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

change in American education reform. However, I propose that there are certain problems with the way the business community coalesces with educational institutions.

There are several issues that educationists and sociologists have highlighted related to corporate interventions in education. I consider three: (a) democracy, (b) habitus, and (c) autonomy, individual and institutional. In the first instance, corporations threaten the ideals of intellectual liberty in education. Giroux (1999) contended that corporate power transforms school knowledge. Through education-industry relationships, students are influenced by the discourse of a “hidden curriculum” (representing corporate interests) to recognize brand names and/or learn appropriate attitudes for future work. Giroux argued that “instruction in this manner does not teach students how to connect the meaning of work to the imperatives of a strong democracy” (pp. 140–149).

The underpinning argument is that capitalist customs embrace pursuits of the moneyed life as the highest value—in relation to which the influence of other values (i.e., educational knowledge) declines (Mills, 1956). Arguably, this paves ways for businesses to tacitly construct a distinctive pedagogy in schools: imparting the social skills that will be useful for work. I argue that corporations mask their economic interests with an educational one through Bourdieu’s (1977) conceptual theorization of habitus, the discursive arrangement of environments where knowledge is socially constructed. This is where corporations could have influential results: refitting the school culture to suit a desired social structure. I explore a historical background, examining the changing elements of academic habitus and the effects of corporate intervention on pedagogic discourse. This is where issues of autonomy are crucial.

The development of the intellect and its knowledge discourse is contingent on certain levels of autonomy of institutions and individuals; sovereignty from external authority is critical for optimum intellectual progress (Collins, 1998). I argue that the intrinsic elements of the learner are systemically being divorced from the knower; autonomous educational knowledge development is lost (Beck, 1999). The world of big business has an influential hand in this divorce.