'The Book' - Blog 4

Chapter 1 continued...

The book then goes onto the discuss the how the capitalist society is also a social process, in the fact that the purpose of education is to prepare students to enter the work force. This concept was discussed in class and hopefully will come back to you as you read this blog. Essentially employers need to keep their employees complacent and exploit them for profit without anyone being the wiser.

Schools teach the necessary skills to become better workers and prepares students for the relationships that exist within the work force. There were five implications that came from these two ideas:

1. Economic inequality is actually defined by the market, property and power relationships that exist; capitalism naturally creates inequality because of this. Power is exchanged between the powerful, the rich keep getting richer. This brings me back to the example that was mentioned earlier...the likelihood of a high school graduate attending college was still just as dependent on the socio-economic status of his / her parents as it was 30 years ago, when this book was written.

2. The education system does not help or hinder the issue of inequality, rather it is where we have the smooth integration of youth into the labour force. This is because of the following:

* The way in which schools reward and promote students is based on meritocracy.
*Schools reinforce patterns of social classes (cliques) and racial and sexual identification. (The presentation done on gender equity spoke to this idea.)
*School teaches students how to relate and fit into the eventual place they will end up: some where in the production process, the world of work.
*Schools create a surplus of skilled workers which only feeds the power the capitalist economy has over its workers: If there are more workers than jobs available then employers have the power to hire and fire. This lends itself to what we discussed in class...the idea that big business can control the curriculum. They can decide what kind of workers they need and then filter those requests down into curriculum changes. This may be the reason their is such a focus on math and science.

3. Schools really do not intend to mirror the work force it just naturally happens:

*Authority and control between administrators and teachers / teachers and students / students and students / and students and their work mirrors the vertical hierarchy of power that exists within the work force.
*The control students have over the curriculum mirrors the control low level workers have over the content of their own jobs.
*The motivation system in school and the threat of failure mirrors the role of wages and unemployment in the workforce and how employees are motivated.
*The rule - orientated culture of high school mirrors the close supervision of low level workers and the relatively low supervision once you reach university mirrors the white collar jobs in the work force.

4. The school system does serve the interests of profit but also created some quirks...once people become educated and realize what is going on they tend to rail against what capitalism stands for...and some people use education for other purposes than the goals of a capitalist society.

5. Current education reforms reflect what is occurring in society at the time.

*For example the comment our teacher made in class in regards to what Peter Lougheed did when he came into power in Alberta in 1970.. he started making cuts to education as his background was an MBA from Stanford... and he had a completely different agenda set out for education than what was currently in existence that was stemming from the social credit ideals.

*Education reforms have failed due the fact that no one has questioned the structure of property and the balance of power.

In short the authors believed that the balance of power needs to be returned to the hands of the people, basically a switch to socialism. As we all know that will never happen in the U.S.A or in Canada.

So we will see what chapter two has to say...