Nico Hirtt, a member of the Belgian organization Appel pour une école démocratique (“Appeal for a democratic school”: http://users.skynet.be/aped). Mr. Hirt is the author of L’École sacrifiée (EPO, Brussels, 1996), Tableau noir (EPO 1998) and Les nouveaux maîtres de l’école (EPO and VO Editions, Brussels-Paris, 2000).
© Ruth Sofair Ketler/SIS, Paris
© Ruth Sofair Ketler/SIS, Paris
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International Trade in Education The WTO uses four terms to describe different
kinds of cross-border trade in services. Each kind is the subject of specific demands
from those who favour liberalization. |
The World Trade Organization
has launched a process that could open up to competition the expanding and highly
protected world market in education. What issues are at stake?
Most of
us see education as first and foremost a public service which is responsible for
providing young people with instruction. For investors looking for somewhere to put
their money it is also an annual budget of $1,000 billion worldwide, a sector employing
50 million people, and above all a billion potential customers in the form of students.
After the collapse of the Seattle negotiations within the World Trade Organization
at the end of 1999, it is hard to say when the “Millennium Round” of trade talks
will start. But education will surely be somewhere on the agenda, since the education
market is growing at breakneck speed.
The decision to extend to services the liberalization of international trade which
previously applied to commodities was taken in 1994. The General Agreement on Trade
in Services (GATS) which was signed in April of that year included education on the
list of services to be liberalized. To stay outside the scope of this agreement,
a country’s education system must be completely financed and administered by the
state, which is no longer the case anywhere. However, each country can still decide
freely what commitments it wants to make, and especially which educational sectors
it wants to expose to market forces. The New Zealand government, for example, has
decided to open up to outside competition the whole private education sector, from
primary to university level.
So far, New Zealand is an exception, but that situation is likely to change. Part
4 of the GATS agreement (“Progressive liberalization”) requires that fresh negotiations
should be held by the end of 2000 at the latest, and should be directed to “the elimination
of the adverse effects on trade in services of measures as a means of providing effective
market access”. At the Geneva headquarters of the World Trade Organization (WTO),
far from the headlines and the demonstrators, work still goes on. But independently
of the WTO and national policies, a number of factors are driving educational systems
towards “commercialization”.
Pressures
for change
First, education is
a rapidly-growing sector in which governments are finding it harder and harder to
satisfy demand, above all in higher education. Between 1985 and 1992, the number
of students in higher education rose about 26 per cent—from 58.6 to 73.7 million.
Meanwhile, public spending on education has tended to stagnate over the past 15 years
(5-6 per cent of GDP in rich countries and 4 per cent elsewhere).
In view of this dearth of public spending, parents and students are increasingly
looking to private education for a solution. In the United States, every episode
of violence in a state school and every scandal that rocks official school systems
gives a boost to “home schooling”, where children no longer attend school and are
taught at home.
Traditional public education is also coming in for strong criticism. Employers complain
it is not geared to their needs and is not flexible enough. An influential European
employers’ pressure group, the Industrial Round Table, deplores the fact that in
most European countries, schools are integrated into a centralized public system
run by a bureaucracy that slows down the process of change or makes them impervious
to demands for change from outside.
Under pressure from economic interests, a process of “deregulating” education systems
has begun. The growing independence of schools is encouraging them to look for alternative
sources of funding, ranging from sponsorship to full management by private companies
and including many kinds of partnerships between schools and firms. A European Commission
working party on education and training says “the time for out-of-school education
has come. . . . the liberalization of of the educational process thereby made possible
will lead to control by education service providers who are more innovative than
the traditional structures.”
The development and spread of information and communication technologies on a massive
scale make possible the development of paid distance learning, using multimedia and
the Internet for tutorials, exams, etc.
Secondary and primary education are also affected. More and more paying Internet
sites bill themselves as alternatives to state schools or traditional private schools.
The computer screen takes over from the teacher, for a fee of around $2,250 a year.
The WTO secretariat set up a working goup in 1998 to look at the prospects for more
liberalized education. Its report pointed to the rapid growth of distance learning
and noted the increasing number of partnerships between educational institutions
and private firms such as the Western Governors’ University, which was founded by
17 U.S. state governors and includes private sector partners such as IBM, AT&T,
Cisco, Microsoft and International Thomson.
