Remedial Class Struggle

[Doug Henwood]

By coincidence, I just happened to be thumbing through the Spring 1998
issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, a sub to which is one of the perks of
joining the American Association for Public Opinion Research, last night.
In it is a review of polls on education in the U.S. over the last several
decades by Jennifer Hochschild and Bridget Scott (respectively a professor
of politics at Princeton and a senior [!] at Princeton). If the polls are
to be believed, and god knows how flawed they are, there has long been
strong and growing support for *more* spending on education. Even with the
most challenging wording - i.e., would you pay higher taxes if the money
went to education - the support is strong. Polls in the 1980s showed
overwhelming support (in the 70-80% range) for cutting the military budget
to fund more education spending. So, if the U.S. ruling class wanted to
spend the money on schools, it wouldn't even have to maniuplate public
opinion into supporting it. But they don't, so they haven't.

Doug