Schools
for Globalized business: The APEC Agenda for Education
A Commentary on the "concept
paper" for the APEC Human Resources Ministerial Meeting
by Larry Kuehn
An APEC Meeting of Human Resources Ministers
is taking place in Korea this week. (Week of September 21) The Korean Secretariat
prepared a "concept paper" for the meeting.
The globalization agenda
for education has seldom been laid out so clearly as in a paper published
in May 1997 by the Ministry of Labour of the Republic of Korea. This Ministry
serves as the Secretariat for the 2nd Human Resources Ministerial Meeting
of APEC, being held in September 1997 in Seoul. The source of the paper,
its content, and the process of which it is a part exemplify the reshaping
of education rampant everywhere in support of the globalization of capital.
How can a paper produced
in Korea be directly relevant to education issues in Canada and the U.S.,
Malaysia and Indonesia? It can happen because there is a very high degree
of consensus among an international elite of corporate executives, government
officials and bureaucrats in international agencies such as the OECD. The
paper from Korea could have been written by any one of a hundred or more
other agencies, and it would have differed only in detail, not in substance.
The common themes--so well
laid out by the Korean officials--will be identified here and analyzed.
First, however, it is important to provide the context of the production
of the Korean paper.
APEC stands for Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation, a grouping of eighteen "economies" with borders on
the Pacific, both in Asia and the Americas. It describes itself as "economies"
rather than countries, partially to deal with the political sensitivities
of containing China, Hong Kong and Taiwan as separate entities. It also
is not a formal organization, but a group of leaders, ministers and officials
who meet for "dialogue" to attempt to reach a consensus.
The nature of APEC and its
processes shape the possible results.While other international agencies
such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
and the World Trade Organization (WTO) also have an economic focus, their
members are nations, not "economies." Since nations are concerned about
more than the economy, it may be easier to expand the content of the mandate
of these other organizations beyond a narrow definition and to touch on
social and cultural contexts within which an economy exists.
Canada's Department of Foreign
Affairs makes the nature of APEC clear in a description on its Web site:
"APEC's mandate can be summed up in a single phrase: 'APEC means business.'
Although APEC is an official dialogue between Asia-Pacific economies, it
has been driven by the needs and interests of the private sector from the
start." Just in case anyone missed the point the first time, the Foreign
Affairs Web article later reiterates that "If APEC had a single motto,
it would be this: 'APEC means business.'"
Unlike the other major international
trade liberalization initiatives, APEC's process is not one of negotiating
and signing treaties.It thus differs from NAFTA, GATT/WTO, the Multilateral
Agreement on Investment (MAI) and the like. APEC is a talk shop aimed at
reaching a consensus. If any one of its participants disagrees with an
action, then that "economy" is free to ignore it, even if all others agree.
In addition to an annual
meeting of the leaders of the APEC economies (in fact, the official political
leaders of the countries), Ministerial meetings are held, bringing together
heads of like ministries, such as environment, transportation and trade.
The Korean paper has been prepared for the second Human Resources Development
Ministerial Meeting.All involved in APEC have identified "human capital"
as an important part of economic development. A Human Resources Development
Working Group of high level officials from all the countries had already
held 16 meetings by 1997.
Since APEC is not an organization,
but rather a "dialogue," the lead on discussion is taken by the country
that hosts the meeting. Since the APEC leaders meeting is in Vancouver
in 1997, Canada heads the Secretariat and formally sets the agenda--with
lots of talk to reach a consensus. Similarly, since the Human Resources
Ministerial meeting is being held in Seoul, it is Korea that develops the
"concept paper" for the education discussion, although other "designated
member economies will prepare a concept paper of their own."
With that background, let's
take a look at the content of the Korean paper. Like much of what is written
about education and the new demands of the global economy, this paper is
filled with clichés, false promises, and identification of the interests
of the people with the interests of capital. I will highlight here the
common globalization premises repeated in this APEC paper, with an explanation
as well as a critique of the claims.
