By Samuel King
"Education for and through enterprise" was the refrain of the 1995 Karpin report to the federal Labor government, attempting to legitimise direct ties between the school system and business. Since that time, the trend towards tying school education to the needs of business has increased rapidly. Recent federal government policy looks set to accelerate this.
One main area of secondary education change has been increased links with local business, including direct training schemes for students. Examples of such schemes abound. In one, implemented in the Perth industrial suburb of Kwinana, which has a youth unemployment rate of over 35%, 20 students were taken in by the Kwinana Industries Council as trainees, doing 164 days per year of flexible work for $75-90 per week.
Part of this linking of education with on-the-job training is aimed at working-class areas. Students attending schools in such areas are being trained for jobs with low pay and bad conditions, while students at wealthier schools are given skills in more lucrative areas.
For example, students at Willunga High School, south of Adelaide, are taught to grow and process grapes for local companies, while students at the wealthy Green Point Christian College in NSW are taught to design, manage and market commodities. Students at the private St Michael's College in Melbourne are taught internet skills, and earn the school valuable revenue in sales and consultancies for local business.
As well as direct training, changes to the overall curriculum of schools have also been proposed by governments and business. The Karpin report, and discussion in pro-business education circles since then, argued that teaching social justice and equality at schools is "ideological", while using the education system to make young people into profitable employees is "preparing students for the real world".
One education consultant, Peter McGregor, told Business Review Weekly: "The vast majority of kids go through school untouched by any acquaintance with business. The usual curricula don't mention world-best practice, Asian Tiger economies, and the need for economic growth, but the authors go overboard about income distribution and social justice."
The influence of big business on curriculum will increase as private funding replaces what the government has cut back. Already at MacRobertson Girls High in Melbourne, the administration has held classes hosting top CRA mining executives. One of the topics covered was CRA's involvement in Bougainville. It is a safe bet, though, that those executives would not have dwelled on Australian military aid to Papua New Guinea and the massacres committed against the people of Bougainville in defence of CRA mining interests.
From the point of view of business and its advocates, such areas of study not only fail to prepare students for work but often make students critical of the society that they are expected to conform to. Any subject that seeks to explain or examine society, or that may point to the need for change, will be amongst those to go.
Increasing business influence and control over the running of schools is tied closely to the shift in funding from public schools to private. The Secondary Education Act, which came into force on January 1, transferred $150 million from government to non-government schools. This was done by taking away funding for four students from the public system for every one student who switches to private schooling.
Amongst other changes, the federal government abolished the "new schools policy". Previously this had limited the number of government-funded private schools, restricted the amount of funding that private schools could receive and set a minimum number of people needed for a private school to receive funding.
Now government schools may need more students to set up than private schools. A Victorian public school of 131 students was closed down because it was too small; a private school has now been set up on the same site which has only 21 students. On the whole, private or so called "independent" schools now receive more funding per student than government schools do.
Opposition to the privatisation and corporatisation of schools is growing. The most recent example is the successful industrial campaign by South Australian education workers, winning a 17% pay rise over two years.
The campaign also forced the government to commit $28 million towards reversing cuts to funding implemented by Labor and Liberal state governments over a number of years.
When asked why education workers were able to defeat the government, SAIT and Australian Education Union state president Janet Giles said, "We didn't focus publicly on just the conditions and wages. We talked about student learning conditions, our ability to be able to educate kids". She added that union tactics helped "with building solidarity between members and communicating with parents and students to educate them about the dispute".