The National Pulse – Corporate America Continues to Treat Students as Widgets

In this article, found here, written for The National Pulse by Dr. Karen Effrem, the issues of corporations and education policy makers dehumanizing students are discussed. Specifically, the problems with treating the education system as primarily a job training program are brought to light.

This education-as-workforce-preparation approach has also led to the imposition of Common Core, competency-based/personalized learning with its machine-based skills training, and the massive data collection and social emotional/personality profiling via education technology occurring in many schools. As chronicled here and other places in detail, this is all very dangerous to academic achievement, privacy, freedom of conscience, and being able to choose one’s own destiny.

But most importantly, it is not the right or the function of corporations or the federal government to treat people like widgets for their own use. Donohue mentioned in his speech that the Chamber is involved in what he terms the “Talent Pipeline Management.” This is analogous to former Exxon Mobil CEO and major Common Core proponent Rex Tillerson’s description of a student as a “product at the end of that high school graduation…Now is that product in a form that we, the customer, can use it? Or is it defective, and we’re not interested?”

These businesses and organizations do not have the right or authority to treat our children as mere links in their labor supply chain and to manipulate sensitive data (including social emotional and personality data often collected without consent via murky algorithms) to slot and shunt people into jobs according to the desires of Big Business and Big Government. Joy Pullman at The Federalist explains just how egregious and dangerous to our children and country this crony control really is:

You can find the entire article here on The National Pulse’s website.