Globalization
is Inevitable and Education Must Comply with its Requirements
This APEC theme paper identifies
three elements in the environment that require economies to change: 1)
industrial restructuring due to technology ; 2) a "new international order
with increased competition;" and 3) globalization. It is not clear what
globalization means to the authors, but a commonly-held meaning is that
governments are powerless to act in ways that bring under control either
technological change or the nature of competition freed by trade liberalization.
The very nature of APEC--a
dialogue of economies, not an agreement of states--both reflects and feeds
this sense of powerlessness of government. The "compliance" language of
the APEC paper carries this same sense of inevitability: "At an economy
level, the economies must work on a system of education complying to the
changing environment."
This powerful sense
of inevitability silences any consideration that education should serve
the social and cultural needs of a particular people, not just the economic
needs of a world economy that is out of control. It also makes incredible
and unthinkable the view that groups should be getting together on an international
basis to figure out how to bring the global economy under control so that
it meets the needs of people, not the other way around.
Education
Means Preparing Workers for Business
If "APEC means business,"
then--as set out in this APEC paper--"Education means preparing workers
for business." This core concept is explicit:
The emphasis on education
for itself or on education for good members of a community without a large
emphasis on preparations for the future work are no longer appropriate.
In other words, the idea that work is only an instrumental part of one's
life is no longer appropriate. Such a diachotomic view on education and
work cannot be justified in the world where economic development is emphasized.
It should not come as a surprise
that a collection of economies that includes a number of repressive states
would not place a high value on education serving to prepare people to
participate in a democratic society.
In fact, even in those APEC
countries that are nominally democratic, issues of international trade
are clearly considered outside the purview of the people. This is clearly
indicated in the secrecy of the negotiations around the negotiation within
the OECD of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment and the refusal of
the Canadian government to debate it in the 1997 federal election. Focusing
on education as preparing workers for business not only serves the economic
interests of transnational corporations. It also reduces the capacity of
people to demand that governments take action to limit the power of corporations
over their lives.
Business
Should Determine the Content of Education
Once the job of the school
is defined as preparing workers for business, it logically follows that
business should have a central role in determining the content of schooling.
Again, the APEC paper could not be more explicit. It says "that decisions
must be taken by a school system for good business reasons with maximum
business intervention."
The authors condemn existing
schools because curricula have been developed by "intellectual elites with
emphasis on learning for the sake of learning without much emphasis on
outcomes." These impractical intellectuals also focus on concepts and theories,
rather than applications and work experience in the field. Where work experience
does exist, it is dismissed as superficial.
These problems will be fixed
up, they suggest, by business-school partnerships, a code phrase for letting
corporations shape the schools.They want employers to share the role of
educating students, an exchange of personnel between industry and school
and to have industry personnel "take part in the curriculum development
pertinent to their industry to make the curriculum realistic to the needs
of the industry."
The
content of education should be work ethic, attitudes and skills
The narrow frame of education,
as seen by the APEC meeting secretariat, is made explicit in the "broad
principles and expectations on a school system that integrates business
practices" that they offer for consideration of the other APEC economies.
These include:
-
A school system should have
an integrated framework on education based on standards and expectations
set by a society.
-
Students should acquire a
breadth of knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary for adjustments into
work environment.
-
All students are expected
to develop work ethics and attitude appropriate for a working life.
-
Schools should provide a
comprehensive skills-based achievement record to better inform the employers
of a student's social skill development level and width and depth of a
student's knowledge and skills. This will aid the employers to better select
and recruit workers.
We
have an oversupply of the educated; an under supply of the trained
When education is viewed
from the "human capital" perspective, the current situation can be seen
as the classic problem that creates a crisis in capitalism--overproduction.
The capitalist's choices for dealing with excess supply over demand are
two:
1) shut down production
until inventories are down, or
2) shift production to
another product for which the demand is greater than the supply.
If these are applied to education,
the options are either to reduce the participation rate in schools or to
shift the students to training programs for specific jobs that are in demand.
The APEC paper's authors
use the example of Korea to illustrate the problem as they see it. They
point out that unemployment among youth is much higher than in the workforce
as a whole, a situation common to all the developed economies as well as
the Asian "tiger" economies. At the same time, a high percentage of high
school graduates are receiving college education. This is leading to the
majority of college educated taking jobs below their qualification level,
again not unique to Korea, as my son with a B.A. working part-time as a
clerk--and many others in his situation--will attest.
