I have just written about flash mobs and creativity and schools. That was a reaction to a post on Facebook by a friend of mine on a video of purported flash mob scene in Singapore. It depicted a highly rehearsed flash mob doing a dance sequence smack in the middle of Raffles Place. Of course it was not a flash mob in the true sense of the word where almost total strangers congregate together almost spontaneously to do something on a mass scale. This, it seems, was a rehearsed advertisement for a a phone company. Just a few days prior to this event, the local daily, the Straits Times featured an article on flash mobs being used by commercial or business entities.

Education and flash mobs have a lot more in common then we normally think. Today, both are being taken over or hijacked if you like by business considerations. The result of these hijackings is a well-run and structured activity that has lost its way.

Only for those are unaware, will see the activity as true to its original intended purposes. Today, behind flash mobs you see a business motive. The same is true of education. Business motives run education. While this is perhaps true of mass “education” since the start of the Industrial Revolution perhaps even more so today we have lost sight of what education is truly for. For the individual it is seen as the passport to the acquisition of material wealth. For the businessmen, it is to teach the populace to be just skillful workers of the 21st century. While this is important, shouldn’t education have other and more important goals?

What we see instead are statements of intent that will actually narrow the goals of education even further to that of the business world. In the US, the Obama Administration panics and its education goal is to prevent America from being left in the dust economically by its global rivals. Hence the Obama Administration’s emphasis on Math and the Sciences. To drive home the importance of it, it intends to link teacher pay to teacher performance which everyone knows is an euphemism for linking teachers’ pay to their students’ test scores. School districts get money if they toe the line. In Singapore, even the madrasahs have to adopt the national curriculum  so that its graduates are economically more viable. Getting funds for the madrasahs from the governing body is easy as long as you participate in the economy-centered new madrasah syllabus. In addition, “philanthropists” like Bill Gates have also linked funding from his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to linking test scores and teacher pay.

The result is that education becomes a “bottom line” endeavor just like businesses. Education is reduced to numbers and statistics, just like businesses. Education will be ever changing depending on the trends in the market place, just like businesses dance to trends in the economy. The people involved in education like the teachers and students will become just digits, just like the way businesses treats its workers. A humanizing endeavor has been reduced to just cold economics. So while outwardly, education appears to be taking place in our well-planned and organized schools, the reality is that education have surrendered even further perhaps to the demands of businesses just as flash mobs are increasingly tools of businesses too.