Last year, for reasons not altogether clear to me, the British government issued a white paper saying that non-teaching institutions would soon have the power to award degrees. Now, as was anticipated, the Pearson corporation says that it plans to award degrees to complete its role as the ultimate education organization of our era. Of course, Pearson could just buy a struggling college or university and change its name, but it doesn’t plan to do that. It has already opened “Pearson College.”
This is all very puzzling. Businesses awarding degrees in business, technology, or maybe even in liberal arts, perhaps online.
I am not enough of a visionary to understand why it is a good idea for a university education to be redefined to mean that you can pick up a degree over the counter or online without ever meeting a scholar. And I am no fan of for-profit universities in principle.
Is it about handing out degrees? Is it about dumbing down higher education? Is it a business plan to make money?
Or is it something else?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not wanting to sound like a raving radical here, but the corporations are trying to control the United States by deciding elections (thank you, Citizens United), our bodies, and our minds. I enjoyed reading Orwell’s “1984” years ago because it offered a glimpse of what the world could have been like had we gone down that path. If I were to reread that novel today, its prescience would frighten me.
It’s time for someone to write the book about Pearson and its huge underground network of destruction. Jeremy Scahill’s work on Blackwater would be a good model. I wonder the connections between Pearson and Common Core, for example. This is too big to comprehend without that scholarship, IMO.
Aw, come on now, everyone who’s anyone knows that everybody is a teacher.
Personally I think that the students and teachers should get paid for their time any time that they take/give a standardized test as there are always “trial” questions that have nothing to do with the test but are for the benefit of the corporation that made the test. Add to that the sheer crappiness of said test the students and teachers should sue said test makers for mal-practice.
Never thought about that Duane. Interesting insight – our kids are performing services for testing corporations by helping them validate tests via field test questions. Why haven’t I ever thought about that?
Duane you are so right. The companies make the tests that check the knowledge of their textbooks. It is a wicked circle.
“I’ll take the Liberal Arts Combo Pack, please, with a teaching credential on the side. And could you Supersize me to a Ph.D?”
Alan, that would be funny if it wasn’t such a clear possibility.
It’s about the enclosure and rate of profit: http://www.richard-hall.org/2012/08/15/a-few-notes-on-pearson-and-the-privatisation-of-academic-labour/
although I might be wrong…
While I’m certainly no visionary, I see this as a logical extension of replacing public schools with private, non-profit or for-profit schools. It fits nicely into the corporate K-18 education model. It allows businesses to award its employees with degrees to enhance the corporation’s image. Oh yes, this is quite logical. And down right frightening, given the proof we have again and again of corporations’ willingness to twist ethical standard to fit their corporate desires.
Something else. We are seeing the total capture of the education sector at all levels by the corporate sector.