Education was once imagined as society’s moral memory, a space where wisdom was transferred, questioned, and renewed. Today, it increasingly resembles a marketplace, governed not by the slow rhythms of understanding but by the impatient logic of profit. The commercialisation of education has not arrived with banners or declarations; it has slipped quietly into classrooms, syllabi, and aspirations. What we now call premium learning is not merely an expensive version of schooling; it is a philosophical shift that redefines what learning is for, and more troublingly, who it is for.
At its core, commercialisation reframes education from a public good into a private investment. Knowledge becomes a commodity, students become consumers, and institutions become service providers competing for market share. This transformation is subtle yet profound. When education is priced like a luxury product, access no longer depends on curiosity or effort alone but on purchasing power. Thus, inequality is no longer an unfortunate byproduct of social systems; it is engineered into the very design of learning.
One of the most pervasive mechanisms reinforcing this divide is the trap of credentialism. Degrees, certificates, badges, and rankings have become the visible currency of success. Schools increasingly optimise their teaching not for understanding but for measurable outputs, such as test scores, placements, and acceptance letters. Learning is compressed into examinable units, stripped of ambiguity and doubt, because ambiguity does not photograph well on a transcript.
In this system, students are trained to perform rather than to think. Questions that cannot be graded are quietly discouraged. Intellectual risk becomes dangerous when marks are at stake. The student, once an active participant in the construction of knowledge, is reduced to a passive consumer, absorbing information just long enough to reproduce it on command. The tragedy of credentialism is not that it values achievement, but that it mistakes symbols for substance. A generation emerges fluent in formats yet fragile in reasoning, armed with degrees but disarmed in the face of complexity.
Parallel to this formal system is the rapid rise of what might be called coaching factories, the shadow education economy. These are the test prep centres, private tutors, algorithm-driven learning platforms, and AI-powered mentors that promise an edge in an increasingly competitive race. They thrive on fear, fear of falling behind, fear of missing out, fear that schooling alone is no longer enough.
For many middle-income families, the cost of these parallel systems now exceeds traditional school fees. Education becomes a double payment, one for admission, another for survival. The classroom, once meant to level differences, is no longer the primary site of learning. Instead, real competition happens outside it, in private spaces inaccessible to many. Even when a child from a low-income background earns entry into a good school, they face peers equipped with constant personalised guidance, predictive analytics, and curated exam strategies. Merit in such conditions becomes an illusion; performance is increasingly correlated not with effort but with expenditure.
This layered inequality is especially cruel because it masquerades as fairness. Everyone writes the same exam, sits in the same classroom, and hears the same lectures. Yet their learning ecosystems are radically unequal. The result is not merely academic disparity but psychological erosion. Students internalise failure as personal inadequacy rather than structural exclusion. The market absolves itself by framing disadvantage as a lack of optimisation.
Another less visible but equally significant shift is occurring in school leadership. Educational institutions are increasingly run by managerial logic rather than pedagogical vision. Principals become CEOs; success is measured through enrollment figures, brand visibility, social media presence, and revenue growth. Education, in this model, is no longer a moral enterprise but a strategic one.
Decisions about curriculum are guided by market demand rather than human development. Subjects that promise immediate economic returns, coding, finance, and standardised sciences are privileged. Meanwhile, arts, philosophy, social ethics, and critical history are quietly marginalised. These disciplines do not generate quick profits, nor do they fit neatly into employability metrics. Yet they are precisely the spaces where students learn to question power, understand suffering, and imagine alternative futures.
The irony is striking: at a time when societies face ethical crises, environmental collapse, and political polarisation, education systems systematically deprioritise the very subjects that cultivate moral reasoning and civic responsibility. What is lost is not just content, but conscience.
Premium learning, then, is not simply better infrastructure or smaller class sizes. It is a parallel universe of intellectual cultivation reserved for those who can afford it. Elite institutions continue to offer debate, mentorship, exploratory learning, and philosophical depth precisely because these qualities are scarce and valuable. For the majority, education is standardised, accelerated, and hollowed out. The divide is not only economic but existential: some are taught to lead and question, others to comply and perform.
This commercialisation also reshapes how students see themselves. When education is an investment, failure becomes depreciation. Curiosity becomes inefficient. Slowness becomes weakness. The joy of learning once its own justification is sacrificed at the altar of outcomes. Students are trained to ask, “Will this be on the test?” rather than “Why does this matter?” In such a world, wisdom is an unaffordable luxury.
Yet education, at its best, has never been about efficiency. It is about transformation. It is slow, uncertain, and often uncomfortable. It teaches us not only how to earn a living but how to live with others, how to doubt ourselves, and how to imagine justice. When these purposes are subordinated to profit, society pays a long-term cost that balance sheets cannot record.
The crisis of education is not merely institutional; it is philosophical. We must decide whether learning is a product or a promise. If education continues down the path of commercialisation, it will succeed brilliantly as a business. But it will fail catastrophically as a social equaliser and moral compass.
To reclaim education is not to reject innovation or technology, but to refuse the idea that worth can be priced. True learning cannot be premium, because its value lies precisely in its universality. When education becomes exclusive, society becomes fragile. And when wisdom is reserved for the elite, ignorance becomes the most widely distributed commodity of all.