Re: [Marxism] Growth of the productive forces and qualification oflabour-power in the United States

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

> 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.

Well, that is a valid question, but I don't really know the answer to it in
terms of the contemporary research, it's a long time ago that I looked at
these questions. I was only reflecting on the broad historical trend from
Marx's lifetime up to today's situation. When I was working on my Phd in the
late 1980s (which I didn't finish) I tried to find out more about it from
New Zealand and Australian data (but I was looking at the relationship
between education and economy in general, i.e. also at labor markets and so
on, to what extent there really were segmented labor markets etc.).

As a general rule, I think you can validly say, sociologically, there is a
strong statistical correlation between educational attainment of students
and socio-economic status, family background, social class background and
the occupation of the parents (in his study ""How working class kids get
working class jobs", Paul Willis explored how British workingclass children
subjectively form and adjust their aspirations and attitudes with respect to
schooling).

But the discovery of this correlation by social democrats was in fact the
basis for the neo-liberal argument about "middle class capture" - the
argument here was that state-subsidised free education aiming to provide
equality of opportunity for all did not really provide it, but that instead
the middle classes "captured" the educational establishment, and more or
less monopolised it. In turn, this was then a reason for marketising
education with a "user pays" principle, to remove "market rigidities",
improve consumer choice, and reduce the drain of education on the public
purse. Because if the middle classes monopolised the education system,
providing it with "cultural capital" (Bourdieu's term) then they could also
afford to pay for it. But really the main effect of it was that more time
and money was spent on educational administration rather than actual
teaching, that students had to take out more loans to fund their education,
and that the control of the wealthy over educational provision increased.

Of course, in neoliberal theory there are really only investors and
consumers, not social classes, and education is alternately viewed as
consumption of a service, or as investment in human capital (Ben Fine has
done some work on neo-liberal "capture" of the social sciences, i.e. the
imposition of models drawn from economics, such as input-output models and
managerial models, on social scientific disciplines and educational
processes).

However there is a difference between the USA and Europe in this context,
because in the USA there are more private schools and universities. The
ability to get an education to "get ahead" and rise out of one's class, i.e.
education as a means for upward mobility, is central to the ideology of
meritocracy and equality of opportunity, which explains the social station
people reach in life as being due only to innate talent and individual
initiative.

As a sociological generalisation, you could say that the possibilities that
exist for upward social mobility is inversely correlated with class
consciousness. Dissatisfaction with the education system itself and with the
rewards of education was a big factor in the popular uprisings of 1848 and
1968. I am sure you will be familiar with the events of 1968 - as regards
1848, which people usually know less about, see for example K.H. Jarausch
"the sources of student unrest, 1815-1848, in L. Stone, The university in
society, vol. 2 Princeton University Press 1952; L.B. Namier, 1848: the
revolution of the intellectuals. London OUP 1944; L. O'Boyle, The problem of
an excess of educated men in Western Europe, in Journal of Modern History,
Vol. 42 number 4, december 1970; and P. Robertson, revolutions of 1848: a
social history, Princeton UP 1952.

Jurriaan






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