[Marxism] Growth of the productive forces and qualification of labour-power in the United States

[Mike Friedman <mikedf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Juriaan,

Your figures on educational attainment are for the population as a whole.
My question would be to what degree does this actually reflect educational
attainment for the working class. The U.S. has a significant petit
bourgeois professional layer, as well as the managerial sector belonging to
the bourgeoisie itself. These could represent 30% of the population and
skew your statistics. The practical significance is that productivity
increase there has indeed been, but this is not linked to an increasingly
educated work-force (rather to rising organic composition). There is a
growing educational gap between workers, particularly oppressed workers,
and other sectors. In the current period (maybe the past 25 years) of
educational cutbacks (when a NY State supreme court judge rules that public
schools are only required to provide up to an eighth grade education --
enough for kids to "fulfill their civic duties"!) and increasing
privatization in and of public schools, this is obviously the case. When I
taught (for five years) at Seward Park High School , an urban "factory"
school, something like 40% of incoming freshman actually graduated. This
seems to be more the norm for working class folks, at least here in NYC.

Mike

> In an interesting article, Scott Baier, Sean Mulholland, Robert Tamura and
> Chad Times called "Income and education in the United States 1840-2000 (Sept
> 2003), they estimated the average years of schooling of the American
> population, and calculated a kind of "human capital-coefficient" such that,
> for each additional year of schooling, a 9 percent increase in the value of
> output per worker occurs.
>
> In 1840, of 6.3 million or so white Americans over 20 years old, the US
> census found that about 9% could not read or write (the literacy or
> illiteracy of black slaves wasn't a concern in those days).  The increase in
> real output per worker between 1840 and 2000 averaged about 1.6 per cent per
> year. Here is the average educational level of the US population they
> estimated, in round figures (with some simple interpolations for missing
> years):
>
> 1840 - 1 year schooling
> 1850 - 2 years of schooling
> 1860  - 3 years of schooling
> 1880 - 4 years of schooling
> 1890 - 4.5 years of schooling
> 1900 - 6 years of schooling
> 1910 - 6.5 years of schooling
> 1920 - 7 years of schooling
> 1930 - 7.5 years of schooling
> 1940 - 8 years of schooling
> 1950 - 9 years of schooling
> 1960 - 10 years of schooling
> 1970 - 11 years of schooling
> 1980 - 12 years of schooling
> 1990 - 12.5 years of schooling
> 2000 - 13 years of schooling


_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism