Enterprise education and the restructuring of the State: business as government?

Abstract

This thesis examines the rise of Enterprise Education as a policy response to educational and economic crises in New Zealand, and western capitalist societies in general. I argue that Enterprise Education imposes upon public education the rules, regulations and language of business, thereby centralising industrial and capitalist imperatives in education. I argue that Enterprise Education therefore provides capitalist industry with the potential to define the public interest in education. This is helped by the fact that the capitalist state, having to manage economic and legitimation crises, restructures that state in the image of the private corporation. The process of economic and state deregulation and restructuring is discussed, and educational policy is fitted into this context. The collapse of the Keynesian welfare state, and the replacement of the welfare state with that of a competition state, replaces state structures premised on welfare rights, with state structures premised on profit motives. Thus, public education is held to the needs of capitalist industry and economy. The state allows business to infiltrate policy decision making processes in education, and define the public interest in education. Further, deregulation of the education sector, and the creation of an education market, allows business to exercise control at the level of the school also. This is achieved through corporate sponsorship programmes, and business presence on Boards of Trustees. Business therefore utilises schools as a site for the dissemination of a corporate worldview, and attempts to actively create the right minds for the capitalist market of the 21st century. That worldview contains values of consumerism, possessive individualism, competition, and the teaching of brand loyalty. Further, business attempts to use the school to disseminate the capitalist point of view on such political issues as equal employment opportunities, and environmental care.