application through incentives and further discounts within leisure facilities and on the high street; and providing information on careers and life choices through a website. The smart card will also facilitate...monitoring attendance on education and training courses...'

A lowering in the quality of general education is a tacitly accepted result of privatisation for profit. Christian Morrison of the OECD writes: 'If operating expenditure is trimmed, the quantity of the service should not be reduced, even if the quality of the service will have to suffer. For example, operating credits for schools and universities may be reduced, but it would be dangerous to restrict the numbers of students. Families will react violently if children are refused admission, but not to a gradual reduction in the quality of the education given, and the school can progressively and for particular purposes obtain a contribution from the families, or eliminate a given activity. This should be done case by case, in one school but not in the neighbouring establishment, so that any general discontent of the population is avoided.'[14] Similarly, privatisation is likely to increase social differentiation - the OECD defines the 'only' future role of the public sector as being 'to ensure access to learning for those who will never be a profitable market, and whose exclusion from society in general will be accentuated as others continue to progress.'[15]
The privateers' mantra holds that efficiency is the result of financial incentive in a competitive context. If this is so, we should lobby for mothers and fathers to contract out their parenting, since competing for a financial incentive should produce the best parent for any child, and the parenting should be more 'efficient'. In life, competition distracts from the importance of the job at hand: to educate, to care for. Competition won't ensure that Serco cares about the fulfillment of Walsall's children.

Coming soon - The Private Sector on the web - a new section on the Corporate Watch website with research on the privatisation of public services - how it works, where it is happening, which services, and which companies are involved. We may also publish a print booklet on this area if there is sufficient demand - contact us if you might be interested in this.

Alternatives: Education for Sustainability
'A public education system is based on the principle that you care whether the kid down the street gets an education.' Noam Chomsky.[16]
Chomsky sees the privatisation of education as an attack on solidarity. In practice solidarity is fundamental to domestic opposition, the only thing that can thwart national governments' mania to privatise.

The concepts of solidarity, mutual sympathy and cooperation which in Chomsky's view are threatened by the current ideology of privatisation, would be central to a democratic education for contemporary society as the foundation for peace. The World Forum on Education outlines that alternative in a text presented this year to the World Social Forum.[17] The Forum calls for a view of education as 'a right to the universal, to cultural difference, to personal originality'. In this context, a democratic education should teach the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, guided by the perspective of sustainable development. It should develop 'critical, rational thought, which protects against...fundamentalism and demagogic populism, which takes into consideration scientific and technological evolution but doesn't confuse access to information with access to knowledge'. Such education would require democratic and participatory management of institutions and would foster 'the right to intellectual activity, to expression, to the imaginary, to art, to the control of one's own body, to the natural and social environment, to the reference points which allow us to construct our relationships to the world, to others and to ourselves.'
In short, education for socially, culturally and politically conscious human beings, not worker-consumer clones for corporate use. The government's choices show where its loyalties lie.

1 ERT, Brussels, March 1995
2 The Ecologist; Laurence Kalaftides, 'Education: on the ropes' p26-31 Nov 2001 vol31 n9, p27
3 ibid. p27
4 Reiffers Commission, 'Accomplishing Europe through education and training' 1996, quoted in Nico Hirtt, 'From Brussels to Lisbon, The ERT Education-Agenda put into practice by the European Commission' presented at 'Globalisation, Identities and Educational Policy in Europe University of Keele, 28 June 2001, p7
5 Reiffers Commission, p1 in Hirrt, p4
6 ibid.
7 Reiffers Commission op cit
8 Hirrt, op cit p5
9 OECD, Analyse des politiques d'education Paris 1998
10 ERT, op cit
11 Donald McLeod, The Guardian 15 June 2001
12 Gail Charlton 'Writing an Essay Using Hidden Prompts' www.schools.walsallgfl.org.uk/ideas/defaults/htm
13 GMV Conseil, Marketing in Schools October 1998, quoted in Hirtt, op cit
14 OECD The Political Feasibility of Adjustment Policy Brief n13, 1996
15 OECD Adult Learning in OECD Countries, OECD Proceedings, Paris 1996
16 Noam Chomsky, 'Assaulting Solidarity-Privatising Education' Zetnet 12 May 2000 at www.zmag.org/Zsustainers/Zdaily/2000-05/12chomsky.htm
17 Bernard Charlot Appel pour une école démocratique (APED) Forum Mondial sur l'Education, a text presented to the Forum Social Mondial at Porto Alegre, 1- 2 February 2002, accessible at http://users.skynet.be/aped