The report also noted the increasing deregulation of higher education in Europe by
governments which have begun “a movement away from public financing and toward greater
market responsiveness, coupled with an increasing openness to alternative financing
mechanisms.” The WTO report lists many “barriers” that need to be removed before
trade in educational services can be liberalized. These include “measures limiting
direct investment by foreign education providers” and “the existence of government
monopolies and high subsidization of local institutions”.
Education
for export
It is true that these
observations were made by a working group, but as Martin Khor pointed out in an article
in the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique in May 1997, “in the WTO, as in
the GATT, setting up a working group is never innocuous. It triggers a chain of events
which participating governments are soon caught up in. Suddenly it is no longer a
matter of being for or against the aims of the working group but simply of how they
are to be achieved.”
Some 350 U.S. experts on international trade in services, including 170 businessmen
and women, gathered at the U.S. Commerce Department in Washington on October 16,
1998 to draw up recommendations for the U.S. negotiators at the WTO. The purpose
of the meeting, called Services 2000, was to look at how the U.S. government should
“continue to support the efforts of American business to take competitive advantage
in foreign markets.” The U.S. currently controls about 16 per cent of the world market
in services. Its services exports have more than doubled in the past 10 years and
now cover 42 per cent of the non-services trade deficit.
The United States is also the world’s leading exporter of educational services, and
a working group at the Services 2000 conference paid special attention to this sector.
It concluded that the sector “needs the same degree of transparency, transferability
and interchangeability, mutual recognition, and freedom from undue regulation or
restraints and barriers that the United States acknowledges on behalf of other service
industries.” The report said that three points should be at the centre of WTO negotiations
about education.
Firstly, there should be a free flow of electronic information and means of communication,
nationally and internationally. Secondly, the negotiators should tackle “barriers
and other restrictions that limit or prevent the provision of educational and training
services across countries and internationally.” They were also to deal with obstacles
to the transferability of degrees and diplomas.
Fighting
for market share
The U.S. demands are
backed by most countries of the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) zone. In
a note in October 1999, the Australian delegation to the WTO said it would be “encouraging
all members to make expanded commitments in all sectors, even the ones that have
proved difficult in both regional and multilateral services negotiations”, particularly
education.
South Korea took a similar position. At a meeting of ministers of human resources
from APEC countries that it hosted in September 1997, the Seoul government put out
a memorandum which clearly stated its vision of education as a tool of economic competition:
“The emphasis on education for itself or on education for good members of a community
without a large emphasis on preparation for future work is no longer appropriate.
Such a view of education and work cannot be justified in a world where economic development
is emphasized.
“At present, in many economies, the education systems do not sufficiently reflect
labour market conditions. Their inflexible and inefficient education systems could
not meet the new economic environmental challenges.” So education should be made
more “flexible”, i.e. be deregulated and liberalized. In particular, “school systems
should be established to allow all students to study what they are interested in”
and “employers, with school educators, should share the role of educating students”.
Some think resistance to liberalizing education will come from Europe, especially
France. “The future WTO negotiations cannot call in question France’s tradition of
public service in the field of education and health,” stressed a report on the WTO
prepared for the French parliament by Béatrice Marre. A few days before the
Seattle meeting, French education minister Claude Allègre also emphasized
his “unshakeable support for education as a public service.”
U.S. delegates at the Services 2000 meeting were under no illusions. “It is likely
that other countries, especially members of the European Union, may take the view
that education and training are non-commercial activities and therefore should be
off the table during GATS negotiations,” the Americans said. “This position reflects
their self-interest as competitors. . . . It should be resisted.”
France is currently the world’s second biggest exporter of educational services.
A year ago, the French group Vivendi (formerly Générale des Eaux),
through its subsidiary Havas, took control of Cendant Software, the U.S. educational
and entertainment software giant. In January 1999, the French ministers of education
and foreign affairs announced that France would fight to increase its share in the
“market” in higher education. So one might well ask how far the
“anti-American” stance of French education officials is simply to protect France’s
position on the francophone education market.
