BIXX
23rd May 2014, 08:02
It is no longer deniable: education is on the fall.
Or rather, it is stagnating, becoming a rotten husk of what it used to be. Our education system has been embarrassingly obsolete for ages (since the late 1800s early 1900s, with the rise of the modern schools of Francesco Ferrer- however, even newer schooling ideas have render the Ferrer academies obsolete). Today I wish to propose a simple reason as to why this trend can be seen in our education.
We recently moved into the post-industrial economy. Lets look at what this means. However, to correctly understand what it means to education to transition into a post-industrial economy, we must first look at how having an industrial economy affected education.
One thing to be aware of is that this will likely be very dependent on Euro-centric data. This is for two reasons. The first being that information regarding non-European countries is, for the most part,
a lot harder to come by. Second, a lot of the non-European world is comprised of third-world countries, and as such, has not entirely reached a post-industrial economy. In fact, there are some areas of the world that effectively are feudalistic in nature (generally the parts of the world that the media describes as being controlled by “war lords” (they use this to describe non-white feudalism, entirely due to the racism inherent in the media and in our civilization, and because they do not wish to expose how their own systems of governance were repressive and brutal). These systems end up being a mixed bag (feudal economies and capitalist economies of the industrial and information economy stripes all appear to some degree in these places), and I do not yet trust my analytical abilities to properly analyze these places. Third-world countries I feel are also feeling the effects of globalization and European domination, and European countries are on the other side of both of those processes and systems, which means that their development will likely take a fundamentally different path from European countries, and I honestly doubt that they will ever reach a post-industrial society under the thumb of first world countries.
One thing this piece rests on is the idea that school is a microcosm of the workplace, designed to train individuals to be workers, as opposed to letting them flourish as individuals. This is obvious through the way school is taught- we are taught how to follow orders, we are taught how to perform a few tasks but often not the tasks we want (here they even admit that they are preparing us for the workplace- who hasn't heard the excuse “This is what you'll need to know in the workplace” given by a teacher when you complain of boredom in class?), essentially we are turned into automatons, who only serve the purpose of reproducing capital for the capitalist.
Industrial society required the workers to be intelligent, to know exactly what they were doing, and be competent in several areas to make sure a factory ran smoothly, so they could produce at the maximum efficiency. There are many reasons for this. For example, to know how to machine things like engines and other mechanical parts, you need to have a decent level of literacy and math comprehension. Seeing as a lot of industrial work is being able to machine things, it was important for the bourgeoisie to have educated proles to do their manufacturing. This doesn't mean they needed highly educated people, but they definitely needed people who knew their maths and their language. So the implementation of public schools that were very effective at getting kids ready for the job market (working at a factory) was helpful to the bourgeoisie.
Take the US for example. In the late 1800s public education finally had spread to the rural areas of the US, after nearly a century of public education in the US. This all happened right around the same time as the industrial revolution, which began in the 1760s and made the industrial economy the standard by the 1820s-1840s (which is, coincidentally, right when public secondary schools came into existence, which happened in Boston in 1821). Of course, correlation does not necessarily imply causation, so what is the evidence that the industrial revolution was partially due to the better circumstances in education?
Well, for one, we can see that Thomas Jefferson (who was a heavily bourgeois politician) believed that their should be two tracks for education, essentially dividing people into classes of elites and labourers from the very beginning. But the point was to get effective labourers from this education. This was stated in 1779, shortly after the commencement of the industrial revolution. Also, in 1805, the New York Public School Society was created by a number of bourgeoisie. The school was meant to be only for poor children (which we know the bourgeoisie see as potential labour). The schools they started also heavily favoured qualities like discipline and obedience, which factory owning bourgeoisie liked to have in their workers. A few years later, in the late 1810s, a proposal is brought forward in Boston (heavily supported by the rich and the bourgeoisie) to establish public secondary schools. The wage earning proletariat opposed this because they did not want to spend their already meager funds on taxes.
I think you get the idea. This general trend continues for many years. But does a single country give evidence that an industrial economy causes the bourgeoisie to grant us a better education?
