The following is mirrored from its source at:
http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=481
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The Corporate Takeover of Childhood
Schools are being privatised in order to develop a new export industry
By George Monbiot
8th January 2002
The Guardian [UK]
For many children, a new school term begins with apprehension. But
yesterday it wasn't just the children who were worried about what
they might encounter. Every term now brings another government
scheme, to re-finance, outsource, subcontract, reclassify, zone or
cluster some aspect of the handling of our children. And parents,
reasonably enough, are becoming ever more suspicious.
What these changes mean, confusing as they are, is privatisation.
It won't happen all at once, as Labour is anxious to avoid the
confrontations which have taken place between parents and private
companies in the United States. But we should be foolish to
mistake the government's purpose. The general privatisation of
schooling in Britain has begun.
Several theories have been advanced to account for Labour's
strange enthusiasm for disposing of our schools, but the most
convincing I have seen is the one articulated last year by a
lecturer at the University of Central England called Richard
Hatcher, in the journal Education and Social Justice.
A few years ago, prompted by the powerful European Roundtable of
Industrialists, Tony Blair identified the "knowledge economy" as
the driver of future British growth. The UK would specialise in
industries such as information technology, biotech and second
generation services. As the export value of manufacturing, farming
and even some of the traditional service industries declined,
Britain would become a market leader in exporting a new
international business: privatisation.
This strategy has so far been resoundingly successful. The private
finance initiative, for example, was pioneered in the UK, then
exported by British companies to countries as far apart as
Finland, Canada and South Africa. Though their sales of hospitals,
roads, prisons and waterworks are of dubious value to the
recipients, they are massively profitable for our corporations,
not least because, having arrived on the scene before anyone else,
they are all but free from foreign competition. Now Blair wants to
do the same for education.
The UK's private education industry, Hatcher argues, "has to be
fostered and nourished by the state until it is strong enough to
compete with US and other competitors". Once they have gathered
enough money and experience from the domestic economy, schooling
companies can then try to penetrate the markets of other
countries. While the United Kingdom's schools might one day be
worth some pounds25 billion a year to potential "investors", the
US system has been valued at $700 billion. Worldwide, education is
worth trillions. If the UK can seize an early, substantial share
of this market, our economy will become, to all intents and
purposes, recession-proof.
So our own children are, in this picture, simply the crash dummies
with which the UK tests its future export policy. Companies will
practise on them until they find the right economic formula and
attain sufficient economies of scale. Then they will apply that
formula worldwide.
This theory appears to explain the remarkable variety of
privatisation and part-privatisation schemes currently being
tested in Britain. Education action zones and city technology
colleges have failed to produce the necessary cash, so they have
been superseded by a new experiment in the shape of the city
academies. These schools receive 80% of their money from the
state, but are controlled by private companies. Elsewhere,
existing comprehensives, like King's Manor in Guildford and
Abbeylands in Addlestone (both in Surrey), have been franchised to
corporations. Private schools are now considering the purchase of
parts of the state sector.
The government has also been experimenting with the management of
Local Education Authorities, privatising either some of the
services they offer, or, in the case of Leeds, the entire outfit.
In some places, it has sold off school inspections, in others
teachers' pay and pensions. It has been "market testing" several
different versions of the private finance initiative, in which
companies provide buildings and services to education authorities
for a fee. It has developed a private market, already worth some
pounds1 billion, in "e-learning", or computer-based education.
These efforts have established a climate in which corporations are
able to gain unprecedented access to schoolchildren. Last year,
for example, the government agency Scottish Enterprise distributed
20,000 copies to schools of a magazine called Biotechnology and
You. This purports to be a "teacher's resource" helping children
to navigate the moral and scientific complexities surrounding
genetically engineered crops. But Scottish Enterprise failed to
warn teachers that the "Biotechnology Institute", which published
it, is a lobby group funded by Monsanto, Novartis, Pfizer and
Rhone-Poulenc. The magazine repeats Monsanto's misleading claim
that its best-selling herbicide is "less toxic to us than table
salt". It attacks organic farming and suggests that it would be
"immoral" not to develop GM crops.
In England, the old careers advisory service run by the Department
for Education is gradually being replaced by a new agency, called
Connexions. Once they have registered with this service,
schoolchildren are given a swipe card, on which they accumulate
points every time they turn up. They trade the points for
discounts from the consumer goods listed on the Connexions
website. The choices they make are monitored, and the information
is then given to the service's "commercial partners". Last year,
the education firm Capita, which runs Connexions for the
government, told the Times Educational Supplement that companies
such as McDonalds and PlayStation Magazine would have "the
opportunity of seeing what these young people take up. They can be
a very difficult group to reach."
By themselves, few of these developments will bring people onto
the streets. "Labour," Richard Hatcher predicts, "will move
cautiously and gradually, carefully preparing each step
ideologically." Or, as the chief executive of the "edubusiness"
firm Nord Anglia commented when he read the white paper the
government released in September, "This is an astonishingly
important point of transition. It is tentative, because it's
politically sensitive, but it opens the door for the private
sector to get involved, bit by bit."
We could argue about whether or not these steps towards full-scale
privatisation improve or damage standards in education. In the
United States, the evidence suggests that privatisation has been
disastrous. In the UK, so far, the results are mixed. But this
really isn't the point. Our schools are being privatised not for
the benefit of our children, but for the benefit of our
corporations, and the export economy to which, the government
hopes, they will one day contribute. Children are simply the raw
materials with which they work. They will unless their parents
demand an end to this experiment of being traded on the world's
stock markets like so many barrels of oil.