Last week, Riccardo Petrella warned an audience gathered at Champlain College of the threat globalization poses to education by turning students into commodities. Petrella, a professor from the University of Louvain in Belgium and founder/President of the Lisbon's Club, was invited by the Syndicat de l'Enseignement de Champlain to present his most recent book L'Éducation victime de 5 pièges.
"Everything now is merchandise, and subordinated to technology" said Petrella, adding that at this point, the only freedom really available for all is adaptability.

Last week, Riccardo Petrella warned an audience gathered at Champlain College of the threat globalization poses to education by turning students into commodities. Petrella, a professor from the University of Louvain in Belgium and founder/President of the Lisbon's Club, was invited by the Syndicat de l'Enseignement de Champlain to present his most recent book L'Éducation victime de
5 pièges.

"Everything now is merchandise, and subordinated to technology" said Petrella, adding that at this point, the only freedom really available for all is adaptability.

"School is not anymore the only place for learning," he said, pointing out the importance of long-distance learning and Internet courses, which are often controlled by privates corporations.
According to him, secondary and post-secondary education are tools to form raw material for companies, only seeking employability. "That's the reason permanent education has been created," he said, to make the people "human resources that can always be regulated." Because human nature is enslaved to the criterion of profitability, "I recommend you to be profitable," advised Petrella.
Could Petrella agree on the performance contract signed in March by Concordia with Education minister François Legault? Surely not, since a part of the funding of performance programs is linked to the population of graduate students. By following this kind of measure, universities are becoming "knowledge corporations." For him, university is a market in which we trade students and professors.
Universities keep and open courses when they are competitive in comparison to what the others universities are doing. "When I proposed to my university in Belgium the creation of a chair of 13th century Byzantine literature, they laughed," he said sarcastically.

"We are giving companies the power to choose what we have to learn and know."

Refusing to stay and wait, Petrella urged everybody to "become dissident against the dominant culture" and to do everything possible to "proceed to the delegitimization of the principles such as human resources and adaptability."

Even if "we are in a society which is not able to think of its future anymore," he is optimistic to see that from Seattle to Quebec, "the youth are creating a new will of utopia."