> The way these monopolies have been colonizing public education has, however, gone almost unnoticed. This is rampant privatization sneaking in as essential to “21st Century learning.”
There is a great deal of irony to the premise of this article, and the careless use of the term 'colonizing' is downright offensive. Actual colonization of education has happened on the backs of public education as a means of centralized indoctrination and cultural control. Private education does not have the same consistent history of colonization.
For example, in India the British introduced the English education system as part of a push known as Macaulayism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaulayism). Macaulay literally believed that the British empire had a moral right to colonization. In India, he helped realize this through the English Education Act of 1835 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Education_Act_1835), which put a end to traditional education systems. Those traditional systems (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurukula) were much more decentralized and distributed, and relied on spoken language to forward the inherited language of the Indian peoples. The change to a one size fits all public education system cut off inherited learning and broke cultural continuity in a way that is hard to recover from to this day.
This played out again more recently in Tibet (https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/03/04/chinas-bilingual-educa...). The introduction of centralized public schools in Tiber, with an emphasis on bilingual education (slowly displacing Tibetan with Chinese languages), and shared education standards (a way to indoctrinate children with one set of political/cultural views) are all really pathways to completing the colonization of Tibet by China.
The true education monopoly tends to be in centralized government-driven education systems where parents are forced to pay into the system and children are forced to attend. Public education is exactly that. In America for example, we largely have a single system, with shared standards like Common Core (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_State_Standards_In...) and with a monolithic workforce. After all, the National Education Association is the largest labor union in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Education_Association). This makes education a common route for implementing political goals, which we see in things like the NEA pushing its educators to deploy the factually-incorrect "1619 Project" into classrooms because it aligns with their body's political culture. When the same patterns played out in the Soviet Union, through institutions like their Ministry of Culture, Americans were happy to label it as propaganda and indoctrination. And yet they can't see the same problems in their own system.
What we need is decentralization of education, which does require introducing private education as a competitive alternative against public education. Parents should be able to choose which schools their children attend. They need more choice in terms of what they are taught and what they spend their time on. Local jurisdictions need locality of choice, rather than being chained down by unions or top-down standards imposed by state or federal governments. Competition in education, both through private and public channels, is critical. The lack of it amounts to a monopoly held by the public education institution. And as for this article - it's focus on technology choices is a red herring at best, manufacturing a problem and summoning outrage when the real problems with the "colonization" of education lie elsewhere.
Great comment. Complaining about the "colonization" of education is a waste of time when "education" itself is a farcical treadmill of wasted time and indoctrination.
A friend and I were chatting about the argument about whether or not "Under God" should be in the pledge, and he made the following point:
Mandatory education? Sure.
Mandatory attendance? Sure.
Governnment-approved curriculums? Sure.
Mandatory taxes to pay for the mandatory, government-approved curriculum? Sure.
Include "God" in the pledge of allegiance? Whoa there, Adolf, we don't want the government indoctrinating our kids!
There is a great deal of irony to the premise of this article, and the careless use of the term 'colonizing' is downright offensive. Actual colonization of education has happened on the backs of public education as a means of centralized indoctrination and cultural control. Private education does not have the same consistent history of colonization.
For example, in India the British introduced the English education system as part of a push known as Macaulayism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaulayism). Macaulay literally believed that the British empire had a moral right to colonization. In India, he helped realize this through the English Education Act of 1835 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Education_Act_1835), which put a end to traditional education systems. Those traditional systems (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurukula) were much more decentralized and distributed, and relied on spoken language to forward the inherited language of the Indian peoples. The change to a one size fits all public education system cut off inherited learning and broke cultural continuity in a way that is hard to recover from to this day.
This played out again more recently in Tibet (https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/03/04/chinas-bilingual-educa...). The introduction of centralized public schools in Tiber, with an emphasis on bilingual education (slowly displacing Tibetan with Chinese languages), and shared education standards (a way to indoctrinate children with one set of political/cultural views) are all really pathways to completing the colonization of Tibet by China.
The true education monopoly tends to be in centralized government-driven education systems where parents are forced to pay into the system and children are forced to attend. Public education is exactly that. In America for example, we largely have a single system, with shared standards like Common Core (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_State_Standards_In...) and with a monolithic workforce. After all, the National Education Association is the largest labor union in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Education_Association). This makes education a common route for implementing political goals, which we see in things like the NEA pushing its educators to deploy the factually-incorrect "1619 Project" into classrooms because it aligns with their body's political culture. When the same patterns played out in the Soviet Union, through institutions like their Ministry of Culture, Americans were happy to label it as propaganda and indoctrination. And yet they can't see the same problems in their own system.
What we need is decentralization of education, which does require introducing private education as a competitive alternative against public education. Parents should be able to choose which schools their children attend. They need more choice in terms of what they are taught and what they spend their time on. Local jurisdictions need locality of choice, rather than being chained down by unions or top-down standards imposed by state or federal governments. Competition in education, both through private and public channels, is critical. The lack of it amounts to a monopoly held by the public education institution. And as for this article - it's focus on technology choices is a red herring at best, manufacturing a problem and summoning outrage when the real problems with the "colonization" of education lie elsewhere.