Just reading Charles Hopkins and Rosalyn McKeown Education for Sustainable Development and the link between education and cash.
"Nations with high illiteracy rates and unskilled work forces have fewer
development options. These nations are largely forced to buy energy and
manufactured goods on the international market with hard currency. To acquire hard
currency, these countries need to trade, and usually this means exploiting natural
resources or converting lands from self-sufficient family-based farming to cash-crop agriculture."
Even in so called developed nations, it could be argued that we educate for cash. I lectured in a Commerce degree class with about 300 students and asked how many students would be using their business degree for a not for profit organisation: Two students raised their hands.
So what is education for - to learn skills? or to learn values? There are some great debates about the benefits of both and the role of education... personally, I can't help but include my own sense of care into my teaching - it is who I am, I believe in what I do and that it has wider reaching effects on communities of people, on the environment and ultimately on your pocket? but what happens when you don't have a sense of care? does it come back to just teaching skills and educating for cash?
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