In the Corporate Interest -- Education and Wealth Creation

The creation of wealth -- surplus -- is often the result of exploitation (of others, the system, or the environment). Education is not by definition a system of exploitation, as learning should be about creating not just transferring resources, but classrooms have adopted many of the characteristics of capitalistic work areas, with a boss (the teacher), administrators, and other workers that need to be overcome.  We do tend to create a production type environment where clogs (students) are interchangeable and volume is a prime ingredient of profit.

Businesses, especially small businesses, often train their own people, as it is hard to find someone with just the right skills at the right time. That is why interships and apprenticeships were the way most people got into the trades and other skilled labor and many then worked their way up to management.

Corporations take on different strategies based on their views of education. What do they say about process and accountability, but perhaps companies do have a sense of what they need in a workforce, but not as citizens. Sometimes the skills needed for a workforce are different than those needed as a citizen.

As community colleges and other formal, government sponsored educational programs grew, business turned to the formal education system to get the people with the skills and training they needed. This system works out pretty well, but not always when skills needed and skills posessed by people in the community corresponded.

At this point, there seems to be a growing disconnect between skills needed and those provided, at least according to a Wall Street Journal "Skills Shortage Means Many Jobs Go Begging."

It could be that businesses will return to more independent training, especially with online training growing in popularity and in the ability to individualize training. For example, it could be that companies find MOCCs or specific classes that provide training and then have people participate in the classes. Perhaps a consultant might come on board and help businesses identify areas of training needed as well as reputable sources for providing that training, many of it already created or create some content as necessary.

New hires might be expected to complete certain training as part of their orientation period, so that if the skills are not acquired, they could be let go without undue unemployment issues.

This is one way that the current relationship between government in terms of education and the private sector could be merged and the risk factor shared more evenly along with the rewards of a well functioning and equitable local economy.

 Mariana Mazzucato has written a new book The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private SectorMyths that postulates that it is a myth that private businesses create all the innovation and take all the economic risks. The real story behind capitalism is that the state is a primary actor in terms of financing research and development in so many different fields. It is the commons that leads to prosperity not the private market economy that is insular and without the power or wealth to underwrite true innovation. The myth, according to Mariana , leads to bad tax policy, with too much reduction in capital gains being exercised and example. 

Google, Apple, and all these technological giants got their start through government funding and government grants. The space program, with all its derivatives, was a government project. This is not socialism. National market economies require national investment and supervision through regulation and the like. 

I was reminded of this with an article in the Wall Street Journal   "U.S. Scores a Breakthrough in Fusion Power" that showed how this fusion breakthrough has been powered through research financed by the U.S. Department of Energy. 

And, the New York Times seconded Professor Mazzucato's analysis in a March 23 editorial "America's Unappreciated Entrepreneur" where it pointed out that "Today, the scope, duration and cost of breakthrough research is either beyond the private sector’s corporate and philanthropic resources or outside its profit model. A salient point in “The Entrepreneurial State,” amplified in a review by Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of The Financial Times, is that corporations today often spend surplus cash on share buybacks rather than on fundamental innovation." 

And, a letter to the editor to the New York Times on March 30  a writer noted "The N.I.H. spent more than $5.6 billion in 2012 on cancer research alone, yet many cancer medicines cost American consumers more than $100,000 per person per year."

I think this reaffirms the importance of appropriate government involvement in all areas, including education, and raises the question Is capitalism the best research/learning environment?

There are many learning opportunities inherent in the dynamic system created by private ownership of property and the socio-economic relationships that it sets in motion  Certainly, the number of international students that come to the United States for higher education is evidence that there are very dramatic learning opportunities here. But, are these opportunities distributed efficiently and equitably? 

Further, do owners of capital have a stronger voice in curriculum and in the actors in education, funders, teachers, resources. For example, I was reading in the Wall Street Journal about some of the science behind cholesterol and how it leads to heart disease. This type of research has been the bulwark of science for many decades. Apparently, however, much of the research was from questionable sources and it might not be that accurate. I think in part this might be because there is not much money in the re in research. One of the foundations of science is that research is replicable but there is little grant money in redoing settled science. So, we might need better methods within our capitalistic system to check.

While corporations have a strong voice in education, it is also true that corporations can support educational costs for their employees, as many community colleges and others do a lot of the training that companies use to do when they hired employees right out of high school. In June, Starbucks announced that it had an agreement with Arizona State University to offer online college instruction to Starbucks employees. For the first two years of study, employees will receive reduced tuition. For the final two years, if the employee graduates, Starbucks will pay the entire tuition. Employees can pursue any degree they choose and they are not obligated to stay with Starbucks after they graduate.

The Starbucks scenario says a lot about the importance of the flexibility offered by online learning and it also reinforces the important role that businesses have in educating employees, not just to reduce turnover, which is an important business goal but also to enable employees to improve their lives without going into debt.

With wealth creation, of course, comes power.

We might think of Google and other search engines as well as EBSCO and other databases as being important revelatory tools but they are also indexes of power. They document who has access to publishing, whose voices are being recorded electronically or otherwise. There are many voices that are not documented, are not indexed, and therefore not really available. Kerry James Stevenson, an African-American artist, made the point about cultural power being determined by those that provide access to images, such as publishers. His argument is that Blacks and other minorities are often marginalized and are forced to make choices between selling their works and figuring out how to incorporate their essence, their message while still finding/creating customers. The artist is always making choices.

Google is constantly creating information through data collection and manipulation. I can see a day when a Google search might result in an immediate phone call/email from a sales representative, political consultant,  dentist, etc. based on a search that was just conducted. Moving from the passive ad based on self declared interest to an active solicitation.

The act of finding/creating audiences reminded me of the talk given by Amitav Ghosh, the Bengali writer, when he said that writers need to create a community, create an audience based on their work. The artist creates and audience are moved toward that voice. That, of course, begs Stevenson's question of the power of the gatekeeper/index.

Stevenson's talk also stressed the creative freedom needed to find an authentic voice. He said that modernism springs from a playfulness of spirit, an availability of time that many people of color find hard to participate in.

These are important cultural and educational choices we make constantly. How is beauty represented, how is power manifest; how is marginality confirmed? Artists and audiences struggle with being identified as important. It is usually outside forces, such as translators, indexers, publishers, that confer status and accessibility of message. Who benefits from the messages that are sanctioned and those that are not; those that are not even voiced?

The person of letters/man of letters soothed by processed images and words and the interplay between those and the imagination is still limited to the images transcribed and created by the culture. 

And, speaking of the person of letters and the influence of money, it is perhaps necessary that instructors become advocates (perhaps sales people) of their own classes. Instructors should be able to elucidate the value of taking a particular class and be willing and able to help fill up their classes with appropriate students. I am doing this with a librarian/instructor collaboration class and I am emphasizing the value of these types of collaboration to the academic community. By making the economic case, I am becoming more involved in the framing of my class and spreading the curriculum via encouraging people to take the class. 

Businesses have much to offer when they operate in the public good and for their own economic interests.