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

Because knowledge (as a concept) is prevalent in every aspect of human society, I have focused on a contemporary topic centered on the concept of knowledge and contextualized in a framework that is rather common to all people: education. Specifically, I explore the social structure of big business and how it engages the knowledge-producing social system of schools. A phenomenon in the last century has been the emergence of capitalism as a gargantuan force penetrating almost every social organism. This is not an anticapitalism book. Within the realm of education, what I am curious about is what social system capitalism succeeded. And, is the residue of the previous system still in place? Big business, as I see it, has a legitimate place in education, but there are some dangers with the way in which business involves itself in education processes. I argue that the charter school movement is simply another vehicle executing what I have discovered is a 100-year trend by the business community (as a social institution) to infuse its values into not only school and university management processes but also pedagogy. At one point, education embodied the discourse of religion—conceptions of God—with an understanding that knowledge has value in and of itself. Then, a wave of secularism dominated Western discourse, where knowledge began to be removed from conceptions of God but still retained intrinsic value. Now, it is capitalism’s turn, working through small and large corporations—a time when the extrinsic features of knowledge are a much more predominant norm. The difference is found in the residual effects of what capitalism may be doing to people’s understanding of knowledge; as a society, people are fragmenting knowledge into mere information. Technology has a major role to play in this regard.

Overall, I think modern society is witnessing a recontextualization of knowledge. Although knowledge was contextualized within a more cosmic paradigm during antiquity and through the Middle Ages, it is possible that the Industrial Revolution usurped modalities of God as the predominant discourse in education. What I mean is that the connections of knowledge to something external to people may be passing away and the birth of a new world understanding may have begun, at least with regard to education.