Commodification of education a distortion

The value of trades training as a plank in the effort to rescue an economy is obvious. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

The editorial on the Government’s huge investment in trades training (ODT 5.6.20) clearly lays out how important this sector of education is for any real recovery from the present crisis.

It focuses the mind on why tertiary education is one of the irreplaceable bricks in our economic and social foundations. It is a sharp dispersal of the fog in which over the past 30 years the nature and value of tertiary education has been lost sight of in a miasma of neoliberal and market enthusiasm that confuses, even corrupts, the values that give tertiary institutions their raison d’etre.

The value of trades training as a plank in the effort to rescue an economy is obvious; hence the need for direct government investment. ‘‘Trainees may save between $2500 and $6500 a year, and start work without the student loans that might once have stopped them completing their apprenticeships’’

This tells us something about the consequences of student loans, one consequence among other pernicious consequences that have contributed to the general withering of trades training that has afflicted us for the past 20 years.

However, it is quite conceivable that some of the trainees who receive this government largesse might go on, when times get better, to generate considerable wealth on the back of it. Is that fair?

It’s an interesting, if not very coherent, question that reflects the creeping commodification of education. And its confusion is manifested in another question, popular with policy-makers in the 1990s, as to how much of any qualification is ‘‘public good’’ and how much ‘‘private good’’? Clearly, in the current crisis ‘‘public’’ trumps ‘‘private’’ and we will simply have to swallow this potential lack of fairness while we get out of a sticky situation. You can’t be fair all the time.

One solution might be — when, of course, we are out of the wood — to apply some sort of progressive tax to our high earners, which might well support funding for similar education for the generations that follow. Such a tax could be applied to other trades, like law and medicine, which tend to produce high earners and who are probably just as necessary to social and economic cohesion as any other tradesperson.

In fact the tertiary tuition fee might be regarded as a pre-emptive tax — the tax you pay before you get the job. We don’t make this bizarre distinction for primary and secondary levels of education. The ‘‘private’’ benefit is integral to the wider social ‘‘public’’ benefit.

Education as a commodity has a more general corrupting effect on tertiary education. Firstly, and since the closing of borders, it has been a particular bone of contention for universities. Too great a reliance on foreign students for income is unsafe. Education should not be a species of tourism, as we all know how fragile that is.

Secondly, commodification distorts the educational process. It has a gradual but pernicious effect on the relation between teacher and student. Students are not customers, but as learners they contribute to the all-important focus on a discipline and, with teachers and researchers, support the maintenance and development of the disciplines they study.

Finally, the culture of institutions has been affected. A form of corporatism prevails, exacerbated by governance changes brought about by the previous government.

In the face of possible widespread collapse, the present government has reorganised the polytechnic sector, which, ironically, might even emerge stronger after the present crisis. Universities, however, have not been so fortunate, as some recent well-publicised issues at the University of Otago seem to indicate.

But we live in hope.

■Dr Harry Love is an honorary fellow in classics at the University of Otago.