{"id":39138,"date":"2017-06-02T13:59:33","date_gmt":"2017-06-02T20:59:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=39138"},"modified":"2017-06-02T13:59:33","modified_gmt":"2017-06-02T20:59:33","slug":"profit-must-not-pervert-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/profit-must-not-pervert-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Profit must not pervert education"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\n\u201cThe profit per boy is \u00a340.\u201d<\/p>\n

The utterance conjured Dickensian visions of a calculatingly finger-licking Fagan, or a pitiless mill owner, or even a slave-marketeer, prodding the muscles of small merchandise and critically examining their teeth. But the independent-school headmaster, from whose lips I heard the pronouncement more than 40 years ago, was not talking about the rewards of ruthless exploitation. He was running a charitable institution, where none of the trustees, staff or teachers thought of making money out of boys. The \u201cprofit\u201d he spoke of wasn\u2019t commercial gain but the average annual surplus available for re-investment in teaching after the payment of all costs.<\/p>\n

At the time, the usage seemed innocuous to me. I did not know that there was any such thing as education for profit outside typing schools or secretarial colleges or other such glass menageries. Even what we called \u201cprivate\u201d schools or \u201cprep\u201d schools in those days were often trusts, or, if they were proprietary establishments, were commonly the results of profound teaching vocations, from which their owners made only modest livings. Education, I thought, resembled a work of mercy and I would no more expect to make money out of it than from visiting the sick or comforting the dying. When I turned to teaching as a career, I cheerfully renounced riches. I have always felt guilty at accepting a stipend for my work, justifying it as a necessary evil.<\/p>\n

We do not know what fees were charged at the Lyceum or the Academy: although they were in a sense professional schools, designed to equip rhetoricians as well as to educate the elite, I can\u2019t imagine Plato or Aristotle grubbing for cash. Socrates berated the sophists for treating teaching as a commodity. Confucius, as far as we know, depended on his pupils\u2019 fees, but they probably paid them in a spirit of charity and gratitude, not as part of a relationship of service provider and customer. The modern liberal shibboleth that education is a right reinforced revulsion from the notion that profit is proper for universities or schools. In the latest related scandal, the American Association of University Professors responded with magnificent disdain to the news that Purdue University, one of my home state\u2019s top public institutions of higher education, had bought<\/a> for-profit Kaplan University from its owners: \u201cNon-profit institutions serve the public good; for-profit private institutions serve corporate interests. The two should not mix.\u201d Most educators agree. The obvious inference is that profit should not be allowed to pervert education. Learning and looting are incompatible: education is unquantifiable and soars beyond the bottom line. How did we ever slide into the well-greased world of \u201cTrump University\u201d, education management organisations, \u201cpathway colleges\u201d, Jo Johnson and Betsy DeVos?<\/p>\n

Proponents of profit deploy all the Devil\u2019s best arguments. \u201cI will expand choice,\u201d he says, sweeping expansive gestures over the vista from Tibidabo. \u201cI will save the state\u2019s money,\u201d he promises, \u201cif only thou wilt fall down and worship me\u201d, while he modifies his pitchfork to rake in billions in tax-funded subsidies. \u201cI will serve the common good,\u201d he proclaims, rattling silver tongue against gold fillings, \u201cby channelling resources into the vocational training that society needs. I will provide pathways to help recruitment for elite research universities,\u201d \u2013 or so he says, without admitting that the pathway is primrose-paved. \u201cI will serve my student-customers,\u201d he avers, while heating up the torture tongs. \u201cI will raise standards,\u201d he suggests, \u201cby making teachers responsive to investors\u2019 standards\u201d, concealing the fact that those \u201cstandards\u201d consist of selling cheap produce at high prices.<\/p>\n

Diabolical imagery comes easily to Mammon\u2019s victims. \u201cMitch Daniels Wants to Sell the Soul of Public Education<\/a>\u201d was the headline of a recent blog on the website of the AAUP\u2019s magazine, excoriating the Purdue president for the Kaplan acquisition. The author was Bill Mullen, a Purdue professor of English. As Kaplan University has been investigated for allegedly hiring unqualified teachers, deploying intrusive sales methods and making misleading claims, academic wariness is understandable.<\/p>\n

Kaplan\u2019s demise is a sign of widespread for-profit failure in the US. In recent years, a series of for-profit ventures in education have folded or faded, including Knowledge Universe, floated with billions of dollars to control individuals\u2019 learning lives \u201cfrom cradle to grave\u201d, News Corp\u2019s \u201cAmplify\u201d scheme, launched to realise Rupert Murdoch\u2019s vision of exploiting \u201ca $500 billion (\u00a3350 million) sector\u201d, and the dreaded Trump University, which New York\u2019s attorney general denounced as a fraud. In 2015, Corinthian Colleges, which turned over up to $1.4 billion dollars a year on 107 campuses, collapsed under a barrage of accusations of bizarre misdeeds, including \u2013 according to a report in the Huffington Post<\/a> \u2013 \u201ccounting a food service job at Taco Bell as placement in the field for an accounting graduate\u201d.<\/p>\n

Profiteers often end up cheating their clients and \u2013 worse by some ethical standards \u2013 impoverishing their investors. But they are showing menacing resilience. A recent report<\/a> in\u00a0The New York Times<\/em> quotes the for-profit mogul, Carl Barney, as sighing relievedly: \u201cLet\u2019s say the carnage for the for-profit sector has stopped.\u201d<\/p>\n

The empowerment of Trump and DeVos has given a failing aberration a new opportunity and restored the market value of its stock. Let\u2019s hope investors keep their money \u2013 by withholding it from a nasty, shabby form of business that may moderate the price of training but always raises the cost, while eroding the value, of education.<\/p>\n

Author Bio: <\/strong>Felipe Fern\u00e1ndez-Armesto is William P. Reynolds professor of history at the University of Notre Dame in the US.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe profit per boy is \u00a340.\u201d The utterance conjured Dickensian visions of a calculatingly finger-licking Fagan, or a pitiless mill owner, or even a slave-marketeer, prodding the muscles of small merchandise and critically examining their teeth. But the independent-school headmaster, from whose lips I heard the pronouncement more than 40 years ago, was not talking […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":39139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[13486],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-39138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-higher-education","tag-for-profit"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nProfit must not pervert education - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/profit-must-not-pervert-education\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Profit must not pervert education - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cThe profit per boy is \u00a340.\u201d The utterance conjured Dickensian visions of a calculatingly finger-licking Fagan, or a pitiless mill owner, or even a slave-marketeer, prodding the muscles of small merchandise and critically examining their teeth. 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