[Oer-community] Is MIT thinking of putting its OCW material behind a pay wall?

[Steve Foerster]

Talat wrote:

<< Education should be part of the public expenditure and if it is not
possible for the public sector, private sector education should not be
seen as any other corporate sector like software, transport, telecom ect. >>

We disagree.  Education is an important service, but it's not something
that's magically immune to the laws of economics.  It's not like
physical infrastructure where the argument can be made that it's a
natural monopoly.  Since it's capable of supporting many different
providers in the same space, education is actually better provided by a
competitive marketplace than by a centralized bureaucracy.


<< Many corporate sectors thrive for profit only to be giant, and
indirectly want to rule or influence ruling, ignoring socio-economic
aspects, which ultimately creates social inequity and disharmony. They
then came to a new term CSR and they try to compensate through CSR. But
private sector education should be the opposite. They should work for
social equity and thus thrive for social harmony and profit for survival
only if public sector fails to support education. >>

There's nothing at all wrong with a profit motive in education, or the
profit motive in general.  Indeed, the problem I see with those sorts of
corporations is that they are too closely intertwined with the state and
thus have the ability to exploit political power instead of actually
being competitive.

-=Steve=-


-- 
Stephen H. Foerster
http://hiresteve.com
http://hiresteve.com/blog
http://wikieducator.org/steve