The Imprint of Business Norms on American Education By Dameon V ...

(Popper, 1962). This kind of utopia is what I have coined the Imprint: the social modality of business activity.

The Industrial Revolution in Europe, and later in America, massively transformed the world into the “instrumental age, obsessed with delivery, outcomes, and audits” (Hogan & Smith, 2003, p. 173). This has created a common (utopian) factor: education as a product of radical relativism, a practice that is not “guided by concepts of objective and fundamental truth as something humanely achievable” but is seen “as a battle for the supremacy of certain perspectives over others…the stronger over the weaker” (Hogan & Smith, 2003, p. 173). The implication of evolutionary Platonic ideation applied in industry and education is that in the “present,” knowledge is now relational to a product that is presented to the learner (the particular), not a practice that is to be engaged in by the learner (p. 177). Overall, market competition as a social structure can be seen as a sort of totalitarian authority over the vulnerable educational discourse. The rational autonomy of education (knowledge) falls away.

Instead, there is a kind of industrial “utopian engineering” controlling how knowledge is transmitted and acquired. This is how knowledge is divorced from its autonomous characteristic. As Popper (1994) stated, though industry and science progressed simultaneously, feeding off of one another, pursuits for knowledge succeeded because, epistemologically, knowledge processes remained a relatively free enterprise; they were autonomous. The philosophy of education that is argued here is to view knowledge as a thing to understand, which, once it is attained, “liberates for the ideal of autonomous, rational, moral agent” (Bailey, 1984, p. 22).

My philosophical points in this section will be more cogent in chapter 3, when I highlight a trend by industry professionals to introduce the Imprint in schools as the ideal (i.e., utopian) social base, masked in what was called “social efficiency” (Kliebard, 2004, p 274) in the early nineteenth century. For now, I want to consider a few more philosophical points, but within economics. This will highlight a unique contrast about autonomy.