>But it seems to me that capitalism has succeeded
>rather well in preparing young people to believe just
>about anything and not to know how to analyze anything.
and triggers a most interesting debate. It shows that the revolution in the industrial methods of the society (gesellschaftliche Betriebsweise) which is the necessary result of the revolution in the instruments of production and which today is commonly known as the crisis of the post-Fordist society does not leave out such "derived" sectors of the society as the educational system.
I wonder whether there is any comprehensive book of relevance on the Political Economy of Education in the US which combines studies on national accounts, class analysis, economic and technological developments of the last decades, and on the legislative and fiscal situation of the educational system with more current results of research in the cognitive process in the interacting system of learning and teaching.
Hinrich Kuhls
>>>>>>>>>>>
Marx on education (Capital volume 1, chapter 15, section 9 passim):
Factory legislation, that first conscious and methodical reaction of society against the spontaneously developed form of the process of production, is, as we have seen, just as much the necessary product of modern industry as cotton yam, self-actors, and the electric telegraph. (...)
Paltry as the education clauses of the Act appear on the whole, yet they proclaim elementary education to be an indispensable condition to the employment of children. [*] The success of those clauses proved for the first time the possibility of combining education and gymnastics [**] with manual labour, and, consequently, of combining manual labour with education and gymnastics. The factory inspectors soon found out by questioning the schoolmasters, that the factory children, although receiving only one half the education of the regular day scholars, yet learnt quite as much and often more.
"This can be accounted for by the simple fact that, with only being at school for one half of the day, they are always fresh, and nearly always ready and willing to receive instruction. The system on which they work, half manual labour, and half school, renders each employment a rest and a relief to the other; consequently, both are far more congenial to the child, than would be the case were he kept constantly at one. It is quite clear that a boy who has been at school all the morning, cannot (in hot weather particularly) cope with one who comes fresh and bright from his work." [***]
Further information on this point will be found in Senior's speech at the Social Science Congress at Edinburgh in 1863. He there shows, amongst other things, how the monotonous and uselessly long school hours of the children of the upper and middle classes, uselessly add to the labour of the teacher, "while he not only fruitlessly but absolutely injuriously, wastes the time, health, and energy of the children." [****]
>From the Factory system budded, as Robert Owen has shown us in detail, the
germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of
every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction
and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency
of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human
beings. (...)
One step already spontaneously taken towards effecting this revolution is the establishment of technical and agricultural schools, and of "écoles d'enseignement professionnel," in which the children of the working-men receive some little instruction in technology and in the practical handling of the various implements of labour. Though the Factory Act, that first and meagre concession wrung from capital, is limited to combining elementary education with work in the factory, there can be no doubt that when the working-class comes into power, as inevitably it must, technical instruction, both theoretical and practical, will take its proper place in the working-class schools. There is also no doubt that such revolutionary regents, the final result of which is the abolition of the old division of labour, are diametrically opposed to the capitalistic form of production, and to the economic status of the labourer corresponding to that form. But the historical development of the antagonisms, immanent in a given form of production, is the only way in which that form of production can be dissolved and a new form established. (...)
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[*] According to the English Factory Act, parents cannot send their children under 14 years of age into Factories under the control of the Act, unless at the same time they allow them to receive elementary education. The manufacturer is responsible for compliance with the Act. "Factory education is compulsory, and it is a condition of labour." ("Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st Oct., 1865," p. 111.)
[**] On the very advantageous results of combining gymnastics (and drilling in the case of boys) with compulsory education for factory children and pauper scholars, see the speech of N. W. Senior at the seventh annual congress of "The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science," in "Report of Proceedings, &c.," Lond. 1863, pp. 63, 64, also the "Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st Oct., 1865," pp. 118, 119, 120, 126, sqq.
[***] "Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st Oct., 1865," p. 118. A silk manufacturer naively states to the Children's Employment Commissioners: "I am quite sure that the true secret of producing efficient workpeople is to be found in uniting education and tabour from a period of childhood. Of course the occupation must not be too severe, nor irksome, or unhealthy. But of the advantage of the union I have no doubt. I wish my own children could have some work as well as play to give variety to their schooling." ("Ch. Empl. Comm. V. Rep.," p. 82, n. 36.)
[****] Senior, l. c., p. 66. How Modern Industry, when it has attained to a certain pitch, is capable, by the revolution it effects in the mode of production and in the social conditions of production, of also revolutionising people's minds, is strikingly shown by a comparison of Senior's speech in 1863, with his philippic against the Factory Act of 1833; or by a comparison, of the views of the congress above referred to, with the fact that in certain country districts of England poor parents are forbidden, on pain of death by starvation, to educate their children. Thus, e.g., Mr. Snell reports it to be a common occurrence in Somersetshire that, when a poor person claims parish relief, he is compelled to take his children from school. Mr. Wollarton, the clergyman at Feltham, also tells of cases where all relief was denied to certain families "because they were sending their children to school!"