Dear Editor:

A recent Register article tells of an anonymous $400,000 donation, supporting local (place-based) job training in our public school system. This is equivalent to the local public school system functioning as an arm of the central management, relegating local businesses to a unified subsidiary subculture of the corporate state.

In 1976, my family’s business was part of the grassroots-grown economy which the state used to justify establishing a centrally managed economy, supposedly to help small businesses find capital by providing generous subsidies to the investor class.

Today I would like to re-establish production through small independently owned studios and a training and development center where training for the work process happens, but as “an individual and small business,” I find myself excluded from the economic development conversation.

I learned of the state’s “targeted sector” during the Baldacci administration, which promoted the “creative economy.”s I thought a company creating its own bodies, glazes, and forms would be included in the creative economy but was soon disabused of my misconceptions by reading Maine economic development statutes. The state’s “targeted sector” prioritizes the largest industries. The frequent exclusion of “individuals and small businesses” from the conversation positions the small business sector as a class of rogues.

The goal of the factory model of education is to produce a workforce with standardized skills, assuming industrial training can happen outside the workplace, taught by teachers disassociated from the place-based work process.

The factory model of education displaces education that informs the student’s role as a citizen and a human. The displaced education might ask, “What kind of political system is this?” The educational purpose displacing it does not ask such questions.

The state’s interests clash with a place-based economy, which is philosophically akin to Home Rule (the Maine Constitution). Central management controls from the top down. Home Rule promotes growth from the roots up. The Industrial Partnerships Act was not written for a place-based system, and the grassroots economy does not fit the model of centralized job training.

Susan M. Andersen

Boothbay Harbor