Education

Education contributes powerfully to better health and public education is a foundation for democracy. Recently, however, private capital has viewed education as a profit center that can replace revenues lost to the decline of manufacturing. This chapter analyses the ways that modern capitalism has undermined equitable access to quality early childcare, K-12 education, and college by privatizing public education, creating and mandating expensive and inadequately tested but profitable educational tests, technologies and products, and imposing debt on schools and students. A powerful lobby of wealthy individuals and corporate leaders have used their influence to promote market values within the school system. These changes undercut the health- and equity-enhancing characteristics of public education. The chapter also describes how students, parents, teachers, and communities are resisting corporate penetration of public education, rejecting the ways it reinforces systemic racism, and creating models for education that promote health, democracy, and collective success.