[ox] Re: Wissen als öffentliches oder kommerzielles Gut?
- From: cr iac-research.ch (Christoph Reuss)
- Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 14:42:17 +0100
Hi Hans-Gert & alle,
"Archimedes and the Internet" - von Harold P. Boas ist ein Beitrag in
den Notices der American Math. Soc. vom Sept. 2001 betitelt, der noch
einmal zeigt, dass groþe Wissenschaftsvereinigungen sehr gut
verstehen, um was es geht, und eigene Aktivit?ten entwickeln.
"I prefer to think of scientific knowledge as a shared public
ressource rather than a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder."
Schön, dass Harold P. Boas das so sieht; aber die Entwicklung scheint im
(englischsprachigen) Bildungswesen in die entgegengesetzte Richtung zu
gehen. Dazu ein aktueller Artikel vom Guardian:
==============
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,629209,00.html
Schooling up for sale
The creeping corporate takeover of education is being fostered to build up
exports
George Monbiot
Tuesday January 8, 2002
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>
For many children, a new school term begins with apprehension. But yesterday
it wasn't just the children who were worried about what they might
encounter. Every term now brings another government scheme to refinance,
outsource, subcontract, reclassify, zone or cluster some aspect of the
handling of our children. And parents, reasonably enough, are becoming ever
more suspicious.
What these changes mean, confusing as they are, is privatisation.
[...]
Years ago, prompted by the powerful European Roundtable of Industrialists,
Tony Blair identified the knowledge economy as the driver of future British
growth. The UK would specialise in industries such as information
technology, biotech and second generation services. As the export value of
manufacturing, farming and even some of the traditional service industries
declined, Britain would become a market leader in exporting a new
international business: privatisation.
This strategy has so far been resoundingly successful. The private finance
initiative was pioneered in the UK, then exported by British companies to
countries like Finland, Canada and South Africa. Though their sales of
hospitals, roads, prisons and waterworks are of dubious value to the
recipients, they are massively profitable for our corporations, not least
because, having arrived on the scene before anyone else, they are all but
free from foreign competition. Now Blair wants to do the same in education.
The UK's private education industry, Hatcher argues, "has to be fostered and
nourished by the state until it is strong enough to compete with US and
other competitors". Once they have gathered enough money and experience in
the domestic economy, schooling companies can then try to penetrate the
markets of other countries. While the UK's schools might one day be worth
£25bn a year to potential "investors", the US system has been valued at
$700bn. Worldwide, education is worth trillions. If the UK can seize an
early and substantial share of this market, our economy will become, to all
intents and purposes, recession-proof.
So our own children are, in this picture, simply the crash dummies with
which the UK tests its future export policies. Companies will practise on
them until they find the right economic formula and attain sufficient
economies of scale. They they will apply that formula worldwide.
[...]
Last year, for example, the government agency Scottish Enterprise
distributed 20,000 copies to schools of a magazine called Biotechnology and
You. This purports to be a teacher's resource helping children to navigate
the moral and scientific complexities surrounding genetically- engineered
crops.
But Scottish Enterprise failed to warn teachers that the Biotechnology
Institute which published it is a lobby group funded by Monsanto, Novartis,
Pfizer and Rhone-Poulenc. The magazine repeats Monsanto's misleading claim
that its best-selling herbicide is "less toxic to us than table salt". It
attacks organic farming and suggests that it would be "immoral" not to
develop GM crops.
In England, the old careers advisory service run by the Department for
Education is gradually being replaced by a new agency called Connexions.
Once they have registered with this service, children are given a swipe
card, on which they accumulate points every time they turn up. They trade
the points for discounts from the consumer goods listed on the Connexions
website. The choices they make are monitored, and the information is then
given to the service's "commercial partners".
Last year, the education firm Capita, which runs Connexions for the
government, told the Times Educational Supplement that companies such as
McDonalds and PlayStation Magazine would have "the opportunity of seeing
what these young people take up. They can be a very difficult group to
reach."
[...]
We could argue about whether or not these steps towards full-scale
privatisation improve or damage standards in education. In the US, the
evidence suggests that privatisation has been disastrous. In the UK, so far,
the results are mixed. But this really isn't the point of the argument.
Our schools are being privatised not for the benefit of our children, but
for the benefit of our corporations, and the export economy to which, the
government hopes, they will one day contribute.
==============
In den USA ist die Privatisierung/Kommerzialisierung schon so weit
fortgeschritten, dass die Qualität der öffentlichen Schulen und der
Lehrmittel ins "unbrauchbare" abgesunken ist. So ergab eine Studie von
John Hubisz (Präsident der US-Vereinigung der Physiklehrer), dass die
12 meistverwendeten Wissenschafts-Lehrbücher (verwendet von 85% der
US-Schulkinder) qualitativ "inakzeptabel, voller Fehler und schrecklich"
sind. Hubisz führt das u.a. darauf zurück, dass die für die Auswahl und
Redaktion der Schulbücher zuständigen Stellen von kommerziellen
Lobbygruppen beeinflusst sind, und deshalb statt auf wissenschaftliche
Korrektheit zu achten, auf "kommerzielle Korrektheit" bedacht sind.
Studie im Volltext (mit 89 Seiten voller Beispiele aus den Schulbüchern):
http://www.psrc-online.org/curriculum/pdf/hubisz.pdf
Grüsse,
Christoph Reuss
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