Education Inc.
Text and Photos: Keetah Bryant (FRL)

The beacon of education shines most brightly to those in search of upwards mobility, to individuals deep in the trenches of lower middle class society. Among this demographic exists a common desire to rise above the ignorance and poverty that currently surround them. Our governments offer this lower echelon of citizens student loans, so that they may obtain that mighty equalizer; a post secondary degree. With debt in tow, droves of the impoverished, young and old alike, enter into the slick classrooms of the academic and scholarly elite, prepared to be educated and eventually liberated.

Many parents with children in school, hard working parents, wish they had had the opportunity as their children do now, to pursue a (NEW WORD other than good), free, education, offered by a public system. Trusting this system to educate their children in the “naturally superior” Western way, many parents, representing a full gamut of ethnicities, send their children to a North American school, for a North American style education that “leaves no child behind”.

Perhaps there was time before now, when teachers were well-respected and appropriately remunerated members of our society. A time when texts were objectively written; a time when quality mattered; a time when the profit interests of individuals would never interfere with the purity of a genuine education - something we in the Western world have apparently mastered. Unfortunately, that time is no longer at hand.


Society and the Corporate Individual


The introduction of the ever-powerful corporate “individual” into our society changed everything, from our common values to our systems of socialization and interaction. Everything was restructured and re-conceptualized to allow for the presence and proliferation of this new sort of citizen. What savings, what value, what economic prosperity these corporations brought! We welcomed them into our streets, into our homes, and into our schools, unaware of the dire consequences that were to follow.


Today’s Lesson is Brought to You By....

Here in British Columbia we witnessed our teachers cope with cramped classrooms and inadequate funding, as they worked for months without a contract. They undertook “unlawful” job action, and then were subsequently bullied back into their classrooms by harsh penalties from “above”. Our public schools are still scrambling for finances, and increasingly so as the pace of new technology moves ever quicker. This is a weakness in our public education system that our corporate citizens exploit.

“It was technology that lent a new urgency to nineties chronic underfunding: at the same time as schools were facing ever-deeper budget cuts, the costs of delivering a modern education were rising steeply, forcing many educators to look to alternative sources of funding for help.”(Naomi Klein, No Logo, 2002)



Enter Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nike, and all the other permeating brands, set to provide a funding alternative to our suffering schools in exchange for unbridled psychological access to our children. Intimately related with the concepts of mathematics, problem-solving, creation, and expression, are the names, images, and feelings associated with these all- pervasive brands.


“Teaching students and building brand awareness, these corporations seem to believe, can be two aspects of the same project.” (Klein, 2002)

The Youth News Network in Canada is just one of these examples. In their case they provide schools with audio video equipment and “free” computers that they can use, in exchange for being able to air two minutes of television advertising per day in the classrooms of the schools that accepted the equipment. The ads cannot be turned off, nor the volume adjusted. Zap Me!, a free in-school Internet browser (accompanied by these “free” computers), monitors the students’ surfing patterns and then send them advertising that is specifically selected for each individual student. The argument is of course, that at least computers and technology are then available for everyone to use. But the question then becomes, who’s using who?
The corporations are also invading lunchrooms and school cafeterias with their so-called “food products”, which have only lead to obesity and poor health among their users.




“In Toronto, [Pepsi] gets to fill the 560 public schools with it’s vending machines, to block the sales of Coke and other competitors, and to distribute “Pepsi Achievement Awards” and other goodies emblazoned with it’s logo.” (Klein, 2002)

Children even participate in corporate-oriented learning in their classrooms, assisting corporations in determining what might be the best product, the best way to advertise it, and the best place to sell it.


“At Vancouver’s Laurier Annex school, students in Grades 3 and 4 designed two new product lines for the British Columbia restaurant chain White Spot. For several months in 1997, the children worked on developing the concept and packaging for ‘Zippy’ pizza burgers, a product that is now on the kids’ menu at White Spot.....The students’ corporate presentation included sample commercials, menu items, party games... taking into account such issues as safety, possible food allergies and low costs... According to nine year old Jefferey Ye, ‘It was a lot of work.’” (Klein, 2002)

Universities have also become a breeding ground for corporate invasion. Billboards are appearing on everything from bike racks to bathroom doors - the landscape of most campuses is littered with logos. And not only do the corporations infiltrate the visual landscape, they are also influencing and infiltrating the content of academic texts ( at all levels of education), and they are commandeering our public institutional research facilities and academic journals.

“All over the world, university campuses are offering their research facilities, and priceless academic credibility, for the brands to use as they please. And in North America today, corporate research partnerships are used for everything: designing new Nike skates, developing more efficient oil extraction techniques for Shell, ... or measuring the relative merits of a brand-name drug....”(Naomi Klein, No Logo, 2002)

It wouldn’t be terrible I guess, if corporations were able to give money to desperate educational institutions, in order for them to continue offering unparalleled academic instruction to the country’s smartest kids. But when the academic integrity of our schools is miserably failing, in part due to numerous fraudulent research reports issued by tenured and revered staff at these places, (See “The Secret Life of Dr. Chandra” at www.cbc.ca), it’s hard to see where the benefit lies, unless you’re a corporation or the recipient of a major payoff, which can be the case at times, it seems.

“On the surface, it’s easier to account for the increasing realization of the corporate-linked university than it is to account for lack of resistance to it...a significant if not transformative pattern of institutional change has occurred over a relatively short period of time. And in many ways, these changes sharply contrast to both the idea and the practices of the university that preceded them, the university in which most current members of the academy began their careers.” (Janice Newson, York University Sociology Professor).

It’s hard to deny the changing face of our schools and the fundamental change in values that inevitably accompanies such a grand (and rather hasty) paradigm shift. Where once our educational institutions served to proliferate knowledge, research, and obtain truths through unbiased processes, they now serve as legitimating fronts on which corporations can wage war against each other with their “legitimate research proves” claims. And while they are inventing these “legitimate” research results, they are quickly and mercilessly encroaching on our very valuable and very susceptible psychological space. The seduction of profit has severely and negative altered the value basis on which all fundamental educational institutions were built. As such, the profit motive has succeeded in changing their inherent function of educational institutions. In the past there was a value placed on the knowledge of fact and the objectively rigid quality of research that went into obtaining those facts. Today there is a higher value placed on profit, brand awareness, and mass internalization of this new mode of profit/brand-centered thought throughout society.

Related Information:

Use the following links to take a look at other people’s like concerns around the globe.
http://www.nologo.org/

http://www.weac.org/News/2000-01/oct00/commercialism.htm

http://www.alternet.org/story/14355/

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/classroom.html

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/10/273954.shtml




Interested in reading the rest of No Logo by Naomi Klein? View sample pages here:
http://books.google.ca/books?ie=UTF-8&vid=ISBN0312421435&id=QoNxo_bZRiMC&dq=naomi+klein,+no+logo&lpg=PA2&pg=PA2&sig=-tDO3cEULGEj0cXdGT8K0Vsu6gw