Buy a diploma

(portalnovosti.com)

I saw this advertisement in a convenient place, on a train traveling to Slovenia. It advertised a private business school located in a town not far from the Croatian-Slovenian border, near Zagreb.

And everything on that poster would be ordinary, typical for this type of work, nothing would attract special attention, if its catchy slogan hadn't been for the following message: we offer a record-breaking short period of education. Never faster to graduate!

We know how things work with advertisements. Although often mediated by aggressive visual-audio tools, the logic of their success rests on subtle persuasion, the production of connotative readings and the potential recognition of those for whom they are intended, who are the intended targets within a defined reach.

Although they belong to the corpus of propaganda content - perhaps someone will remember that during socialism, television program blocks intended for advertising were labeled as EPP, economic propaganda program - the aforementioned characteristics subtly separate advertisements from the agitprop of ideological-political discourse.

In this sense, to return to the original motif, the above example of a train advertisement is atypically denotative. Moreover, we are witnessing a raw and brutally direct advertisement. But more important than the mere detection of the technical characteristics of the advertising visual-auditory apparatus, is to ask ourselves about the social circumstances related to the set of values ​​on which certain advertisements rely, opening up space for such profiles of persuasive discourse.

More specifically, what is it about today's formal-institutional education that it is possible to place advertisements like the one mentioned? Of course, we are not in unfamiliar territory here either. For the last twenty years or so, in the periods of the so-called late transition and the current post-transition, we have been witnessing the results of the process of privatization of education, especially higher education.

There is nothing missing here, nothing that has not been born from that bastard mess of a capitalist (post)transitional nation-state in which a broad social consensus has been hegemonically established according to which private entrepreneurial initiative has no limits, nor should it have any obstacles.

In fact, obstacles, if any, should be removed legislatively and practically. Even when it comes to fields of vital social interest, and education, along with healthcare, is a fundamental social pillar.

The disastrous effects of privatization trends in education may not be as immediately visible, at first, as when we witness such processes in healthcare, but they are equally devastating in the medium and long term.

But once the ground is prepared, there are no longer any obstacles to the harsh truth from the center of the associated set of values ​​being clearly and without reservation placed in the public space, including through advertising messages. And the advertising in question says: come, pay and collect your diploma.