One step closer to a corporatist dystopian future
Published by Sabotabby January 28th, 2008 in Edumakashun, Meat!, Work, Shame on you for not being rich white and privileged, A million ways to mortgage the future, Corporate Idiocy, book larnin'…where you can get a high school diploma by working in McDonald’s
Do I need to point out everything that’s wrong with this? Corporate sponsorship of public education is a vicious cycle. First, the government cuts funding to schools. Next, a corporation approaches the desperately underfunded school to bail it out—Nike will build you a new basketball court, in exchange for some brand-name recognition. How could any inner city school refuse? Then, the government is free to shirk its responsibility for funding, because hey, someone’s already paying.
I doubt there will be much of an outcry as the education of the underclass is slowly handed over to corporations eager for a docile, under-educated workforce. In my province, this has been going on for awhile—Ontario high school students must complete 40 hours of community involvement to graduate. The lofty rationale behind the policy (”to encourage students to develop awareness and understanding of civic responsibility and of the role they can play and the contributions they can make in supporting and strengthening their communities”) sounds nice until you read the rest of it; students, most of whom already have part- or full-time jobs, can complete these hours “in a variety of settings, including businesses, not-for-profit organizations, public sector institutions (including hospitals), and informal settings.” While I’ve been in community activist groups that have taken on student volunteers, most kids end up doing free labour for businesses.
Welcome to the future: Liberal educations for the rich, indentured corporate servitude for everyone else.
Heh, reminds me of when the middle school I went to got a vending machine. Apparently one of the cola brands (I honestly forget which one) helped pay for some renovation, in exchange for the vending machine. Some parents didn’t like it, but they couldn’t remove the vending machine, so the faculty kept it unplugged during school hours. >.
I confess that I’m not seeing the problem here, only the squick. This is tied to the fact that they’re now extending compulsory education in the UK to 18; this is squicky two-tiering, yes, but it means that the kids who’ve previously dropped out after GCSEs because they want to be big kids with spending money can continue some form of education. I can’t imagine these Mcwhatsits being as sought-after as more traditional apprenticeships or GNVQs, but they are part of a whole that I think is good and worth supporting, namely education for all up to the age of 18, no getouts even if the kid thinks they want to. Contrary to what you suggest, school funding is pledged to increase to at least £8000 per child (from £5000ish) within three years.
There’s not a problem with corporate interests taking over the business of public education? Public education ought to serve the public interest, not train workers for McDonald’s.
Is the £3000 increase enough to cover the cost of keeping children who would otherwise drop out in school until 18 (a problematic goal to begin with; they are doing the same thing in Ontario without, as far as I can tell, hiring extra teachers or social workers)? I doubt it; education is expensive. Unless, of course, your teaching is being done not by a trained and qualified teacher but by a pimply-faced McDonald’s manager.
The more control you give corporations, the more they’ll take. This is a lesson we’ve long been learning in North American schools—I suppose the Brits are only now hopping on the bandwagon. It starts with Nike building a basketball court and the next thing you know, children are being suspended for refusing to watch advertising along with their morning announcements.
The £8000 target is per pupil so the more kids stay in formal education, the more gets spent. What else is going to get cut to cover it, I dread to think. I’m not convinced that throwing money at education is the only thing that needs to be done to fix it. But that money includes the training and pay of teachers, and teacher recruitment continues apace on every other billboard, so I don’t believe that staffing is the problem with the idea. The problem is that a lot of the kids who do drop out at 14 or 16 are those who have serious literacy problems because they were horribly let down in their early years, and I don’t see how forcing them to stay in education or training til they’re 18 is going to help them.
My reading of this is that public education isn’t touching Macky D’s at all here - they’re giving private education to their workers that ends in a recognised qualification that they believe will represent transferable skills. Whether it works depends on whether other employers accept the qualification. I could be wrong, but I have yet to see anything even hinting that any public funding will be used for the training. The only real downside I see here is that it will be used for fudging - a kid who quits school to go work at McDs will be said to still be in education even if they manifestly aren’t, just so the targets get met.
As for private money in public education, that’s been going wrong here for long enough already. It’s only relation to this case is the common thread of New Labour’s love of other people’s money.
This bothered me at first, and then I thought: maybe they have that in so that kids who already have jobs, (and ergo, not a lot of time for community service) don’t have to be slowed down.
I doubt there will be much of an outcry as the education of the underclass is slowly handed over to corporations eager for a docile, under-educated workforce.
This is what I think people are missing. Establishing a corporate subsidy of education is inviting disaster, since corporations like McDonald’s do not gain from a well-educated workforce, just the opposite. They can leech of an under-educated populace of workers more easily than otherwise. Therefore, establish a dependence on your corporation, within the education system, and expand as needed. There’s no reason for them, logistically, to care about bettering their workers’ station in life. This is the same type of ludicrous bullshit that was tried before in America, albeit, in a different era. Rich companies have zero vested interest in making their employees smarter or more socially mobile. That is capitalism in a nutshell.
