[lbo-talk] School Debate: Central Focus

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Wed Feb 15 10:21:27 PST 2012


but you don't really mean that schools correct social inequality at all, do you? I mean, the CD author might, but not leftists?

there's no way to correct class inequality under capitalism is there? you can maybe impact individual life chances, but actual _class) inequality remains intact. As the Luxembourg studies point out, someone moves up the class ladder, someone else falls down.

the standard analysis in sociology of education years ago, back in the mid 90s, was that what people saw as "class mobility" was actually just structural shifts in the economy where it temporarily appears that class inequality is actually affected, but the long view shows that it stays intact. One example of this is a blip people saw happen in the 70s, where two year college degrees really seemed to make an impact. This is because there was a plethora of jobs opening up with computing for which talent was limited. Salaries were high as a result. That "bump" was flattened. Similarly, we can talk about temporary "rises" in income that seem to correlate with advances in educational attainment but which are rolled back as capital fights back to flatten wages.

Computer programming is another example. College profs, another.

Sean wrote: <> <> I don't know if you've followed the conversations on Twitter with <> Malcolm Harris, but there seems to be some debate about that. I <> agree, but he seems willing to take a more radical stance. I think it <> depends, in this case, on what the school institution is for. In some <> communities, they really may act like more of a prison or at least a <> high security day care. I agree that in principle they are key, but <> there are obviously other factors. The book "Class Dismissed" for <> instance, makes the argument that education is a poor lever for <> correcting social inequality. It's true that even this lever seems to <> be under attack, but perhaps its worth letting it go if we can strike <> closer at the goal of eliminating inequality. I say this as an <> educator who generally believes in the efficacy of it as a lever. <> <> Sean <> ___________________________________ <> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk <>

-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list