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Originally Posted by Nothing
For a long time now, I've thought that a well educated citizenry is a necessary ingredient for a properly functioning system of governance. Do you think a corporate run education system would make an honest attempt to ensure citizens would by and large be informed well enough to participate in governance processes?
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To your first point, I have always thought that too.
To your second, no I don't.
Here's why: the model that you and I have of education - and I mean, teenage/young adult stuff like late secondary school and tertiary - no longer really exists in the USA, and it's there that these changes are going to happen first. The point of late-secondary and tertiary schooling is no longer to become educated; it's
to get a job. In that sense American schools are certification authorities rather than places of learning. Give us a kid at one end, we'll push the kid out the other with a piece of paper with a seal on it, and that means the older and poorer kid now has the skills required for employment in this or that industry. That ain't education.
Look at this graph:
That widening gap represents a fat profitable industry just waiting to get disrupted. And think of the opportunities for the Big 5. Imagine if Google were to partner with, say, Stanford business school, and offer guaranteed employment and reimbursement of all student loans to every business major who graduates in the top 1% of the class. Overnight that would become the only business school in the world worth going to if you're really smart. Now imagine what happens to Google and its innovative accounting practices if every year it vacuums up the brightest 1% of accounting and tax graduates in the world. Google would never have to worry about paying tax ever again. Anywhere. Because the people designing Google's tax structures would be way smarter than the underpaid government tax agents chasing them for money.
The fact that (bites pillow) neoliberalism (/bites) has created a modern world where the best and brightest would never dream of working in public service is a big topic for another time. Let's just stick to my most direct answer to your question, which is: in the USA, which is where everything starts for the West now, late-secondary and tertiary institutions provide certification, not education. And they charge too much for it while delivering too little (see Jonas's comment above).