Soft drink advertisments in a school cafeteria
I wrote this article to contribute to the OBESSU campaign “Education we have a problem” you can find here the original version.
When someone talks about privatisation of education the first picture that comes into my mind is a school that, to overcome budget cuts, has installed big advertisements of a famous soft drink in classrooms. Although the possibility this happens tomorrow is very small, there are several hidden forms of privatisation happening right now in European education. These characterisations are less striking than advertisement, but at same time way more sneaky and dangerous: they risk undermining the impartiality of education by reducing it to an exploitable commodity at the service of the labour market.
To better understand the whole process, we first need to distinguish the concepts of privatisation and commodification of Education: during the last decades, these two notions have become two sides of the same coin.