Education for Sale.

"There is a major risk that the WTO's initiatives will clash head-on with the principles upheld by all those who value a quality public education system.”
Education International.


‘The University of Nike’ was crudely spray painted over the entrance to a university in France, a sign next to it pointed to the ‘Bill Gates’ building. In Berlin a mass occupation of a University is violently evicted by riot police, hundreds are arrested. The disruption of a senate meeting in Italy and mass rallies in Spain. Across Europe the streets were swamped by manifestations of student anger against increasing cuts in education, in a week long series of action against not just a European but a globalised assault on education, all culminating in the mass demonstrations that greeted the leaders of the EU as they gathered in Brussels at the end of December. The General Agreement On Services In Trade, emerging from the World Trade Organization has been made a dirty word because of a global movement against social injustice that challenges not only specific aspects of the system but the increasingly the whole system itself. Seattle, Prague, Genoa and Brussels, scenes of anger continue to flash across TV screens as a movement derided as ‘middle class youths attempting to recreate the sixties’ refuses to burn it self out and forges ever-closer links with a wider cross section of society and workers. Links forged because of the common threat of issues like GATS.

Education is just one aspect of our social fabric under threat from GATS, this agreement of the global elite is a threat to democracy and the ability of governments to regulate and create standards, protect labour rights, and safety and environmental standards, pressurizing governments to surrender public services to a private sector where the sole concern is the creaming off of profit with scant regard for the needs of the public. But how exactly does GATS threaten education? What impact can it have on the daily lives of students and workers engaged in education?

GATS, adopted at the end of the Uruguay Round of World Trade discussions in 1994, is a key component in the increasing trend towards the globalization of economics, as the clasp of multinationals tightens around the globe. Neo-liberalism-the annihilation of all ‘barriers to trade’ between countries, and the exorcism of even the mildest forms of government interference in the market place. Neo-liberalism is a continuation of the disastrous economic agendas of the 1970’s and 1980’s, the bastardized offspring of monetarism and thatcherism. Controls on imports, which protect native industries should be dropped, taxes on income and corporate profit disbanded to remove the burden on business, facilitating economic growth, attracting foreign investment, enabling poorer countries to fulfill excessive debt repayments to the IMF and World Bank. The argument is that this will lead to a ‘trickle down’ effect, as the increased profits gleaned by companies leads to job creation and eventually some of the wealth will trickle down, making everyone better off. But who has economic globalization really benefited? The companies, and the companies alone.

Flemming Larsen, the European Director of the IMF admitted in a debate on Neo-Liberalism that ‘Many of the poorest nations have in fact being regressing during the last couple of decades. I fear the gap between the rich and poor will continue to grow.’ In their agit prop video for ‘Sleep Now in the Fire’ Rage Against The Machine satirized the franchised game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, with the contestants facing questions on inequality, juxtaposed with scenes of Seattle. The answers were almost absurd, absurd but true. In the United States, that bastion of neo-liberalism, the benefits of economic growth have been even more disproportionately divided than in the past. Since the first wave of the neo-liberal assault in the 1970’s, 60% of American families have seen no increase in their real incomes. 45 million go with out health insurance, one in eight are subsisting below the poverty line, the minimum wage is worth 22 percent less than in 1968. In 1980, the bosses of large companies were getting 42 times as much money as their average factory worker; by 1998 they were getting 419 times as much. In Ireland, a supposed neo-liberal success story, the chasm between rich and poor continues to gape even wider as the politicians espoused a Celtic Tiger invisible to any but the rich.


GATS demands a cessation of the provision of public services by government and advocates their seizure by Transnational Corporations. The EU commission has described GATS as ‘first and foremost an instrument for the benefit of business’. In a discussion on GATS, David Kearns the US chair of Xerox described how ‘businesses will have to set the agenda…a complete restructure driven by competition and market discipline, unfamiliar grounds for educators.’ Business Lobbyists use the disturbing argument that ‘schools will respond better to paying customers like any other business’. The US business lobby is highly critical of the ‘culture of laziness which continues in the European education system…where students take liberties to pursue subjects not directly related to industry. Instead they are pursuing subjects which have no practical application’. Instead they want an education system intricately linked to the market and profit. Where courses reflect the need of business and any remaining semblances of personnel development is jettisoned.

The private provision of education is a highly lucrative market, with a global turnover of $3 trillion annually. In Ireland we have seen the rapid expansion of private education providers and the increased prominence of the exam cramming factories that cater for secondary exam students. A by product of an education system where the creation of college places is under-funded prompting the need for their strict rationing of existing places through the points system. For big business the corporate takeover of education is an extremely lucrative opportunity.

A barrier to trade in education is ‘the existence of government monopolies and high subsidization of local institutions.’ This means that the third level maintenance grant is discriminatory, forcing government to end subsidization of public sector or extend the grant to private schools equally. Looking at the government’s snide rejection of even the slightest genuine increase in the grant, over the past number of years can you really see them extending it to private education? Nah, didn’t think so.

