239 pages
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Educational philanthropy has not only been steadily expanding in the past several years but it is being transformed in radical new ways. Proponents of so-called “venture philanthropy” like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Eli Broad Foundation, and The New Schools Venture Fund are aggressively pushing the longstanding privatization agenda of the right wing think tanks. The “venture philanthropists” are pushing hard for vouchers, the creation of “charter school franchises” that will make a “market” in public schools locally and nationally, the expansion of private school scholarships to lure parents out of the public system, and the expansion of tax credits which are an under-recognized stealth form of vouchers that Kevin Welner has termed “neo-vouchers.” The “venture philanthropists” share their agenda and exchange money with right wing think tanks that have long sought to treat public schooling like a market: Fordham, Manhattan, AEI, Hoover, and Heritage to name a few. Part of what is significant about this trend is that educational philanthropy imagines public sector services as private investment. The venture philanthropists describe education as a market and call for public schools to be forced to “compete” against each other for scarce resources. Then the educational “consumers” will “choose” the best schools and the rest will be allowed to “go out of business.”

Venture philanthropy departs radically from the age of “scientific” industrial philanthropy of Carnegie and Rockefeller and Ford. Venture philanthropy (VP) is modeled on venture capital and the investments in the technology boom of the early 1990s. VP is consistent with the steady expansion of neoliberal language and rationales in public education, including the increasing centrality of business terms to describe educational reforms and policies: choice, competition, efficiency, accountability, monopoly, turnaround, and failure. Likewise, venture philanthropy treats giving to public schooling as a “social investment” that, like venture capital, must begin with a business plan, must involve quantitative measurement of efficacy, must be replicable to be “brought to scale,” and ideally will “leverage” public spending in ways compatible with the strategic donor. Grants are referred to as “investments,” donors are called “investors,” impact is renamed “social return,” evaluation becomes “performance measurement,” grant reviewing turns into “due diligence,” the grant list is renamed an “investment portfolio,” charter networks are referred to as “franchises” to name but some of the remodeling of giving as investment. Within the venture philanthropy paradigm, donors are framed in private terms as both entrepreneurs and consumers while recipients are represented as investments.

One of most significant aspects of this transformation of educational philanthropy involves the ways that VP recasts the public and civic purposes of public schooling in distinctly private ways. This new view carries significant implications for a society theoretically dedicated to public democratic ideals. This is no small matter in terms of how the public and civic roles of public schooling have become nearly over taken by the economistic neoliberal perspective that views public schooling as principally a matter of making workers and consumers for the economy and for global economic competition. Although educational philanthropy and venture philanthropy in particular represent a very small portion of the roughly $600 billion spent annually on education in the United States, venture philanthropy has a strategic aim of “leveraging” private money to influence public schooling in ways compatible with the longstanding privatization agendas of the political right.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the most aggressive venture philanthropists pushing “school choice.” Echoing the business press and the right-wing foundations, Bill Gates himself has denounced U.S. public schools as “obsolete” and blames them for failing the economy. He was apparently inspired in his educational and health endeavors by reading Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth.

In this context, Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth is an important book to revisit. Carnegie writes that the best gift a philanthropist can give to a community is a free library, “provided the community will accept and maintain it as a public institution, as much a part of the city property as its public schools, and indeed, an adjunct to these.” Carnegie emphasized the value to the public of the free access to knowledge and information and he understood public knowledge institutions as an ameliorative effort that would allow the poor opportunities for self advancement.

Like the leading educationalist of his day, G. Stanley Hall (who is largely responsible for the new field of study of adolescence), Carnegie accepts the racially grounded doctrine of recapitulation theory. Recapitulation theory holds that the development of the human being repeats the development of the human race and that the successful development of the human race towards civilization depends upon youth being forced to undergo the trials of earlier stages of human development. These trials build character in youth and prepare them to lead civilization forward. (This history is discussed in Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, Nancy Lesko, Act Your Age!, and Brown and Satman, The Critical Middle School Reader, the last containing an exemplary excerpt from G. Stanley Hall’s book Adolescence. Such movements as scouting and the YMCA typify such early twentieth century thinking that viewed getting back to primitive nature as a necessary strengthening endeavor to prepare youth for stewardship of civilization. In the view of recapitulation theory, human development follows from primitive nature to animals to lower humans to higher humans. Within this schema white European males are at the top of the upward chain of nature. However, white boys, in particular, need to go back down the chain to get toughened up for the stresses of governing advancing civilization.

In the Gospel of Wealth Carnegie celebrates his own impoverished childhood and the character he gained by working as a child laborer in the textile industry.  He describes his adult visit to the home of a Sioux Indian chief and makes much of the fact that the lowliest Indian and the chief live in indistinguishable dwellings.  For Carnegie this illustrates the superiority of Euro-American civilization.  The difference between the worker’s cottage and the millionaire’s mansion indicates for him an upward movement towards greater and greater civilization.  He argues that capitalism raises everybody’s quality of life and that the amenities of the worst off in civilized society are superior to the living standards of kings in prior eras.

