***** The multiple activities of work in English are all in one way or another involved with "value": aesthetic, moral, political, social, critical, or whatever. Work in English, in this broad sense again, is ideological work. What is _circulated directly_ as a result of work in English, however, are not values but evaluation. To take perhaps the simplest example, what is passed on directly from an instructor in English in the form of a final grade for a student on a transcript is not the aesthetic value of _Paradise Lost_, the distantiation of ideology in _Middlemarch_, the aporias of sensuous imagery in a Keats ode, or the gender consciousness of a Rich poem. What is passed on is a grade evaluating student achievement in comparison to other students. The evaluation may be "based on" any or all of the above, and any or all of the above may then be circulated indirectly. What the workplace of education requires from the English instructor, however, is the evaluation of the student. The "concrete labor" of instruction may -- _or it may not_ -- reflect dominant cultural values, may or may not "produce" new values, may or may not attempt a massive critical "destruction" of the "very notion" of value, but it _will be_ passed on as an evaluation. (Evan Watkins, _Work Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value_, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989, p. 96) *****
That educational institutions function primarily as a screening device (or an adjunct to human resources departments of firms) and only secondarily produce "skills" (if they do so at all) becomes strikingly obvious when we look at English Departments, in that, here, it is clear that concrete contents of our labor add little or nothing to the production of "skills" necessary for future employees (this fact is obscured in other disciplines). However, evaluations of students we (along with all other teachers) produce do serve capital by minimizing transaction costs of hiring.
Yoshie