The WTO secretariat maintains that opponents of GATS are infected with a needless paranoia and apprehension, he claims that the GATS agreement safeguards public services in Article 1, section 3 B and C. However, section B defines that the privatization of ‘services includes any service in any sector except services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority’. So, does this mean that all the essential government provided public services are protected or just those that allow it to exercise its authority and function like the military and the police? Section C elaborates on the excepted services even further. ‘A service supplied in the exercise of government authority means any service which is supplied neither on a commercial basis, nor in competition with one or more service suppliers’. The contradiction between these two statements unmistakably betrays the agenda behind GATS. GATS safeguards the police forces and militaries that protect the status quo and the economic interests of multinationals at home and abroad, while allowing for the slaughter of public services like education. It means the privatization of education where there is even just one private school. Where ever the profit margin of a company is affected by a government provided service, the Storm troopers of the WTO will be out to impose the new world order of rampant capitalism.

Ireland is represented in the GATS dialogues by the EU commission. Once a service industry is added to a particular governments ‘schedule of specific commitments’ for surrender to privatization it has a three year window to withdraw it, if it uses this right it must pay ‘any necessary compensatory adjustment’ to other member states representing the interests of their corporate lobby who are put out of place by the sudden removal of a market. If one member believes another state is in violation of the GATS agreement, the claim is brought to a settlement body. A secretive tribunal of bureaucrats, meeting in closed session and already has proven unfavorable to environmental, health and other legal actions focusing on issues of social justice. The winning country has the right to enforce the ruling through economic sanction. Article IV on domestic regulations demands that they ‘do not constitute unnecessary barriers to trade in services’. A dangerous eradication of democracy, bulldozing the way for the secretive tribunals of the WTO to storm over decisions democratically taken at a localized level and paving the way for multinationals top run riot in pursuit of profit. An agreement that will ‘hugely expand the authority of the WTO to interfere in the exercise of governmental authority. It would mean transferring the delicate responsibility for balancing the public interest with commercial considerations from elected government representatives to appointed tribunals or WTO panels.'

The WTO acknowledges that the implementation of GATS will lead to ‘cream skimming’ in service provision, using the example of health care to describe how ‘private clinics may well be able to attract qualified staff from public hospitals without…offering the same range of services to the same population groups.’ As the consumer watchdog Public Services International aptly paraphrases it ‘the elite will be able to access private transnational corporation controlled care; the rest will have to make do with the shrinking public system.’ Something that will exacerbate social inequality.

The pressures exerted by GATS for a more mobile work force which can mould itself to the chaos of the free market brings with it a degradation of standards and training. The privatization of education brings with it the view that labour is a cost and not an investment in society. The resultant increased trend towards mobility can lead to the disintegration of unions, as their power bases in the once stable employment fields of public service become unstable, facilitating the race to the bottom in terms of wages and the further drop in skills as workers opt for employment in better paid fields. The secondary system is already experiencing a mass exodus of its best teachers to other professions. In recent years teachers have seen their pay levels fall significantly behind the majority of other professions. They earn on average £9,000 less than other college graduates. Last year’s embittered ASTI dispute was an attempt to prepare secondary education for privatisation by connecting it to the private sector, through bench marking, easing any future transition and wiping out the Union as a source of resistance to neo-liberalism. Betraying a further agenda of compliance with GATS.

In No Logo, Naomi Klein explores some results of the corporate attack on education. In 1996 the faculty and students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison were unwillingly censored because of the administrations sponsorship agreement with Reebok. A clause in the deal stated ‘During and for a reasonable time after the term the University will not issue any official statement that disparages Reebok. Additionally the university will promptly take all necessary steps to address any remark by any University employee, agent or representative…that disparages Reebok’. An Amnesty Chapter at Kent State had their application for funding revoked in 1998, because of Coca Colas exclusive vending rights on campus, after they advocated a boycott of cokes products in response to the conglomerates support for the since ousted Nigerian dictatorship. There’s the case of the expulsion of a student in Greenbriar high School because he wore a Pepsi t-shirt on a day dedicated to Coca Cola. There’s the invasion of American schools by Channel One, where kids must watch two hours a day of ads sandwiched between 12 minutes of teeny bopper current affairs, in return the schools do not get direct funding but are allowed utilize the TV equipment for other classes. A student who refused to sit through the daily dose of ad blitzing was arrested for playing truant and detained by police.

While these cases may seem extreme and serve to highlight the eradication of independent and free thought on US campuses. Ireland is following closely behind. The Public Private Partnerships are the first major warning signs of the oncoming privatization of education. We have seen attacks on civil liberties with 16 arrests and police violence against peaceful protesters at a recent anti-PPP protest, as the forces of the state crackdown on any dissenting voices. While students in France used the tactics of culture jamming to rename their colleges in an effort to highlight the corporate seizure of education, in UCD it is too late to engage in such creative acts of resistance. We already graduate from Tony O’Reilly Hall and attend The Smurfit School of Business.

GATS is not some abstract issue, it is no longer something our students’ union can dismiss as irrelevant to the students of UCD. The concerted campaign of the global elite to rob us of a decent publicly funded education system, to take our grants, to turn our colleges into factories of the mind, no longer concerned with intellectual development and stimulation, where students are churned out to work as obedient automatons in the ‘dark satanic mills’ of the future is something that encroaches into all our lives. We can no longer ignore the cannibalization and commodification of all aspects of our lives for profit. Another world is possible. Join in the fight back, because enough is enough.