Education for the rich: No Bake Sales For Them

This piece I wrote not long before the crash.  Thought I'd share it here as it has some interesting info in it.

“A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.” Marx

There have been occasions when discussing politics with co-workers or friends when they told me that socialism was a good idea but it’ll never work. “But we already have socialism in the US”, I reply, “The rich have socialism, they just don’t want the rest of us to have it.”

I am joking of course, but many of the services that a socialist society would guarantee, the best health care, housing, leisure, access to some of the world’s most beautiful places, are guaranteed the rich capitalist society. Here in the US we are in the belly of the beast. It is where big business has the most freedom, the most unfettered political influence and the greatest command over the access to and use of capital.

Perhaps there is no greater example of how the capitalist class maintains their privilege and power than in education. We are all aware of the attacks on public education, a social service that was wrested from big business. The intention is to privatize public education. They were forced to recognize that it benefited their class interests to have workers that could read or write, this is much less so today on a global scale, but where it is, they must make a profit out of their learning factories.

Higher education is also becoming more expensive and difficult for the average American. But the top private institutions where they educate their children are amassing staggering wealth, and spending it.

In its December 10th issue, Business Week, a major theoretical journal of the capitalist class, takes a look at the state of the Ivy League schools where the rulers of society, and the world, send their children.

The author, Anthony Bianco points out that Princeton has a new student residence hall named after Meg Whitman, the e Bay CEO. Whitman is from Princeton’s class of 77 and has donated $30 million to the university. Her new dorm is quite something. “Each student room has triple-glazed mahogany casement windows made of leaded glass.” says BW. At a cost of $136 million, that is $272,000 for the 500 students that will live there.

The rulers of society are bred in these factories and the survival of the system depends on them. So it is only natural they provide an environment that is conducive to learning like small classrooms and the best talent. Comfort and security is also important. Stanford has spent $4 million restoring an old red barn structure where undergraduates can house their own horses for $500 a month. Princeton provides to all PhD students that give birth, a full stipend during the three-month suspension of “academic work.”

The Ivy League universities educate only 1% of the nation’s college students but their wealth is staggering. In one year, reports BW, Harvard, Yale and Princeton spent $6.5 billion on operations, an increase of 100% in a decade. This was more than double the 41% average budget increase form all universities over the same period. Harvard’s $5.7 billion in investment gains raised through its endowment in the year through June 07 is greater than the “total endowment assets of all but six US universities, five of which were Ivy Plus.. " Bianco tells us. “It’s unlikely that more money has ever been lavished on the education of so few.” He adds.

One by-product of this massive concentration of wealth is that these universities steal educators from the public institutions. Not only can they pay much larger salaries but they can also offer better facilities for research. What is also damaging is that when researchers are wooed from a public university to a private one, all the research grants money they have is transferred also.

But education, like anything in capitalist society, is a commodity to be bought and sold. In the pages of the big business journals, they talk of education and educators no differently than they do auto production. BW quotes one Yale academic, a former chair of the physics department who was ecstatic over stealing a renowned researcher from a public university: “There was a huge war” he says, “Everybody wanted him”. He declined “to disclose the price he paid for Girvin.” Says BW. So they transfer scientists and educators like football players from one team to another. Like any business relationship it is a race as to who can drive his or her rival from the marketplace first. If they can’t compete, some “lesser” universities will be “likely to lose market share” says one academic.

So in this way the rulers of society churn out their ideology of individualism, selfishness and the worship of market forces. But it is the working class that pays. It is wealth that was created by labor that found its way via the eBay CEO’s pocket in to Princeton University for the education of their children as they deprive ours of any education at all.

What a deal this is for them. Every four years we are supposed to go to the polls to elect one of them who also came from these institutions most likely. As a group, whether they were a product of Yale or UCLA, an electoral system where they have two parties and the working class has no party at all puts them in charge of society’s resources. They are handed over the governorship of society, with no opposition; the bourgeois’ interests are secure. They decide how to collect our taxes and how they will spend them. One way is to fund predatory wars while they gut our education and health systems. So they get it both ways. Through the exploitation of labor they own our wealth that they use to educate their children. They also take our taxes and use that to their benefit as they “uneducate.” ours.

These resources belong to society as a whole as it is the labor of society, domestic and global, manual and mental, that is their source. Obviously, education in the hands of society collectively would not waste resources on creating extravagant and materialistic squalor; research and experiments wouldn’t be market driven and their results owned by corporations. The whole orientation and focus of education and its by products would be transformed when freed form the straight jacket of market forces.

One important part of my education I never learned in Catholic school. The task of accomplishing such a transformation of education and society as a whole is the task of the working class. I think learning that profound tidbit cost me $3.95.