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We are living in times of immense change, where the world we thought we knew is transforming into something else completely. Technological advances have moved humanity from an era of scarcity to a new era of abundance. As technology races ahead, society and our institutions have to change accordingly. Public education is just one such institution. The question is: will change be in the interests of the public or the corporations?
In Oklahoma, Senate Bill 1187 strips teachers and support staff of any wage increases, bargaining rights, and benefits. Detroit schools, run by an unelected Emergency Manager, are literally crumbling around the students as the district faces billions of dollars of debt. Lead contaminates the water fountains of numerous Chicago schools. New college graduates are burdened with monstrous debts and few job prospects, forced to live with family or on the street. The examples are endless.
The education system where most children attend public schools, gain a certain level of literacy and competency in various skills, came about during the industrial revolution. Large factories needed masses of workers that were literate in order to operate the machines of industry. Yet today, industry is in decline with automation pushing wages down and an ever-increasing number of people out of work. Every sector of work, blue collar and white collar, is threatened by automation and robotics. The ruling class no longer needs to educate a large section of society, so they have unleashed an all-out war against public education. They seek to profit from the $70 billion K-12 education market.
It’s clear that the ruling class has a plan for what to do with those who will not be educated. Over thirty years, 23 states have doubled the amount spent on incarceration compared to primary education spending, with seven states seeing increases of over 500 percent; nation-wide, spending on prisons increased 1100 percent compared to spending for public colleges and universities. They are replacing education with a police state.
It is dangerous to educate people that the economy no longer needs. The rulers cannot easily control a society where the majority of people are literate, creative, critical thinkers—the kind of people that will recognize the problems in society and organize to change it. The attack on education is an attack on our democracy and expansion of a corporate dictatorship.
To combat a complete corporate takeover, we need to fight for a new cooperative society. With a cooperative economy where the people—not corporations—own and control everything we need to live, human needs, not profits, would be the driving force of society. Using the new technology to feed and house everyone, we could eliminate poverty. In a cooperative society, we could give every child a well rounded, nurturing education in state-of-the-art schools. Young people could fully explore their interests and passions, reaching their fullest potential.
To achieve this new era of education, we the people must take over the education system or the corporations will complete their takeover of it. We must first nationalize education so that all schools are funded equitably by the government. United, we can take back our education from the corporations. Together, we will build the new education system and the new world that we need.
