Open
World Conference of Workers
In Defense of Trade Union Independence & Democratic Rights
EDUCATION
IS NOT A COMMODITY:
Fighting the Privatization of Higher Education Worldwide
By DAN KAPLAN
[Note: Following is the full text of the presentation by Dan Kaplan to the
March 25th report-back meeting from the International Conference Against
Deregulation (held in Berlin at the end of February). Kaplan, who was a
delegate to the Berlin Conference from his union, is the Executive
Secretary of AFT Local 1493 in San Mateo, Calif. The report-back meeting
was held in San Francisco at the Plumbers' Hall and drew more than 100
unionists and activists. For a more complete report on the Berlin
conference, visit our web site at owcinfo.org.]
"Education is the property of no one. It belongs to the people as a
whole. And if education is not given to the people, they will have to take
it." - Che Guevara
I had the opportunity to attend the International Conference Against
Deregulation and Privatization in Berlin, Germany, on February 22-24. The
Conference themes of privatization and deregulation refer to the major
trend of governments around the world to erode and eliminate government
services, such as health care, education and social services, with the
goal of giving over as much as possible of these public services to
private companies.
Well over 400 participants - representing trade union, political, and
popular organizations - were in attendance. The individual participants
came from 51 different countries. I was asked by the conference organizers
to be one of the featured speakers on a panel that would discuss "University
and Youth" issues. The other panelists came from Peru, England,
Burundi, and Germany.
The Conference established a balance sheet that indicted the deregulation
and privatization policies that are now being promoted and implemented
around the world. The Conference, as such, represented an appeal to pursue
and develop all efforts in all countries to stop these devastating
policies. The focus of my attention, of course, was to learn as much as
possible about attempts currently being pursued in various countries
around the world that aim to achieve the privatization of public education.
I would like to share a little of what I learned in Berlin in
conversations with teachers and teachers' union leaders. The story that I
want to tell begins in 1995.
But before I begin this story, perhaps a few contextual facts are in order
to help frame the discussion: 1) Over 115 million children worldwide
between the ages of 6 and 12 do not go to school, and a large number of
those that do attend school, leave before completing primary education; 2)
250 million children between the ages of 6 and 14 are forced to work for a
living; 3) 882 million people are illiterate; and 4) over two thirds of
the national governments worldwide allocate less than 6% of GDP to
education.
In January 1995, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) was
established as a legal framework for countries engaged in trade
negotiations in a broad range of service sectors, including higher
education. Today the GATS negotiations are continuing under the auspices
of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In December 2000, U.S. officials
submitted a broad proposal to reduce international barriers to trade in
higher education. This little-known proposal has caused deep concern among
many in the education community, who say that federal policy is being
unfairly set by for-profit education providers, including
distance-education institutions in particular.
The imprint of these for-profit institutions on the U.S. treaty proposal
is thought to be obvious. Also, it is widely thought that this proposal
was sent to the World Trade Organization without being seen or discussed
by the major representatives of the higher-education community. The fear
is that such a treaty could drive a wedge between public and private
institutions in the United States, and threaten developing countries'
efforts to create their own educational systems. Countries struggling to
build a national higher-education system could see large numbers of
middle-class and affluent students enrolling in private foreign colleges -
including distance-learning institutions - leaving poorer students behind
in a decaying public higher-education system that does not receive enough
financial support from its government.
Burundi, for example, just last month announced that it is closing down
entirely its public education system in three years. It claims that the
private sector will be able to provide for the country's educational needs.
But private education in Burundi has a parasitic relationship to the
public education system, and without a public education system there would
be no private education sector functioning in the country. In other words,
the privatization of the university system in Burundi will mean the
destruction, pure and simple, of higher education in the country, because
no one in the private sector will be interested in subsidizing an
unprofitable university system. This means in effect the destruction in
Burundi of higher education as a constituent part of the nation.
The inclusion of higher education in the GATS negotiations has been the
subject of much debate within Education International (El), an
international body representing 309 national teachers' unions from 150
countries, including the AFT and NEA in the United States. In fact, last
summer at the Third World Congress of El, held in Jomtien, Thailand, on
July 25-29, this international organization of teachers' unions passed its
strongest resolution to date (titled "Educating In a Global Economy"),
which said in part:
"Huge public funds are being released to encourage the development of
on-line education, and the promise of an education via new technologies is
being used as an excuse to deny legitimate claims regarding the building
or the upgrading of schools and the recruitment of new teachers and
personnel of all categories. More and more students are deprived of their
right to study, as they are compelled to follow electronic courses and
watch video-conferences instead of following regular courses. University
institutions are trying to seize teachers' intellectual property rights
and plan to sell their courses to other universities, to business and to
individual buyers. This leads to the privatization of schools and to the
emergence of specialised firms..."
