The importance of access of quality education is incredibly important in our society. It is the main driver of opportunities and, hopefully, it provides everyone (or most of the people) with the tools to contribute in our capitalist society.
In our economic system, education has become the main creator of one of the most important economic goods of our economy. Intangibles such as creativity, knowledge, and other that allow us to create and apply novel ideas in our environments. The widespread of education hasn’t been better. Our education system has been iterated continuously, even unconsciously, throughout different stages of our society. From the great Greek philosophers that were mainly able to dwell on our existence thanks to their richness, or lack of interest in material possessions; to the middle ages where monks and monarchy were deemed as the only ones to receive education; to the renaissance with the rise of humanistic values; and ultimately, in our democracies where it has become a basic human right. The right to develop our capacities.
Nonetheless, even if its better as it has been, it is failing its potential to deliver a more knowledgeable and equitable society. The knowledge society is our new utopia, not a reality. An utopia where everyone can develop freely and to the extent they desire. However, our goal to reach our new utopia is being negatively affected by the inclusion of market mechanisms in our education systems.
To realize the different ways how market mechanisms are negatively affecting our goal, we have to realize what our education provides. Our current education system focuses on the creation of intangibles mentioned beforehand (some could argue that more on the diffusion of information but the importance of developing skills such as creativity has increased lately). These intangibles can be referred as the individual’s intangibles. These intangibles are fundamental in our current capitalist economies since they not only provide existence to capital, but it provides its value. These intangibles are the very essence of the existence of capitalism and its growth. As Marx says in its Critique of Political Economy:
Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraph, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.
These intangibles are the clear distinction of our human nature and the rest of the natural world. Our evolution that led to the ability to increasingly develop these intangibles is the reason we stopped being at complete mercy to our environment(or it seemed for a while) and to exert control on it.
The generation of individual’s intangible has been the main focus of our current education system. Especially in our modern system, there has been the inclusion of policies to increase the “efficiency” of this generation process. An example of this type of policy is performance funding that determines the quantity of funding of a school is determined by its performance in a given set of indicators. These policies have motivated the segregation between socioeconomic sectors in the education system (where the most of the modern human interaction takes place in our early life), since the better schools can obtain more funding, invest in higher quality, charge higher prices to individuals, and so on the cycle continues. The quality of the underfunded schools will stagnate, prompting individual’s to highly prefer high performance schools. The problem is that not everyone can afford them or live near these high performing schools. The market creates winners, but also plenty of losers. All of these relate to the generation of individual’s intangible. It is already a bad picture.
To exacerbate the situation, there are other intangibles that are being neglected, and potentially “sacrificed” for the benefit of a few, in the search for market efficiency in the education system. These intangibles can be referred as social intangibles (or social capital), which relate to the creation of relationships with our communities and the value of these relationships, both spiritually and economically. The generation of social intangibles, or lack of thereof, can have strong effects on our society and the opportunities available for the individual. It’s sad whether this has been intentional or not.
Social intangibles can have a great impact in the economic success of the individual. This is well now in the business literature in the term networking where relationships tend to be diminished to economic transactions. It may be more critical if a person wants to be an entrepreneur where the earliest funds for its venture are colloquially known as the 3 F’s (Family, Friends, and Fools). If the economic value of your social intangibles is low, you better compensate harder with your individual intangibles to convince a “fool”. The lottery of life becomes even more important taking the creation of inequality of individual and social intangibles.
Until here it has been revised in a purely economic sense, which I understand can be controversial in terms of social intangibles. Nonetheless, the negative non-economic effects of the inequality of social intangibles are high. Potentially, it reduces the cohesiveness of our society and the level of understanding we can have between each other. Doesn’t come as a surprise, these markets mechanism have very low interest in building these social intangibles through the continuous opportunity for inter-community interaction that a good education system can provide. It just cares for higher generation of intangibles, regardless of its effect in society or its distribution. Typical markets.
This segregation of all opportunities between communities is a characteristic of market mechanism, where the richer will always have more bargaining power, better quality of education, and a social network with more dispensable income, wealth, and time to develop knowledge. However, it will diminish our ability to understand the life of people in different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Our ability to have a joint societal project. Our ability to reach our new utopia: a knowledge society for all. These characteristics are enough to reject the notion of strong market mechanisms in our education system that are rooted on the lottery of life. We have to ensure quality and access to all communities. If we manage this, we will have a richer society where the lottery of life doesn’t determine who you will be, but you will have the freedom to mold and embrace you identity as a whole.
As Alexander van Humboldt said to Thomas Jefferson’s (3rd president of the United States and owner of slaves) friend William Thornton[1]:
Of course the abolition of slavery would reduce the nation’s cotton production, he said, but public welfare could not be measured ‘according to the value of its exports’. Justice and freedom were more important than the wealth of a few.
Here once again, the generation of intangibles of a few or its efficiency is not more important than the access to opportunities of all. Equality is more important than the (intangible) wealth of a few.
Our utopia is not to be an “efficient” society, its to be one where everyone has the opportunity and freedom to develop who they want to be. The market will always neglect that.
[1] The Invention of Nature: The Adventure of Alexander Von Humboldt: The Lost Hero of Science by Andrea Wulf. 2015.