From this perspective, it is competition and the refusal of aristocratic inheritance that makes possible the forward movement towards greater and greater innovation and civilization.  Carnegie extols the virtues of poverty and the valuable lessons bestowed upon child laborers, and laments the misfortune of the children of the rich who do not benefit from the character building blessing that is destitution.  Carnegie sees the Sioux as both stuck in the prior history of the human race and as communistic—communism, Carnegie explains, is not progress but regress returning humanity to primitivism.  For Carnegie, capitalism produces both wealth and poverty.  The dim and stultified aristocrats of old Europe have suffered from the mistake of inheritance.  Carnegie exhorts his millionaire contemporaries to be ashamed to die with their wealth.  Instead they ought to give it to the public so that those who can help themselves will do so.  Those incapable of helping themselves should be left to the care of the state, he explains.

Central to Carnegie’s view of philanthropy is the value of self-help as well as the valuing of human worth based on economic productivity.  Carnegie rails against the violence of frivolous charity, suggesting that the nickel given away on the street harms  the recipient whose productive energies will be drained by acquiring something without producing something.  Philanthropy for Carnegie must be highly rationalized based on its inspiration for fostering economic productivity. However, it also must contribute to the public good which cannot be strictly reduced to the economic.  Indeed, Carnegie has harsh words for the wealthy person who flaunts wealth in conspicuous displays.  And Carnegie opposes the giving of vast inheritances to children, seeing patrimony as a diffusion of productive energies and a corrupting influence.

Perhaps most significant is the way that  Carnegie expanded a perspective towards wealth found in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.  Franklin taught his readers to view money as having a life of its own and a reproductive capacity.  The squandering of wealth was akin to killing productive offspring.  (Of course, both Franklin’s and Carnegie’s view of wealth as being strictly guided by rational utility is at odds with a pre-reformation and pre-Bourgeois religious tradition in which religious sacrifice (squandering) was central. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share Vol. I. New York: Zone Books, p. 126.) Carnegie’s vision for philanthropy, however, more deeply displaced a value on dispensing wealth to individuals and marked a turn towards the shift from charity to philanthropy.  Now, Bill Gates and other venture philanthropists mark another significant shift in the western understanding of giving.

Gates’ perspective includes certain elements of Carnegie’s thought, including the rationalization of philanthropy as necessary to foster “productive” individuals and the ideal of philanthropy as useful grease to ease working people into the corporate dominated economy.  However, there are numerous glaring differences between the social visions of Carnegie and Gates.

Carnegie viewed public schools and public libraries as being crucial for making knowledge and information freely available to individuals.  While Carnegie idealized hard work, self-improvement, and self-reliance despite potentially punishing economic and material conditions, it was publicly- and freely-supported immaterial labor (self education) that the individual could pursue for self-improvement and economic advancement.  While Carnegie certainly did not believe that the public sector should redistribute public control over capital, the public sector should make freely available the means for individual access to information that would benefit the individual and contribute to the making of a more educated workforce and informed citizenry.  In contrast, Bill Gates earned his historically unmatched fortune specifically by using intellectual property laws to own, control, and license the products of immaterial labor, namely software.  That is, Gates’s wealth is principally the result not of the sharing and free exchange of knowledge in the public domain but the restriction and commodification of knowledge.  In the 1970’s computer hobbyists freely shared their hardware and software innovations in a kind of hippy tech movement.  Some of the software that would go on to result in spectacular profits for Microsoft, Apple and other computer companies began as freely shared innovations by hobbyists.  Gates and Steve Jobs among other early leaders of the nascent computer industry were particularly adept at commercializing and monopolizing the innovations of others. (The documentary Empire of the Nerds provides a valuable history of the early commodification of the software and computer industry.)   In fact, what would come to be called shareware or open source is closer to the spirit of the early software and computer innovators who were motivated less by the potential for profits than they were by intellectual curiosity, the technology itself, and the challenges of solving problems.

While Carnegie eschewed conspicuous displays of wealth and excessive consumption, Gates champions a version of schooling that idealizes a corporate economy in which consumer spending on manufactured needs is at the core.  Venture philanthropy intensifies the economic rationalization of giving by insisting that it be more tightly controlled, especially in terms of its outcomes.  Yet, it also departs from the ties that scientific philanthropy had to the ideals of a productive industrial economy.  In a sense, the transformation of philanthropy reflects the transformation in the understanding of productivity and utility accompanying the shift in the U.S. from an industrial to a consumer and service based economy.  To put it differently, as the core of the economy becomes increasingly defined by the imperative for ever more frivolous consumer spending and the fabrication of ever new consumer needs and desires, unplanned and unrationalized giving appears increasingly as a problem in need of eradication.  One way to think about this is that as squandering and irrational expenditure of energy, wealth, and resources have become increasingly central to economic growth, the concurrent need is for such activities to be brought into the domain of authority, legitimacy, planning, and order.

The rise of the new venture philanthropy and the legacy of Carnegie raise a number of crucial questions: how does race function as an organizing principle in a different way than it did under “scientific philanthropy”?  Does venture philanthropy’s  need to exert greater and more direct control over giving indicate that Carnegie’s interest in diffusing radical movements and socialism (a largely ideologically-driven vision with serious material implications) has given way to an interest in turning public schools into profit making industries?  What are the social costs of the loss of the very notion of the public good in the shift from the old to new forms of philanthropy in education?

Recommended Further Reading:

Robert Arnove (ed.), (2007) special issue on educational philanthropy Critical Sociology V33n3.

Gail Bederman (1996) Manliness and Civilization Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nancy Lesko (2001) Act Your Age!  New York: Routledge.

Frederick Hess (ed.) (2005) With the Best of Intentions Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.