>My observation was more a systemic one, to wit, that the overwhelming
>effect of the credentialling sector is better characterized as
>indoctrination than emancipation.
People keep saying this like it's some big revelation. By now my critical response is... duh! Michael Yates said this here a couple weeks ago and it bears repeating:
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20120130/001303.html
Just because schools in the United States are a form of torment for so many students, essentially vehicles for indoctrination and preparation for a lifetime of meaningless work doesn't mean that learning to read and write are not necessary for both survival and happiness in the modern world and further could be seen as enjoyable by the overwhelming majority of persons. Didn't black people hunger for education after slavery? Didn't workers fight for free public schools? Doesn't Cuba place a high emphasis on literacy and didn't Cuba's illiterate men and women (and Nicaragua's, etc.) want to read and write? Did the peasants Freire taught thing that he was tormenting them? The capacity to read and write is a mark of our development as a species, no? Can we get by without them? Some of us could, no doubt? Shouldn't we respect the skills of all workers, irrespective of whether they are formally literate? Of course. Did some among the ancient peoples without literacy manage to memorize the entire histories of their peoples? Yes, and this is a feat we can hardly imagine today. But let's not confuse the horror of capitalism with what we might want to achieve in a new society. Marx said,
" that within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of la-bour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; that all means for the de-velopment of production undergo an inversion so that they become means of domination over, and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate [entfremden] from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and every extension of accumulation becomes, conversely, a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse." (Capital, vol. I).
Just as a machine is seen as an alien thing by the worker, and the normal and necessary activity of labor is converted into a horror, so too is much of schooling. Everything that might be good is turned into an evil. But surely machines and labor and reading and writing are not inherently evil. Surely a good argument can be made that all are fundamental.