``..Twenty one thousand hours that results, for most kids, in bare-bones literacy and in the conviction of being not-good-enough...' joanna
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The way I look at it is that public education is a reflection of the society, it theoretically serves, so that means, the education system is simply a reflection of the larger and pervasive problems of the society---which in this example means that the society in its institutional mask has no use for children, no need for them, and therefore dispenses with them. By completely absorbing the neoliberal mantra of capital as the only only greater good the society has in effect, become generally hostile and has a negative view of its own people, beyond their roles as consumer or producers, essentially materiale. As consumers, they don't need education, so it is a public burden, and being public outside the economic system, therefore not just a burden, but a suspicious burden. Since none of the people involved in education produce anything for the greater economy, they are simply leeches of some sort.
But evidently, education is necessary, so it is treated like plumbing constructed of the cheapest materials possible and thrown together on some traditional plan the is supposed to work.
In this political-economy view, worries over education and its failures sound like the worries over somebody else's plumbing--a potential health hazard, but otherwise meaningless.
This is not a society devoted to its people. It is a society devoted solely to its political economy, which means its capitalist political economy.
CG