The Corporation is an anti corporation propaganda movie produced in Canada. I was made aware of the movie by one of our LingQ members. I checked out their website. There is a feature video which shows a school teacher (who drives a nice car) telling us that he watched the movie "a dozen times" and then invited the producers of the movie to his classroom, where we see young kids being brain washed with the presentation of a one sided and simplistic portrayal of the evil corporation.
I find this appalling. Any self-respecting teacher of impressionable 12 and 13 year olds should have the professional responsibility to present different points of view, and to not impose his own prejudices on his students.
To judge by the website, the movie is being promoted at schools, and the producers are seeking donations. There is even an admonishment on the website encouraging people to buy the DVD from them,("we need the money") which is strange since the movie is available on youtube, albeit with an introduction where, again, the producers beg for money.
The movie itself begins by saying that corporations were created 150 years ago ( I guess they had never heard of the great banking and trading corporations that were started will before that time). The main theme of the movie is that corporations are bad. Yet the population of the world today is 6 times larger than 150 years ago, people live twice as long, are healthier and better educated, and for all those reasons probably happier. Much of the improvement in people's living conditions is the result of products and services created by corporations.
That there are some lazy people, dishonest people, or bad practices in corporations is not surprising. That is human nature, and those same features are to be found in all human institutions. The advantage of the corporations is that there are so many of them, and they are constantly having to change and adapt. Old ones die and new ones appear. Corporations create the wealth in our society and we cannot do without them unless we want to revert to state control of resources and economic activity and we have seen the results of that. Corporations, and people who work there, pay most of the taxes that support schools and other public institutions.
Films like The Corporation this are a healthy part of the discourse on our society, as long as other points of view are also presented. A film like this should not be promoted at school children as some kind of revelation of the truth.
What we probably need more of is corporations running the education system for profit. This is happening in Sweden, yes socialist Sweden, where a corporation is setting up schools which meet the national school curriculum and receive the same funding per child as the public system. This creates choice and introduces innovation, and the parents and children, not some school administrator, decide if the service is good or not.
It is not the institution of the corporation that is bad, but a lack of competition that protects the "bad apples" that is root problem. Unfortunately that is even more the case with our education system.