In addition to the passage of this resolution, EI also produced an
interesting document at its last World Congress titled "Theme Report
2: Education and New Technology." To give a sense of EI's developing
analysis of these issues, let me quote various passages from this text.
After noting that "many enterprises have also realized that education
and training might constitute an extensive market from which profits could
be made" the text later comments that "higher and continuing
education in the context of lifelong learning will probably be the sectors
in which individualized and market education and training are most likely
to develop."
The document further observes: "The rapid development of the Internet
is weakening national legislation dealing with intellectual property.
American universities, for example, claim property of the inventions and
patents developed by their teaching staff by using a provision in the law
on author's rights that sees the recruitment of a person as the quid pro
quo for the work carried out. In simple terms, this means that if a worker
invents or creates something in the course of his/her employment, the
employer owns it simply because the employer has hired the services of
that worker... The control of email messages sent and received by
university teachers and administrators is another attack on employees'
private lives and professional freedoms."
The EI analysis continues: "This new way of delivering courses poses
the extremely serious problem of quality, and of the accreditation of
certificates obtained by students following them." EI understands
that these concerns really represent a fundamental challenge to the
continued existence of quality public education in society.
As the text puts it: "Could the unavoidable use by education systems
of new information and communication technology, with all the challenges
that it poses, call into question the future place of public education in
our societies?" As the report notes, there are those "who
believe that the use of new information and communication technology will
lead to a kind of industrialization and commercialization of education and
training. There is no doubt that for political and electoral reasons,
governments will usually maintain a public sector, but one whose influence
will be limited because of shortage of funds."
The EI document concludes by arguing that the "deregulation of
education phenomenon still needs to be examined very closely. For EI,
liberalization of the education sector, which is what a majority grouping
in the WTO would like, is completely unacceptable. Education must continue
to be a responsibility of the State, and at a time of major changes,
national and international governments must take on new responsibilities."
In particular, EI notes several functions that governments should provide:
1) be responsible for the control and regulation of the education market;
2) guarantee the quality of content of education software; 3) preserve
cultural identities; 4) guarantee exceptions in applying copyright law in
favor of education and training; 5) guarantee the accreditation and
recognition of certificates and diplomas; and 6) guarantee intellectual
property and pedagogical freedoms for education employees and researchers.
Just a few days after the conclusion of last summer's Education
International World Congress, Michael Moore, the Director General of the
WTO (not the American filmmaker and author of the same name) called the
leadership of EI. He explained that there had been a misunderstanding, and
that the WTO had no intention of including higher education in the ongoing
GATS negotiations!
But there should be no misunderstanding on this point. As the "Appeal
of Teachers and Teacher Trade Union Members In Support of the Berlin
Conference" makes clear: "The WTO - despite the denials of its
representatives - is planning to put education, health, and social
services on the agenda of the General Agreement of Trade in Services (GATS),
which opens the door to the commercialization of education services."
The stakes are quite high, as the Berlin Conference Appeal makes clear:
"The fact is that nowadays big international corporations want their
share of the world 'market' in education, which in 1999 was estimated to
be worth US$2.2 trillion. Š Their aim is to transform education into just
another commodity, into some kind of industry selling its products (courses)
to 'customers' (pupils and students) in a market ruled by the law of
supply and demand. ... It is clear that the big corporations and
financiers are listened to carefully by governments of different political
colors, all of which are tending more and more toward dismantling the
public education service in each of their countries. Those corporations
and financiers have undertaken a huge project which aims to replace
'formal education' (school) with what they call 'non-formal education' (the
workplace) and 'informal education' (everyday life). Š This logic would
lead to the replacement of qualified teachers with volunteers, social
workers or street vendors."
As Perry Robinson of the AFT wrote in a paper he delivered to an EI Higher
Education Conference in 1999 ("Transnational Higher Education and
Faculty Unions: Issues for Discussion and Action"):
"Those that regard higher education as simply one industry among
others that must face the discipline of the market are hostile to
university traditions, the professorial authority and control of
instruction and curriculum, and increasingly view universities as
institutions that must yield to the demands of the market that views
education as worker training."
