|
Home
GATS Basics
GATS 2000
GATS Debate
Campaign
Critics
Corporate
About
Feedback
|
Alex Nunn, University of Manchester
Jess Worth, People & Planet
Education has long been a corollary of democracy as it gives
'the people' the necessary skills, knowledge, reasoning and
confidence to make democracy meaningful. However, the freedom of
education and thus the vitality of democracy is under threat.
Education has come to be seen as a global market opportunity
worth an estimated US$2 trillion per year. This realisation has led
business lobbying groups, such as the powerful European Roundtable
of Industrialists, to argue that: "too often the education process
is entrusted to people who appear to have no dialogue with, nor
understanding of, industry and the path of progress... The
provision of education is a market opportunity and should be
treated as such."
GATS is clearly now regarded as one mechanism to achieve this
end, by removing such barriers to global trade in education
'products' as accreditation restrictions, investment ceilings,
government monopolies, selective application of government
subsidies, professional qualification restrictions and visa
requirements.
The USA is already explicitly targeting Higher Education (HE) in
its requests for sectoral liberalisation through GATS. Given the
weakness of the 'exemption' for public services, education at all levels may be covered by
the horizontal provisions on domestic regulation, which apply to
all services. The European Commission (which negotiates in the WTO
on behalf of EU member states) has also demonstrated its commitment
to the liberalisation of public services, as well as Public Private
Partnerships in education. Given that the Commission's 'Towards
GATS 2000' statement of intent calls GATS "first and foremost an
instrument for the benefit of business", the coverage of education
by GATS would contribute to the extension of private initiatives to
education at all levels throughout the world.
There are many shapes that this expansion of private involvement
may take, each bringing its own challenge to the vitality of
democracy. In fact, GATS will essentially speed up and spread a
process which is already happening to education in many countries --
notably the USA and UK. The experiences of these countries provide
a salient indicator of where our public education systems could be
heading under GATS.
In the USA, commercialisation in schools is rife and most openly
manifest in massive advertising programmes such as the
Channel One project, which beams a daily news broadcast containing lucrative advertising programmes into 350,000 classrooms. In return, schools receive free use of satellite dishes, VCRs and television monitors as well as other Channel One broadcasts. Other examples of advertising direct in the class room are 'free' materials such as exercise books bearing company logos, or even texts such as the Decision Earth environmental kit paid for by Procter & Gamble
(a leading nappy producer), which extolled the environmental
benefits of disposable nappies over their cloth alternatives. The
motivation for business is not just that "School is the ideal time
to influence attitudes, build long-term loyalties, introduce new
products... to generate immediate sales" (as US company
Lifelong Learning Systems puts it), but that it offers the chance
to inculcate long-term patterns of consumerism generally.
Governments are interested in promoting private sector
involvement in education as a means of tailoring the country's
skills base to the needs of business. To this end the New Labour
government in the UK has launched a raft of policies and proposals
aimed at generating "entrepreneurship, motivation, teamwork,
creativity and flexibility". Higher Education too is to provide the
'transferable skills' necessary to the workplace.
More worrying still is the tendency towards the
commercialisation of Higher Education research. As more research
funding comes from the private sector, it is increasingly tailored
to commercial needs. Even where funding is sourced from the public
sector, governments -- eager to boost competitiveness -- attach
commercial priorities to it. The implications range from the
gradual deselecting of research not seen as commercially useful to
the direct curtailment of academic freedom by forcing the
termination of the contracts of individuals who are critical of
powerful commercial sponsors.
The UK, following in the footsteps of the USA, has embarked upon
a more advanced stage of private involvement in schools,
out-sourcing aspects of school building, maintenance and education
delivery. The motivation for the private sector is that long-term
government contracts can be extremely profitable, but only where
costs can be reduced by lowering wages and cutting quality, as has
been the case with UK hospital ancillary services. Further profits
can be generated by 'asset stripping', as demonstrated by a
proposal to privatise one school in London (Pimlico), where the
profit motive was the real-estate value of its playing field.
The intrusion of these private sector motives into education,
especially under GATS rules, threatens to bring about tiered and
inequitable education systems. GATS rules may effectively prevent
government subsidies from being selectively applied to public
services. This raises the possibility of having a basic
government-funded education system, with funding given to all
providers, and then allowing individuals to enhance this by paying
top-up fees to providers with varying 'brand images', or for the
provision of 'optional extras' at an additional charge. In other
words, GATS could dramatically boost the trend away from universal
and equal access to free, publicly provided quality education,
towards the spread of education systems based on the ability of
pupils and students to pay.
In the developing world the situation is even more serious and
the anti-democratic challenges even more stark. Whilst the
provision of any education is obviously better than the provision
of none, programmes run by multilateral agencies in partnership
with the private sector, motivated by the potential for developing
cheaper workforces and new consumers for both educational and other
products, have serious implications for the development of
autonomous democracy. The perceived potential for profit making is
highlighted by the degree of interest from both traditional and
e-Universities in emerging markets, especially China.
The provision of business-focused education for profit also
threatens the long-term sustainability of cultural and linguistic
diversity, especially through the dominance of the English
language. Indeed, universities in Europe and Asia are already
beginning to offer degrees taught only in English: the language of
international business.
The redefinition of education as a profit-generating 'product',
through GATS, threatens to destroy the professionalism of
educators, to asset-strip schools and to focus educational
priorities solely on profit, the production of a compliant
workforce and willing consumers and to nullify challenging
innovative social criticism.
For further reading, see:
Previous / Contents / Next
|