Education Commodification

American consumerism is an incredible establishment. It was just the other day while making a credit card transaction that I was struck by the beauty of how intricate a system buying and selling has become in America—how easy it is to swipe a card after entering a department store meticulously designed and laid out so you leave with the most in your bags and the least in your wallet. How that swipe of the credit card is not just payment, but a forfeiture of data that is aggregated and tagged to you along with tremendous amounts of other data from where you live, your income and specific demographics and psychographics (popularly collected via online activity) detailing your personality. Facebook, Google, Twitter: The biggest names in the world live for understanding their users as consumers and selling that information to marketers. It is an awe-inspiring system (or absolutely grotesque, depending on how your take of it).

It comes at no surprise, then, to hear individuals rant on the absurd commodification of virtually everything. But I was struck when someone (a professor in EPS) first mentioned that education was commodified. Education! The bastion of social and economic equality, that even with fault, had seemed to me immune to the otherwise all-consuming consumerist plague. But the idea has only snowballed for me. Labaree’s emphasis on education’s objective for social mobility bolsters this remark. He even says that a more expensive education is valuable due to the fact that it is more expensive. While he outlines two additional, socially good, objectives of education, it seems clear that in the context of a consumerist nation, that the consumerist objective is victorious. A humbling, but vital concept to understand if I wish to work in the realm of education (and attempt to better it).

If there is to be positive change in education, grappling with the realities of capitalist influence is the first step to make change. I’m a fan of the “change comes from within” philosophy, thus creating goals that can be seen by the decision-makers in education (legislators, government agencies, as well as those controlling corporate interests and large endowments) as possibly beneficial to themselves, while also pushing for an education system that focuses more on the learning and less on the degree, will be paramount.