Or as the February 3, 2002 edition of the Sunday Herald of Scotland put it
in an article titled "University chiefs resist higher education
sell-off": "Placing higher education within GATS would almost
inevitably lead to short-term profit-making exercised at the expense of
long-term education in the interests of the wider community. It is exactly
what universities shouldn't be doing."
One leader of the University system in Scotland said that the proposals
"could also lead to transnational corporations taking over
departments and courses. We might see Microsoft bidding to run computer
studies courses as they already do in some parts of the U.S., or perhaps
the Arthur Anderson School of Business Studies."
The article also notes that "in India and China, higher education
bodies have warned that GATS could have a damaging effect in their
countries, while the European University Association produced a
declaration last September which warned: "Higher education exists to
serve the public interest and is not a `commodity'."
Let me now summarize the Berlin Conference discussion of these issues, and
then conclude with a brief analysis of what needs to be done to block and
roll back the privatization of public education now underway around the
world.
The workshop that I participated in was attended by over 125 professors
and students from around the world, and went on for almost three hours. It
was the consensus of the workshop participants that the same policy of
destroying the right to education and training is being implemented
throughout the world under the auspices of various international
institutions, e.g. the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, the European Union. These plans are leading to the
dissolution of traditional institutional forms of schooling through the
privatization in all its forms of public education.
These plans are accompanied by a threat to the statutes and conditions of
employment for teachers. Everywhere, the proportion of teachers employed
on the basis of private and insecure contracts is growing in relation to
qualified teachers employed within the framework of a tenure-track system.
This policy tends to deliver the youth up to a degraded form of education
that culminates without diplomas or certificates, without recognized
qualifications conferring a title, and thus without the opportunity of
joining a trade union that would be able to organize on the basis of a
collective bargaining contract based on specific qualifications. This
policy is being masked frequently by "pedagogical" arguments
such as "lifelong learning', "online education", or the
"validation of skills" which can be acquired in the street or in
the workplace, as well as in school.
Many workshop participants also noted that teachers everywhere are of
course resisting, and they are being joined by students and workers. For
example, there has recently been a strike by 4000 primary school teachers
in the Loire-Atlantique region of France, as well as a general strike and
many demonstrations in Algeria in defense of public education.
The workshop participants who were active in their various national
teachers' unions (almost all of them affiliated with Education
International) thought it quite significant that El had passed at its
World Congress various amendments (mainly submitted by Force Ouvriere of
France) to resolutions that lead to the condemnation of attempts to
include teaching and education in the General Agreements on Trade and
Services (GATS). In fact, the teachers union leaders who were present
emphasized the importance of the stakes involved in the position taken by
the World Congress of Education International opposing the GATS, which
aims to integrate schooling into the rules governing trade that were
negotiated within the framework of the WTO.
The teachers unionists who spoke at the workshop understood that the
success of the World Bank, IMF, and WTO's plans to privatize and destroy
both public education and the profession of teaching, would require the
integration of the trade unions, and hence of Education International. The
teachers union leaders and activists in attendance vowed to engage in a
political struggle to resist this process of integration.
The higher education workshop at the Berlin Conference concluded that it
is possible to develop initiatives on the international scale within the
framework of the "Appeal of Teachers and Teacher Trade Union Members
in Support of the Berlin Conference," and on the basis of the
decisions taken at the Berlin Conference itself. Thus, the workshop
decided to propose the setting up a Correspondence Committee based on a
Bulletin, and to work towards the organizing of an International
Conference in Defense of Education and Teaching.
The first task of the Committee is to produce a Correspondence Bulletin
that will publish information on the implementation of plans concerning
the privatization of public education around the world, and the resistance
they meet with. Through this work the teachers present at the Berlin
Conference hope to win broad international agreement with their
perspective of convening an International Conference in Defense of
Education and Teaching within the next year.
Time is of the essence, but there is a little time remaining to organize
internationally for the removal of higher education from the GATS
negotiations. Here is the timeline. By June 30, 2002, countries are to
file requests asking trading partners to open their markets in service
areas, including higher education. By March 31, 2003, countries that were
the subjects of these requests are to present offers to open their markets
in service areas, including higher education. Trading partners will then
hold meetings and discussions. If they fail to reach agreements regarding
higher education, the issue could become part of a new round of global
negotiations after the GATS negotiations formally conclude in January
2005. In the meantime, the next meeting of the higher education branch of
Education International will be held in April 2002, in Montreal.