(Un)Education in America

Tomorrow's schools, today

In June I wrote a post about the internship and its role in the redefinition of labor and training. Widespread divestment from training, in which the cost of training is transferred from the employer onto workers, is manifesting itself as a demand for prior experience. Workers are to have been trained elsewhere, and are expected to hit the ground running. Paired with a general job shortage, these demands for experience can only be met at the workers’ expense, by paying for training programs or by working for free. The internship is a perfect example of this trend.

But there is another, arguably more important aspect of divestment from training—the turn toward cutting and streamlining public education. Primary and secondary schooling is intended to foster good citizenship, to provide care for children while their parents work, and to train productive future employees, among other things. Today, we are seeing a redefinition of the government’s role as educator and trainer that could prove vital to any future economy.

Universal education is one of the quintessential features of a modern state. It seeks to educate every child with the same skills and information, to prepare them to be functioning citizens. This model of state-sponsored education originated in the early modern era and grew in importance through the 19th century. Truly universal coverage began in Western countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, making education an integral part of Fordist and pre-Fordist state system. Totalitarian states blatantly employed it as a means of indoctrination and military training, while in social democratic states the education system was a manifestation of modern values.

Yet, modernist goals aside, education has always been subordinated to the economy. Child laborers were often taught only after their shifts, for example, and the school year itself was based on the assumption that it should not interfere with work. Rural school years were divided in two to allow students to help sow in the spring and harvest in the fall. In the 20th century, education patterns played a major role in globalization, helping to ensure that highly skilled jobs gravitated toward Western states while unskilled labor rolled ever outward toward capitalism’s periphery.

This modernist model has prevailed for over a century, but in the United States and elsewhere we may now be witnessing the birth of a new model, an educational system run outside the state, sometimes for profit, and often with public money. Charter schools are the most obvious evidence of this trend. Run by private institutions with public money, they represent the retreat of the state from the preparation of new generations as citizens and workers. The growth of the for-profit college and university system is another equally important part of this shift. In these institutions education has been fully commodified, and is marketed, bought, and rendered in the same manner as other services.

As austerity further strips all but the most definitional functions from the state, education, too, is on the chopping block. Even in countries that developed not only universal secondary but fully funded and guaranteed higher education, the logic of austerity is rendering these guarantees not only obsolete but actual threats to the countries’ political and economic stability.

In some ways, this move toward the privatization of education is analogous to any other expansion of capitalism into a new market. And, like all under-explored markets, education has witnessed some incredible changes due to capital investment. More than ever before, education is increasingly seen and understood not merely by businesses but by people themselves as an unfortunate and costly necessity, nothing more than the means of production of labor power—debates about whether high school graduates would be better off paying for college or seeking work immediately go around and around. Like other production processes, different firms compete over how to be as efficient as possible in adding value to the product—educated children and youth. Language, history, music, art, and other subjects not directly related to the jobs students might one day hold are to be cut and potentially replaced with more productive subjects such as math and science. This reflects a near total abandonment of the modernist, citizen-constructing goals of the education system. Only knowledge and skills which would produce profit in today’s markets are given any importance or funding.

Education is to be profitable, both for the educator and the student’s future employer. It is to be cheap and efficient. And it is to be quantifiable—measured for evaluation and comparison, perfect fodder for PowerPoint presentations or news show infographics. Contemporary institutional obsession with standardized testing should be understood as the latest attempt to take control of the very definition of education from educators and put it in the hands of business consultants and bureaucrats.

Education is being revalued in a way that is favorable to businesses and the state but unfavorable to many citizens. As mechanization and globalization undermine the middle ground between the highly skilled and unskilled, a middle ground we once called the middle class, the value in educating every citizen is more and more economically dubious. The city of Chicago plans to close 50 public schools, citing budget restrictions, and overwhelming affecting black students. Similar plans have been proposed or carried out in other American cities.

The racist and discriminatory nature of these plans is so obvious that it seems absurd that anyone would deny it. These cities are sending a clear message—they are no longer willing to support the education of racial minorities that society has already largely consigned to a marginal economic position. The investments in personnel and infrastructure needed to rebuild crumbling school buildings and educational systems are no longer vital to the economy, and have been all but abandoned politically. Industrial blue-collar jobs, with their mixture of acquired skills and manual labor, have all but disappeared, and the economy no longer needs children to be prepared for them. Educational resources are allocated for privileged communities and cut for oppressed ones, both reflecting and serving to uphold the social distinctions that the modernist education sought to destroy.

As neoliberalism gives way to its successor or successors, our societies and economies will shift and change in ways we would never have expected. As a manifestation of that, the redefinition of the state’s relationship to its citizens is not more unusual or surprising than the changes that occurred after World War I or in the transition from Fordism to neoliberalism. Though this is no reassurance to those of us who have to live through it, these moments of renegotiation can sometimes be opportunities as well as trials. The future of education is far from decided, and the trends and strategies laid out here are already being challenged by those who believe education should do something more than prepare a child to make a profit for somebody else. I will turn to consider some of these struggles, and their potential consequences, in a future post.