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Is Tech Billionaires' Educational Philanthropy a Bug Or a Feature?
Long-time reader theodp writes: Some education watchers have adopted a wait-and-see response to Jeff Bezos' two-pronged $2B pledge to aid the homeless and to establish preschools for low-income children (Mark Zuckerberg's The Primary School interestingly prefers 'em even younger, noting "we admit students at or before birth"). Not so Audrey Watters, who presents her misgivings in a blog post, titled, "It's Like Amazon, But for Preschool" (tl;dr: read her URL), wondering what a chain of preschools that "use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon" might look like, considering Amazon's own labor practices. She asks, "Are private preschool chains really the path we want to pursue, particularly if we believe that access to excellent early childhood education is so incredibly crucial? Can the gig economy and the algorithm ever provide high quality preschool? For all the flaws in the public school system, it's important to remember: there is no accountability in billionaires' educational philanthropy." Sharing Watters' concerns is author Anand Giridharadas, who argues in his new book Winners Take All that the wealthy pursue social change without uprooting the systems that produce inequality. Bezos has a "a stark opportunity to be a traitor to his class, to actually think about giving in ways that transform the system atop which he stands," Giridharadas said. "It is great to be a winner who gives back. It is even better to be a winner who thinks about how winners can take less."
Educational philanthropy has nothing to do with philanthropy. The theory of public education has only one blunt response to "why do we teach people how to read?": because they make better factory workers. So now the tech sector is attempting to shift the economy away from making stuff, and to do that they have to buy out all the schools that take kids and turn out factory workers, and replace them with code academies, GM-style.
None of this, not a single iota of it, is actually in any way intended to help mankind.
If you'd vote people to congress who'd be willing to actually tax the 1%, they wouldn't need to do this.
Is it being done purely to provide educational opportunities for whatever direction in life the student is interested in, or is it only to make good little workers for whoever (Bezos, in this case) is footing the bill? Beware the Privatization of Education, lest we end up with a generation that's trained like slaves would be trained, to do specific jobs not of their choosing, and to hell with whatever the students are interested in.
The bug is not how billionaires waste their money. At least someone else gets a slice of the pie. The bug is the media's excessive coverage of celebrities, including billionaires. The assumption that celebrities know more than your average expert in a field that the celebrity is not in, is pervasive and pernicious in idiot-centered celebrity culture.
How did Jeff Bezos bilk "millions of normal folks for their hard earned $$'s"?
Tax abatements and shelters, lobbying for legislation that equates to special treatment, regulatory capture - you know, the typical Evil-American-Corporation stuff.
In fairness, all that stuff is only half on him, the other half of blame lies with our elected "representatives" who would rather make sweetheart deals with corporations than actually, you know, represent their constituents.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese