Education should not be about commercial gain

Education is a goal and not a product to be manufactured and sold solely for profit, writes Michael Lambert.

The process of education as a moral enterprise has been cast aside and a product called education has been sold by businesses to generate a profit. Philip Cheung / The National

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The primary objective of any business is to maximise profit. If an enterprise is aiming to do anything other than that then it is something other than a business.

The primary objective of education depends, among other things, on a combination of an individual's social, moral, cultural, philosophical and political leanings.

Historically, education was an enterprise in its own right.

When Plato wrote The Republic in the early part of the fourth century BC, he expressed the most influential early account of education. For him, education was a moral enterprise, which sought to cultivate spiritual benefits such as virtue and human well-being in the interests of society.

The pursuit of knowledge and the intellectual and emotional growth of the individual – and consequently, the society to which they belong – was the key objective of education.

Increasingly, however, the process of education as a moral enterprise has been cast aside and a product called education has been sold by businesses to generate a profit.

Indeed, one of the primary objectives of a child’s education in the modern world is to ensure that they have the capacity to participate in the economy after leaving school.

This is certainly one of the major objectives behind government support for education and is quite often one of the primary objectives of parents too.

This is unsurprising when parents are paying significant sums of money for an education and hope that one day their sons and daughters will be self-sufficient.

Something quite unusual arises from this model, however, when you consider that any resources, which are used in the production of a given product, are part of the means of production.

In a car factory, the conveyor belts, the welding tools and the craftsmen are all part of the means of production. Without these means, the car cannot be produced.

In a for-profit school the buildings, the books, the staff and the pupils are the means of production. Without any of these, the product of education cannot be produced.

What this means for students is that they become a means by which to create a product called education, which can then be sold for profit for the benefit of the owner or shareholders.

The product itself, education, is then sold to the next generation of students, who become the replacement means of production. All the time, the owner or shareholders benefit as one element of their means of production is self-replicating.

In this business model, the interests of parents and pupils may only be considered in so far as they enable maximum profit.

It is possible that a free market and for-profit education, which is simultaneously produced by the pupils and provided for them, aligns with what the pupils actually want and therefore the outcome is ostensibly the same.

However, it is my belief that such a model for education creates what Jean-Paul Sartre dubbed mauvaise foi, that is a situation in which an actor (in this case a for-profit school) adopts values and behaviours on account of social or market pressures, rather than acting freely and according to their own ideals.

At their best, schools run as businesses ostensibly provide good education (otherwise they would go bust).

But only when a school is run with a clear and authentic mission, when revenue after costs is called surplus not profit – and this surplus is ploughed back into the school for the benefit of students and the wider social fabric – can schools truly build a better society.

Michael Lambert is headmaster of Dubai College, a non-profit- making school