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

Tue Aug 2 10:55:31 CEST 2011

Thanks Michel this is an example of the poison that's beginning to infect
education across the world and a worry I've expressed in my published work
in a number of instances. The kind of crap the article you've forwarded to
the list talks about attempts to eliminate any hope of wisdom that develops
over time and with careful reading and thinking, i.e. scholarship and
critical thinking; for an understanding that teachers really do know more
than share-holding students. This is not a gesture toward democracy as the
story will tell you, it's a crack in the door to complete subsumption to
capitalism. It pains me to say that I'm sometimes not sure whether the next
generations will be educated at all except into learning that the world is
about competition and if you can't fight (unless we as educators continue to
resist it), give up early and let the bullies win because it's easier.
Forget widening participation and different learning styles and capacities.
Just back to the neo Darwinian nonsense. Propaganda is about education after
all.
Phoebe
On 2 Aug 2011 05:48, "Michel Bauwens" <michel at p2pfoundation.net> wrote:
> 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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