The Precariat grows in the Education Industry
In the past 50 years, the education system in Britain and globally has been transformed into a vast industry, making it easily the biggest industry in Britain and in some other countries, apart from so-called financial services. It has generated many perverse paradoxes. Never has so much money been spent on education and yet never has so small a share of that money been spent on actual education. In Britain and in most OECD countries, there has been a persistent chronic shortage of teachers, yet teachers’ real wages on average have declined. While spending has increased, the teaching of subjects long regarded as the essence of good education has shrunk dramatically – humanities, philosophy, history, culture and art. Finally, for the growing mass of people being shunted into the precariat, the level of educational credentials required to obtain jobs is higher than the level required to perform those jobs, a historically unprecedented phenomenon.
In the transformation, the class structure that has emerged in the wider economy has been largely reproduced inside the education industry. Because the industry has been extensively privatised at all levels and then commodified (everything being bought and sold) and increasingly taken over by financial capital (mainly by private equity), two streams of employment have been sharpened, in which an administrative and sales staff stream has grown to dominate a teaching and research stream. This dualism has contributed to the stagnation and decline of earnings of teachers and academics.
There are other malaises that have grown, as shown in my book, which include a shrinkage of unstructured play among children and youths, a sharp decline in ‘deep reading’, an epidemic of ‘examinitus’ and a growing threat to human intelligence from Artificial Intelligence. But the evident class structure inside all levels of education should also be alarming.
Take the administrative stream first. At the top in income terms, as well as in status and power, is an elite, often with no knowledge or experience of actual teaching. Often drawn from financial business, they are receiving six-digit salaries, plus plentiful perks. Below them is a shrinking salariat, with long-term employment, with paid holidays, medical leave and prospectively good pensions. Perhaps parasitic is too strong a term, but there does seem to be a lot of them.
Below them in income and status terms is a huge and growing precariat, workers with short-term or no contracts, volatile uncertain wages, few if any non-wage benefits and dependent on the good will of their bosses. Many are in chronic debt, financially insecure and without any control of their time, as shown in an earlier book. Poverty lurks.
That class structure has been even sharper in the teaching-academic stream. In schools and pre-schools, there is mainly a divide between a shrinking salariat, often subordinated to the whims of school administrators, and a growing majority in or falling into the precariat. The latter are on short-term or no contracts, often not knowing who or when they will be teaching, many held on call by temp agencies as ‘supply teachers’. Their wages may not seem to have fallen by much, but this often conceals the fact that they have lost traditional non-wage benefits and services. Indeed, many teachers earn less than they would working in supermarkets. Not surprisingly, the precariat and salariat can easily feel alienated from each other.
Particularly those in the precariat have lost control of their time, having to do a lot of what I call ‘work-for-labour’, work that they have to do to stay in touch or are required to do outside labour time and off workplaces. Many have to teach a curriculum in which they do not believe, in fear of losing out to those more prepared to do so. All of this has contributed to the widespread incidence of mental breakdowns and the hemorrhaging of the teaching profession.
At university or higher-education level, the class differentiation is even more pronounced. The administrators and new private owners are part of the plutocracy, earning millions of pounds or dollars. Within academia, there is a super elite, treated like football stars subject to extravagant transfer fees, paid huge salaries and bonuses that do not reflect the extent or quality of any teaching. They add lustre to the university ‘brand’! But are they really worth it?
Below them is a privileged salariat, mainly tenured professors or their equivalent. But their numbers and employment security have been shrinking. Fewer are rising from the ranks of the precariat into its ranks. Indeed, universities have become zones of the precariat. The worst situation may be in the United States, where three-quarters of all academics are on temporary contracts, many of them as ‘fractionals’, that is, employed on a part-time basis, often ‘on call’. The situation is similar in the UK.
In sum, the class structure in all levels of British education is clear and is detrimental to healthy teaching and research communities. Nor is it necessary. It must and can be overcome. But that will require a transformation of education, reviving it as a commons embedded in society, out of control by financial capital and not driven by a ‘human capital’ ethos. Such a transformation is surely among the most urgent priorities of social policy.
