Teacher Marketplace: The Sneaky New System of Educational Capitalism?

Public was shocked by the news of the teacher marketplace. According to the Minister of Education and Culture, the teacher marketplace is a platform plan to accommodate the recruitment of teachers which still leaves various problems related to the allocation of teachers needed by educational units. Marketplace will be a platform for teachers and schools to meet through digital media and can recruit each other on this platform.

However, Nadiem Makarim's new idea has sparked polemics and chaos. Many comments say that the term marketplace is considered too commercial. Initially, the Minister of Education and Culture Nadiem Makarim initiated a plan to create a teacher marketplace as part of the Freedom to Learn policy. This policy of course gave rise to pros and cons among education practitioners, especially teachers as the "object" of this policy plan. Likewise with the response of the teachers. The average teacher's attitude is very clear, namely, they reject this idea and feel insulted by the idea that places them on the marketplace platform.

The idea of this marketplace aims to solve problems often caused by unexpected things, such as moving schools, stopping teaching, retiring, or dying. However, the term "teacher marketplace" creates an argument that teachers are a source of commodities traded in commercial transactions. Teachers as commodities are understood as merchandise worthy of being traded in the open market era. All can transact commercially to trade teachers.

Transactions in the marketplace refer to several commodity dimensions, namely use value, exchange value, and price. This dimension will refer to the teacher's background/portfolio and competence. The more competent and have a good portfolio, the price will be expensive in this digital market. The teacher must polish himself to convince potential buyers to be able to "glance at it" and if they agree they can make a transaction to agree to get services and sign the contract.

In the marketplace, teachers can have more economic value because it is in line with the thesis of the market mechanism, namely the more human activities that have monetary value and become goods that are traded, the more profitable they will be.
In the socio-cultural position, there is a degradation of the value of the teacher's social relations in society, which should be personal, friendly, and educational, to become merely an economic commodity based on human relations that occur because of economic interests. In other words, the marketplace is a representation of market mechanisms operationalized by capitalism's logic. If the marketplace idea is implemented, of course teachers will be included in the cunning vortex of educational capitalism.