The authors do not expect
this situation to change: "Since demand for the highly-educated are not
rising, this tendency is predicted to continue into the future." Of the
capitalist choices of shutting down or shifting production, the APEC paper
opts for a shift. It bemoans a situation where "general high schools are
highly over populated compared to vocational high schools." It complains
that vocational and technical subjects don't gain the enrollments of the
humanities, and that workplaces and technology are not at the centre of
all study.
These shifts in education
production can be imposed in a number of ways. As an example, in Mexico
City a standardized test--the Examen Unico--was created to channel more
students out of programs leading to university and forcing them into vocational/technical
programs.
Although not explicitly advocated
in the APEC concept paper, shutting down production is a policy implicitly
followed, as well, through reductions in education funding and increases
in tuition costs, as well as privatization--actions being taken in a long
list of countries. These policies are generally explained as necessary
because of the reduced capacity of the state to raise revenue in the era
of globalization. This, in turn, results from governments submitting to
the blackmail of threats of capital strike--moving production and jobs
elsewhere.
Training
will eliminate unemployment
The claim that training will
eliminate unemployment is the mostmisleading of the many claims of those
who place the blame for unemployment on the unemployed rather than on an
economy that does not produce enough jobs.
In the face of persistent
unemployment--especially of the young--both developed and developing countries
make the claim that training is the solution to unemployment. This APEC
paper is no exception. It claims that "the strengthening of the workforce
will increase employability...and resolve unemployment, under-employment
and other problems in the labor markets."
The only way in which this
would be a credible solution is if the main cause of youth unemployment
were structural--a mismatch of training and employment opportunities. This
is, in fact, the claim that is made: through "smooth transitions from school
to work, the economies can lower the level of unemployment among young
people and cut the inefficiency associated with frequent job changes."
While the paper claims there
is a shortage of craftsmen and technicians within the Korean economy, the
more general experience in the more developed as well as less developed
economies is that the real shortage is of jobs, not skills. As the experience
of Malaysia has shown, workers drawn from rural areas, working at low pay,
can be trained to produce in the most high tech factories. It is the combination
of low pay with high skill, not the high skill itself that means that the
jobs will temporarily locate there.
The problem of lack of jobs
is centred not in workers, but in the two characteristics that the APEC
paper says will characterize the 21st century as the century of globalization:
"severe competition, and rapid changes in technology."
Severe competition in the
cost of labour means that industry moves from country to country, without
constraint, to take advantage of a still lower wage and higher tax incentives
being offered elsewhere. William Greider's book, One World, Ready or Not,
describes these peripatetic corporations, jumping from one Asian economy
to another, from establish factory to southern maquiladors, with no responsibility
to any interests other than their own profit. Low-cost production of athletic
shoes in Indonesia loses out to lower cost production in Vietnam. This
movement is facilitated by technology that requires fewer and fewer production
workers, as well as puts legs on the jobs that do exist.
The central promise of the
APEC education strategy is that more training will produce jobs. Since
a better match of improved training is all that is offered to produce more
jobs, it will inevitably fail. The purpose of APEC--to liberalize trade
by eliminating government intervention and control over corporate power--means
that an important tool has been given up: government action to mitigate
the social impact of cutthroat competition and rampant technological change.
We
are developing a common culture as a result of globalization
This is the most puzzling
of the assertions made by the APEC meeting secretariat. In fact, the first
copy of the paper that I received had a big question mark beside the paragraph
that says
The globalization
of economies show up as the following: The present business strategies
focus on cultural integration; All economies are in the race with different
economies to gain and develop new markets.
This doesn't make much sense
if we think of culture as practices, language and beliefs which a geographically
defined group of people share in common and that distinguish them from
people who have a different set of practices, language and beliefs.
But we are, of course, dealing
here with globalization defined according to a neo-liberal, trade liberalization
view. From this perspective, culture is a particular set of products that
can be sold and consumed, just as hard goods can be sold and consumed.