Establishing a corporate subsidy of education is inviting disaster
Am I missing something here? Where’s the subsidy? Is there something you’ve read about subsidies that I haven’t? I understood this was an accredited version of some existing privately funded training thing. As for whether they do or do not care about bettering people; they’re one of three corporations who have been given this accreditation thing - the other two are attracting little notice thus far. I’d love to know how competitive that was, what they had to do to convince someone that their training was up to much. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a stitch-up, with little real competition or meagre analysis of what McD’s was doing. But I’d like to see evidence of that before slotting into a rant.
Where’s the subsidy?
You’re right, I chose the incorrect word for it.
But I’d like to see evidence of that before slotting into a rant.
I went into a rant? Well, okey dokey. Me, I don’t trust any corporation like McDonald’s to educate its employees adequately. I personally need evidence that they actually are educating their people.
For me, there are a lot of reasons why this is rantworthy rather than just squicksome. A major one is what JackGoff said; McDonald’s interests are contrary to those of the working class when it comes to education. But beyond that:
1) There’s a difference between flipping burgers at McDonald’s and an actual apprenticeship (I support the latter). Training as a plumber at a company means that you can be an independent company, or work for another company, or teach other people how to be plumbers. “Training” at McDonald’s means that you can flip burgers at McDonald’s. They’re not interested in job mobility.
2) If the government is going to decide that kids need to stay in school until 18, then keep them in school, or at least within an environment where they’re being educated. Saying “we’re keeping them in school until 18!” and then deciding “flipping burgers at McDonald’s = school” is disingenuous.
There’s no educational difference between a kid who drops out at 16 and works at McDonald’s and a kid who goes to work for McDonald’s at 16 instead of going to school. There may be a difference in credentials, since the latter now gets a diploma, but this just devalues the diploma. The kid is no more educated.
egads, it’s like that scene in Costco from Idiocracy , only…it’s real. *shivers*
Frito: Yah, I know this place pretty good. I went to law school here.
Joe: In Costco?
Frito: Yah, I couldn’t believe it myself. Luckily, my dad is an alum and pulled some strings.
Sabotabby, I agree with what you say but you (like Yahoo) are seemingly trying to translate this-all into the language of US education and are coming up short in places like this:
There’s no educational difference between a kid who drops out at 16 and works at McDonald’s and a kid who goes to work for McDonald’s at 16 instead of going to school. There may be a difference in credentials, since the latter now gets a diploma, but this just devalues the diploma. The kid is no more educated.
People here tend to take GCSEs (generally between 9 and 11 of them) at 16 and either vocational qualifications (GNVQs) or A-Levels (3-5 academic certificates - I have 4) at 18. So both those kids would have a crop of GCSEs; plus it’s pretty normal to drop out of academic-only education at 16 and move on to something more useful - most of the nursing students I know switched to nursing NVQs instead of academic learning at 16, for example, and there’s nothing odd or inferior about it. I sure as hell don’t trust Macky D’s to provide that kind of transferable vocational education, but the concept itself is neither new nor bad.
Thene, I’m not American.
We have co-ops and apprenticeships that count for high school credits here (in Canada), too. I don’t have a problem with this; I think it’s a good thing for the most part. But there’s a world of difference between learning the skills that you need to be a plumber, or an electrician, or a carpenter, and flipping burgers. That difference is the difference between education and credentialing. McDonald’s can credential—that’s a decision that the state makes—but they’re sure as hell not able to educate.
Having checked the Province of Ontario’s description of what activities constitute acceptable volunteer hours, I noted that students could not volunteer for something that was ordinarily a paid duty, ie: they could not volunteer and take over hours for which someone else might be hired for pay. I realize that this could be gotten around, but I’m hoping not.
What about the kids who love something like vetinary work, so they volunteer to help at an animal clinic? I’m assuming this is the intention of the volunteer hours, that students give back to and become involved in community life. Since this is very common within a home-based educational setting, the schools are late to come on board. I would not, however, think that because a student is interested in the hospitality or food service industry as a career, that they should work for free at McDonalds. I don’t see how that would even be possible from a legal liability standpoint. What happens if the student is injured on the job?
Like a lot of things, this volunteering sounds like a good idea–and there is not the infrastructure to support it. The schools don’t have to be involved in helping the student with volunteer placements, only with approving them and handling the paper work.
Big business has shaped American education since the time of the Rockefellers. What shocks me is not the idea of volunteer hours, but of food and drink mandated by a certain company for a school, advertising in school bathroom stalls, or of educational modules provided by companies with their own business slant. Think major old companies designing slick curriculums on environmental management. Shudder.