[P2P-F] education for self-profit ...

Tue Aug 2 06:47:15 CEST 2011

It seems to me there is an emerging version of 'open' that is a
hyper-neoliberal one, or perhaps right-wing libertarian,

see for example,
http://miiu.org/wiki/Vesting_students_as_co-owners_of_schools

which must be about the most awful proposal for reforming education that
I've seen so far ...

in this version: people and parents would co-own the school, but the aim
would be to generate profit, i.e. learning becomes a by-product of making a
profit

the same people propose 'free economic zones' with zero worker rights, etc
...

I notice this is on John Robb's miu site under the name of resilience ...

please note that I have no problem with co-ownership, only with the notion
that education is a for-profit activity and that this would be strenghtened
by giving students a vested interest in commercial activity ...;
co-ownership of a mission-oriented educational institution would be an
entirely different matter

the issue at state here, a true ontological issue, is inscribing
hyper-capitalism even deeper in the human structure,

I have personal experience of this. Years ago, I was working for USWeb/CKS -
MarchFIRST, a web consultancy that grew by leaps and bounds before
collapsing. They had instituted a system whereby developers would become
co-owners of the projects with our clients. The results were catastrophic as
the whole culture of the company destroyed internal cooperation, since
everyone was internally competing with everyone else, you could not call up
a sister company, as they would steal your clients ...  (actually that
culture predated that reform, which only strenghtened it and was itself the
result of a particular type of thinking). We had Jerry Springer-type
meetings in which employees were competing to win prizes to exotic
locations, and a VP saying: "if you see a competitor and he's down, jump on
him again and again" .. The whole atmosphere was entirely disgusting.

To imagine such dynamics taking over the school environment, is a nightmare
of the highest proportion.

Again this is not an opposition on any market dynamic per se. For example an
interesting project is Kaospilots, a school for social enterpreneurship
where students need to fund one third of their education by external
consultancies ... but this is done entirely in the context of social
projects, and it is a school for enterpreneurship that comes after general
education, so it makes sense.

Michel

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