FTAA & Education

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement has many hidden negative effects on the lives of people throughout the Western Hemisphere. One of the most malicious of these is the agreement’s assault on public education...

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement has many hidden negative effects on the lives of people throughout the Western Hemisphere. One of the most malicious of these is the agreement’s assault on public education.

Of course, the right wing and their corporate masters have targeted public education for attack for decades. Under modern capitalism, education is increasingly seen as a simple commodity to be bought and sold for profit. According to CorpWatch on-line magazine, “The ‘education industry,’ a term coined by EduVentures, an investment banking firm, is estimated to be worth between $630 and $680 billion in the United States. The stock value of 30 publicly traded educational companies is growing twice as fast as the Dow Jones Average. Brokerage firms like Lehman Brothers and Montgomery Securities have specialists seeking out venture capital for the 'education industry.'�

Industrialists at one time viewed public education as a necessary expense for educating an urban workforce. Now capitalism sees public education as redundant due to the world economic crisis, market liberalization and the increasing separation of workers into technical and unskilled workforces. By cutting taxes, outsourcing educational services, corporate merchandizing, privatizing school management and the wholesale privatization of campuses and schools, capitalism threatens the educational future of millions of students.
Today, regional and global trade agreements are trying to extend the corporate reach to all aspects of public life including public education. What was in many countries a guarantee—universal public education—is now being threatened everywhere. Public education is a right that the peoples of the Americas have struggled for and won at great cost and now FTAA threatens to take away this right with the stroke of a pen. If the FTAA agreement were adopted, its sections overseeing “trade in services� would undermine public funding and management of education as an “unfair labor practice.�

FTAA is not alone among capitalist trade agreements in jeopardizing public education. The World Trade Organization is attempting to include education as part of the General Agreement on Trades in Services (GATS). “If the WTO’s “non-discriminatory� clause came into effect it could require governments to provide at least equal amounts of funding to private enterprises (universities) as is given to public entities, irrespective of tuition and housing rates that are levied at private institutions,� writes Yves Engler in Z Magazine. Similarly, the services section of the FTAA agreement could force governments to fund private education or to open up public school and universities to private “competition.�

This provides the opening for a number of disastrous situations for public education. For instance, under FTAA guidelines a corporation could sue a local or national government body for providing subsidies to public schools on the grounds that this creates an unequal market environment. A small, unelected panel of corporate lawyers would decide on the case. The government could potentially be forced to pay fines or provide equal subsidies to corporations as it does to public schools. In another potential scenario, local school districts could be forced to open up the management of their schools to a bidding process. They would then be required under FTAA regulations to go with the lowest bidder, no matter how disastrous that company’s practices might be for the quality of education.

Like other international trade agreements, FTAA is structured to primarily benefit U.S. corporations at the expense of public institutions, workers and small businesses. In a speech titled “Keep Public Education Out of Trade Agreements� delivered at the World Forum for People’s Education, Larry Kuehn, Director of Research and Technology British Columbia Teachers’ Federation, Canada said “At a recent meeting in Vancouver, a WTO official said that the push in the WTO to create an international agreement on services came from the United States trade officials…Further growth in education exports would help further to reduce the U.S. trade deficit.�

Student organizations throughout the Americas and across the world have responded to the FTAA with resistance. November 17, 2002 student and youth organizations around the Americas took part in the Day of action against the FTAA. The International Student Union (IUS), the United States Student Association (USSA), the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) and the Continental Organization of Latin American and Caribbean Students (OCLAE) as well as the Young Communist League, USA endorsed the Day of Action.

The Canadian Federation of Students’ fact sheet on FTAA sums up the sentiment: “The aim of the FTAA is to remove 'barriers' to trade and investment. In the world of international trade our public schools themselves are considered such barriers…Any policy that restricts investment by foreign-based, for-profit universities and colleges (like affirmative action hiring or residency requirements for governing boards) could be challenged as a trade barrier…Under the FTAA, the public education system itself will become slowly dismantled as public funds are depleted.�

National student federations in Latin America and the Caribbean, regional alliances, campus groups and youth-led political organizations are joining hands with trade unions, environmentalists and others to put the pressure on to keep FTAA from including public education in its rules on services. Youth and students worldwide demand that education be a right for all and not a privilege for a few. They refuse to allow undemocratic institutions to undermine public institutions of education.

Libero Della Piana is one of the National
Co-coordinators of the YCL and a student at Miami University of Ohio.