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THE
CAPITALIST TAKEOVER OF UNIVERSITIES IN THE USA By Manuel E. Yepe http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/ A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann. The great crime against education in the US is not the buying and selling of universities by for-profit corporations, but something worse. It is the deliberate “hollowing-out” of higher education centers from within as the result of a philosophy that their mission is preparing students to take jobs in the business world upon their graduation. Philosophy, art, the history of human cultures, logic and critical thinking, ethical decision-making, and humanities in general are activities usually called “academic,” and have traditionally been seen as part of the very definition of a college-level education. Their function is to deepen and expand human horizons and exercise critical thinking. They are a once-in-a-lifetime unique experience for many students. A work by Professor Robert Abele, PhD, published on March 25, 2015 in COUNTERPUNCH under the title “Conduits of Capital: The Capitalist Takeover of Higher Education” identifies three ways in particular in which this hollowing out is being done: 1) emphasis on “basic skills” courses, used to limit students' levels of reading and writing to what employers need; 2) defining as successful those centers with higher figures of students who pass; and 3) reducing, and eliminating programs that widen student’s views and teach them to rationally reflect on and analyze their society and its trends. According to Abele, in President Obama’s so-called “community college initiative,” Obama’s plan is not promoting academic education, but turning college-level education into job training. PBS Newscharacterized Obama’s community college proposal as “a plan to better connect the training of students at community colleges with specific types of jobs in the marketplace.” Even more specifically, “the plan would offer $600 million in grants to support job-driven training, like apprenticeships, that will expand partnerships with industry, businesses, unions, community colleges, and training organizations to train workers in the skills they need,” said an April 14, 2015 White House statement. Part of the process of corporatizing education has been the deliberate shrinking or even the killing-off of philosophy and humanities departments in higher education, both at community colleges and four-year colleges, across the nation. In other words, one cannot be a critical thinker, or engage in deepening one’s knowledge of human ideas or cultural development, if one is to be an employee of a US business. The corporate philosophy which is killing such programs does so primarily for two reasons: 1) such education does not have a monetary payback for the business world; 2) critical thinkers and those with scientific social knowledge a danger to corporate hegemony. “No one is arguing here that teaching basic skills and offering job training should never be a part of a community college’s mission,” says Abele. “But when that type of training becomes the primary emphasis of community college education, as it does both in Obama’s “community college initiative” and in current administrative practice in colleges today; and when it is made clear that this corporate educational philosophy determines where the money the nation earmarks for education will be funneled, then the mission and value of a distinctively academic education are clearly at risk.” Contrary to that, founding father Thomas Jefferson was a staunch supporter of what has been, until lately, the traditional definition of a college education. He believed that “In a republican nation, whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.” He added to that the critical need for “an informed citizenry” in the democratic process. There is something in our humanity being lost when the national philosophy of education becomes a means-to-an-end capitalist-oriented enterprise; when students become simply commoditized as mere future job-holders; when education is defined as the numbers of successful passing grades in courses and in graduation numbers; when content-based education that deepens the human mind and widens the human perspective is downplayed. Education is clearly in trouble in the United States. The danger to education is not due to teacher incompetence, as the media and right-wing politicians like to portray it. It is because of a lack of vision from those politicians and college administrators who cannot see anything but the flow of money, and who are allowing the revered institutions to be hollowed out and die by using them as conduits of capital. April 4, 2015. |
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