George Lucas

George Lucas, author and filmmaker, is famous for the story and movie, Star Wars. He is also founder, and chairman of the George Lucas Foundation, a non-profit organization that works with school information systems and creates media for their use.

One such program is called Edutopia. Created by Lucas himself, the program is advertised to connect schools to technology. It’s advertised as a resource whereby “technology is employed to make schools more exciting and dynamic for everyone involved -- students work on real-world projects and consult with the best outside experts; teachers learn by tapping into the best people and practices in their field; and classrooms regularly connect with the rich resources of their communities and the world beyond."

The practice of letting businesses run how school is done has the potential to strip away childhood exploration of the natural world and personal thinking skills. Like cogs, or diodes they will be easy to replace, for they will simply learn to preform a certain function in a machine-like, money driven world.

There is advantage to the business that can use students for advertising, research and even political propaganda, which in itself is good reason for teachers and parents, not salesmen and CEO's, to determine what is taught and what is not inside of classrooms. More often than not, history is taking a back seat to math and science.

It is clear that businesses are willing to download a lot of money into this schools if they can because of the potential profit that comes with rocking all the little cradles of the world. A US News Education Summit was held in 2008 where a panel discussed the role of businesses in high school. Will Swope, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel's corporate affairs division was on that panel. He said the budget they pour into schools and education as a company is big and often it is serve serving. They are looking for and trying to develop people with the talent they need to "move the Earth forward."

"There is no question," he said, "...part of it is absolutely self-serving. If a strong math and science training makes it easier for us to do the kind of incredibly complicated research that we do, we can't move forward in our technology without very deep fundamental understanding of the kind of technologies and fundamental raw physics that drives this kind of capability."

There are a lot of wars going on, and they are not just out there somewhere in the stars. There is a battle for the mind... a battle for the heart and soul of human beings nd one of the major battlegrounds is school.