Marxism, intellectual property, and Education

It is interesting to examine the present educational system through the lenses of Marxist and Capitalist thoughts. Shannon (2000) reminds us that under the logic of capitalist, everything including curricular designs, learning materials, instructional approaches, and evaluation procedures should be organized in a similar fashion, making education works like enterprise that ensures students, like products, to turn out to have the preconceived and fixed capacities bureaucracy sets in. Scripted program in senior high is very common in Taiwan as well. The force of high-stake exam such as college entrance exam for all senior high school students gives rise to the standardized textbooks, curriculum and class activities. Not only teachers but students are highly influenced by such system. Teachers are forced to negotiate their beliefs for teaching to match the social norms and avoid any dispute such as being blamed that they do not do a good job in teaching based on the scores of students. On the other hand, students would not pay much attention to teachers’ teaching if the content is not related to the high-stake tests. A number of drawbacks have been identified. Students lose their creativity because of the scripted structures of teaching. To be recognized as good students in mainstream society, they are trained to be test-taking machines instead of reflective and critical thinkers.
The notion of intellectual labor brought up by Spigelman (1998) makes me think about the issue of the criterion to measure textual ownership. In an academia where the importance of copyright cannot be overemphasized, each researcher strives to establish his/her ownership for texts. Thus whenever collaboration is involved during the process of composing, it is inevitable for people to argue who is more qualified to be the first author. Theoretically, people who contribute the most would be the first author, while in reality, it is not so easy to determine who accomplish the most because both quantity and quality of the duties need to be considered when making such judgment. The issue goes back to the discussion of the definition of originality. Do people do the most writing is the first author? Or people who come up with the idea? People who do the data analysis and collection? What if these duties were accomplished by different people? A piece of writing cannot be accomplished without any of those. After all, there are no rigorous rules clarifying the levels of importance of these duties. The debate of copyright would continue. In terms of the idea/expression dichotomy of ownership, Edward’s responses about the issue stood out for me. He believed that adopting the expressions used by other native English speakers can convey his ideas more effectively. As a nonnative English speaker, I feel that there’s always a language barrier that I couldn’t overcome when I need to express my opinions toward things. Thus, I would usually try to build a personal corpus of literary work for me to refer to when it comes to writing. The process of learning to express myself may invade the concept of copyright that “unacknowledged appropriate of either ideas or words is deemed unacceptable” while it is an inevitable process of language learning.