The Commercialisation of School

Commercialisation

With my 'modern teacher' hat on, I was partaking of a Twitter chat the other day. During the chat I was struck by the terminology the moderator of the chat used. He was discussing how you promote the 'branding' of your school. To me, branding is a word with a whole world of commercial and capitalist connotations and it felt unnatural to be using the term in an educational sense.

http://www.onextrapixel.com/2009/07/25/the-significance
-of-establishing-a-prominence-brand-identity-for-your-website/

So with this in mind, I began to think; is education becoming more commercialised? Should it? Is this inevitable progress? And should schools really be adopting marketing and business approaches to their 'core business'? Think of the terminology: 'performance related pay', 'target setting', 'data tracking', 'intervention strategy' in fact, I don't know for sure where these terms originated from but they sound like terms that could have come from industry, and there are many other examples. I was sat in a meeting just this week where the students were referred to as ‘customers’. Students or parents as customers is a worrying thought to a progressive educator when that old adage ‘the customer is always right’ comes to mind.

I enjoy sport, football in particular (the version where the ball is kicked more than any other action), and the podcasts I follow deride the word 'brand' in football. To them it represents the money-grabbing marketeer approach to club ownership. They believe this approach often means the club can afford to pretty much ignore the needs of the match going fans.

So on the one hand, we are bowing to the demands of the customer by giving them what they think they want, while at the same time ignoring what they actually need. This is because we are scrambling to maintain our own thin veneer of success as dictated by the narrow gauge of data.

What happened to the 'industrial' school?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory

In his oft aired talk on the state of schooling (RSA version), Sir Ken Robinson uses the industrial features of schools to question how appropriate the current school design is for the task of learning (recognise that staff meeting anyone?). It's interesting to see that we are being guided away from the industrial model of schooling, the old fashioned world where things were actually made; I loved making stuff at school. To a creeping commercialisation of schooling where things are measured, tracked, compared, publicly evaluated and ultimately judged on how well they sell. Where schools are in competition with each other to develop their unique selling point. Where the actual ‘product’ seems to be lost in the wake of the more important job of reporting the numerical values that reflect the right image for protecting the reputation of the schools, areas/local authorities/districts, political policies or even countries (thanks P.I.S.A.). And we all know how well that model worked for the banking world.

What now?

Naturally, I am not necessarily recommending we go back to the old industrial model. In fact I'm not entirely sure what I am recommending. But as far back as 2008 (and probably earlier too) reports of school’s using tactics which ‘game’ the system, not dissimilar to what the banks got up to, were calling for the end of the targets and results obsession. We are not churning out products. We are not manufacturing, assembling or marketing. We are learning. How can the impact of school life ever be effectively measured when the outcomes last over a lifetime and people's judgements on success are as varied as there are people?

What I really need is some way of measuring how empowered my students are to achieve what makes them happy over their lifetime. That they are wise enough to choose their own success criteria, and that the very same success criteria has a basis in consideration for the world around them.

Find a way to measure me that, and I'll sell it for you.