Miseducating for the Global Economy: How Corporate Power Damages Education and Subverts Students’ Futures

All across the United States, corporations, politicians, economists, educators—and now, most remarkably, Ivanka Trump—cry out for new “education for the twenty-first century economy.” Meanwhile, millions of Americans face increasing difficulty finding well paying, secure jobs. But the current employment crisis is not so much due to the educational system as it is to a sustained corporate effort to keep the public in ignorance about the damage wrought by the global economy itself. Miseducating for the Global Economy reveals that behind the going concern for “global economy education” lies capitalism’s metastasizing indifference to human values, to a fair distribution of resources, to its radical restructuring of workplaces with an attendant intensification of work effort, and to the genuine well-being of workers and their families.

Gerald Coles’s book provides a real education about the twenty-first-century global economy—and what corporations are doing to prevent our learning about it. Corporations and business organizations, for instance, resolutely withhold massive wealth that could be used to fund more realistic occupational education, even as they skew educational curricula away from too much global economic awareness. Coles describes the intellectually narrow and morally crippling effects of the corporate-control of education; how the imperative for profit maximizes the misunderstanding of communities, nations, and the environment, even as it minimizes aesthetic appreciation, cultural expression, compassion itself. But it is by understanding all this, Coles argues, that real change can begin. Using this analysis, educators, parents, educational organizations, and activists can finally begin to craft schooling that truly serves students and advances global humanity.

Gerald Coles is an educational psychologist who has written extensively on literacy, learning disabilities, and the politics of education. Among his books are Reading Lessons: The Debate over Literacy and Reading the Naked Truth: Literacy, Legislation, and Lies. His articles have appeared in the Harvard Educational Review, Science & Society, the APA’s Journal of Peace Psychology, as well as in many other education, psychology, and political journals.