The objective is to commodify culture and to find the biggest market. Homogenization
of tastes and desires will produce the biggest market for "cultural products."
Communications technology
and global media corporations are certainly at work advancing homogenization
in the process of creating markets and integrating production for these
markets. This is not really, however, a race between economies, as the
authors describe it, but a race between a handful of corporate giants who
have no particular interest in one economy--as the term is meant in APEC-speak.
While the pressures for cultural
homogenization are powerful, counter-forces also exist. Some of these counter-forces
are within education systems where many still believe that developing skills
to democratically influence the nature of their society is a worthy educational
objective.
Because globalization is
creating a global economy and integrated culture, we should develop a common
curriculum and educational practices.
Given the nature of APEC,
proposals for commonalty in schools are not based on formal agreements.
Rather, the strategy is one of information-sharing, exchanges, conferences,
and research. Specific suggestions include (no surprise) promoting the
benefits of business-education links and sharing experiences with school-to-work
transitions. Developing curriculum also gets thrown into the mix, with
a proposal to exchange experts and experiences among APEC member economies.
Two structures already exist
to pursue this convergence in education. One is a number of university-based
APEC Study Centres that receive funding to carry out research aimed at
advancing the trade liberalization agenda. In times of limited research
funding from governments, the academic research agenda is more susceptible
to shaping by the availability of these resources.
The other is the "APEC Education
Forum," a sub-group of the APEC Human Resources Development Working Group.
It undertakes projects that range from "Mutual Recognition of Qualifications
in the Region" to "Performance Monitoring of Educational Systems: Framework
Conference." Education officials from all the APEC countries attend these
meetings. Increasingly the framing of education policy issues is taking
place in this international arena, rather than in the schools and communities
that the education system is supposed to serve.
Labour
should be co-opted into helping reshape education to serve globalization
An interest in involving
labour is a relatively new element on the APEC discussion agenda, and it
may not survive critical scrutiny from a number of the "economies." On
the other hand, when unions see the role assigned in this proposal, they
may well not be interested, either. The concept paper definitely does not
suggest minimum labour standards or observance of the International Labour
Organization Conventions on the right to free association and organization.
Rather, it says
To meet
the strong requirement for qualified, flexible and motivated human resources,
employers' and workers' organizations are expected to play as the effective
promoters of change with various activities which facilitate training programs.
While unions have and will
remain advocates of training for workers, the emphasis here is not on meeting
the interests of workers, but that of the corporate globalized system.
While the authors of the paper may see those interests as the same, many
labour activists do not.
What
is to be done?
How should those who value
equity and the basic principles of public education respond to this APEC
paper and the many similar proposals and programs. Should we accept that
globalization and its implications are inevitable and identify some areas
that can mitigate the worst impact on public education? Or should we undertake
the larger challenge of resisting the fundamental premises on which it
is based? Three considerations seem of primary importance in making that
choice.
1. Globalization only
benefits the minority.
While some have benefited
from trade liberalization and globalization, most have not. Income disparities
have increased within and between societies.A primary function of modern
government has been to create a more equitable distribution of a societies
resources, which has been of benefit to all, not just those who directly
benefit. Globalization--as currently practiced--is an abandonment of that
positive function.
2. Human wants and needs
are more than just economic.
While education definitely
has an impact in the economy as a whole and on the economic well-being
of individuals, it must respond to much more of what it means to be human.
Individual growth, social and cultural development and cohesion, democratic
participation and the interests of the whole community must be important
elements that public education continues to address.
3. The developing globalized
system is not invulnerable.
The current crisis in
the "Asian tiger" economies demonstrates some of the vulnerability of this
developing globalized system. While there is some chance of a collapse
of the system with global repercussions reflecting the current level of
integration, it is more likely that it will be changed by many small actions
and challenges, based on local acts of resistance that affirm the principles
of equity, democracy, social justice and public education. Repeated and
varied actions to support the public purpose of public education is the
necessary antidote to the domination of the economic goals an business
interests encouraged by APEC.
Larry Kuehn is Director
of Research and Technology at the British Columbia Teachers' Federation.
lkuehn@bctf.bc.ca
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