>On Oct 5, 2009, at 11:25 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
>>""The entire U.S. school system, from pre-K up, is structured from
>>the very start to enable the rich to outcompete the poor," writes
>>Michaels, "which is to say, the race is fixed. And the kinds of
>>solutions that might actually make a difference -- financing every
>>school district equally, abolishing private schools, making high
>>quality child care available to every family -- are treated as if
>>they were positively un-American."
>>
>>http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee170
>>
>>So, a guy who doesn't like neo-liberalism is an ardent defender
>>of... Liberalism. Ain't he special. does he really think that high
>>quality child care for everyone is going to fix the problem of
>>inequality? That schools will level the playing field, thereby
>>creating equal opportunity and that this is an advance over neo- liberalism?
>
>Huh? Education is one of the mechanisms that reproduce class and
>structural inequality. How is it "liberal" to point this out?
do you think that, if everyone has an _equal opportunity_ because their schools are all equally funded, that they will now get into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton? It is fascianting, to me, that he only wants to make k-12 eqalitarian. It'd be a bummer to have to continue with the work of destroying inequality on a college campus, heaven forbid!
Do you think the skies will open up and provide jobs for all those very well-educated people? Not just jobs, but the good jobs to which they've been educated to expect?
Michaels advances a vision of social stratification, much like that of Richard Florida. He's worried about inequality. He's not worried about capitalist exploitation. That makes him an excellent Welfare Liberal.
to Jim H:
except that isn't even how Michaels' thinks diversity and multiculturalism operate. what they do, he argues, is give more people a stake in the system.
I said it myself once, long ago, and did earn the enmity of someone on the Bad Subjects list. I'd walked into a grocerty store in 1996 and saw a sign promoting diversity in hiring. I posted to the list to say that the embrace of such diversity in global corporations provided a strata of people of color in managerial and professional positions, to give the rest of the peons hope that they might advance someday. They look up the corporate ladder and see all those shiney faces of people of color and are inspired to bend their nose to the grindstone and work even harder. It was a commonplace argument in 1992 when "multiculturalism" and "race, class, and gender" became very popular.
At 05:11 AM 10/6/2009, heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
>It is convenient for capitalism to make a virtue out of inequality (by
>calling it diversity).
>
>And it is convenient too to make a virtue out of the division of people
>along ethnic lines and call it multiculturalism... or divide and rule, as
>they used to say.
>
>
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