Re: denny's

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Wojtek to Kelley:
>all i argued is that higher education is the major source of hierarchies
>and inequalities, and does not need any external sources to create them.
>Stated differently, if you take a perfectly homogeneous society in every
>respect (just a thought experiment, ok?) and introduce a nice educational
>institution to it, say, jhu, or syracuse u., you will end up with a
>stratified society in a rather short term, and the main dividing lines
>between social groups will be 'intellectual merits'.

The above seems entirely uncontroversial if Wojtek changes "the" into "a"
in his statement that "higher education is the major source of hierarchies
and inequalities."  That's neither here nor there, however.  During the
late 60s, some Japanese New Leftists said the same and called for the
abolition of universities, which may be a logical goal deduced from the
proposition, but it seems entirely impractical.  Nothing short of the
abolition of the division of labor, or alternatively, the equalization of
compensation for all kinds of work, mental or manual, together with the
abolition of capitalism, would change the fact of higher education being a
hierarchy-producing institution.  Meanwhile, the level of analysis had
better come down from an Olympian hight of abstraction.  (Your usual
proposals of living wages, etc. at least have the virtue of having a
practical application, though they still don't address racial
stratification.)

Yoshie