England seems to have a slightly different history for their state-funded schools. In the early 1810s, religious schools were founded, which were given state funding in the 1830s (but were not official state schools). Most schools were started by middle class (which was much more wealthy then than what we consider middle class today) folk who were doing “charity”. This was primarily the way things went until 1870, when the Elementary Education Act of 1870 was introduced. It was enacted because it was seen that there was a need for Britain to keep up with the rest of the industrialized world. This was a reform demanded by industrialist bourgeoisie. Which, seems to me, to show fairly definitively that we only got better education when it benefited the bourgeoisie.
Lets take a look at the post-industrial education systems, now that we've discussed industrial education. First, lets take a look at what we know about the post-industrial job market. First, we know it is primarily composed of service industry and information handling jobs, with all the heavy industrial jobs shifted to third world countries (which is why globalization occurs- there will always need to be industrialized areas ready to produce capital rather than simply moving it or data about it around). Here is what a service industry job is: the movement of capital. Whether you are working in McDonald's or as a salesman in a car dealership, all you are doing is moving around capital. Often, massive amounts of it. On the other hand, there are information handling jobs, which are comprised of moving the information about capital around, which are in the category of what we call “good jobs” when they reach a certain position. Information jobs also have another interesting quality: there are less of them. This is because one person who handles capital information for a living can handle the information regarding the capital it would take many, many people to move around in a service job. An extreme example of this is, of course, the stock market, where brokers handle the information of entire companies, sometimes even entire industries, and redistribute it to maximize profits for the investors, who are usually bourgeois. Of course some workers may benefit, but their own benefit ultimately helps the bourgeoisie at the top because when their company is being invested in it becomes worth more, thus making the bourgeoisie richer.
This is not new knowledge.
So, let us see what this has done to our education. Unfortunately we run into a problem: no one seems to be entirely sure when the post-industrial revolution hit. Many sociologists, economists, and Leftists have used the term since the 1960s, which implies it hit sometime around the early 1960s, but only recently have mainstream economists and politicians given it any thought.
But what we do see is this: in this time period (that is admittedly large) we have seen huge budget cuts to education. Especially in the few latest years, we have seen massive cuts to education. To bring back the United States as an example, many states (all but two) have decreased the amount of money they spend per student from 2008 to 2013, averaging out to a staggering 25.52% loss in funding per student. Now, like we said before, correlation does not imply causation, but it certainly seems that it once again will be correlated due to causation. However we know that the bourgeoisie get massive tax breaks due to tax loopholes, while the average person (I think the bourgeoisie call us the “labour force”) have to shoulder the burden, while also not having as good of public education. Lets pick a city as an example (as it is just a microcosm of the larger issue at hand)..
Portland, Oregon, my hometown. We have had several years worth of austerity cuts hit us, with these measures supported by groups such as the Portland Business Alliance, who refused to give Portland Public Schools money recently. We have a deficit all the time, but the problem isn't that the money isn't there, it's that those who can afford to pay aren't. So the workers have to deal with their public programs being scrapped, and thus they have to sink more money of their own into them, causing them to pay lower taxes due to inability, thus creating a deficit... The cycle continues.
If one looks they can see this same trend all across the United States, and furthermore, the first world. In some places it is more extreme than others, but it is always there. We have been hit by austerity due to post-industrialism, as once again the bourgeoisie are responding to their own needs. Whereas before they needed an educated workforce, now they need one who can do basic operations on a calculator (hey teens, ever notice your parents talk with dismay about you being aloud to use a calculator for your math class, even on simple problems?), as that is all a cash register is.
They don't want us smart... They want us profitable.
Or rather, it is stagnating, becoming a rotten husk of what it used to be. Our education system has been embarrassingly obsolete for ages (since the late 1800s early 1900s, with the rise of the modern schools of Francesco Ferrer- however, even newer schooling ideas have render the Ferrer academies obsolete). Today I wish to propose a simple reason as to why this trend can be seen in our education.
We recently moved into the post-industrial economy. Lets look at what this means. However, to correctly understand what it means to education to transition into a post-industrial economy, we must first look at how having an industrial economy affected education.
One thing to be aware of is that this will likely be very dependent on Euro-centric data. This is for two reasons. The first being that information regarding non-European countries is, for the most part,
a lot harder to come by. Second, a lot of the non-European world is comprised of third-world countries, and as such, has not entirely reached a post-industrial economy. In fact, there are some areas of the world that effectively are feudalistic in nature (generally the parts of the world that the media describes as being controlled by “war lords” (they use this to describe non-white feudalism, entirely due to the racism inherent in the media and in our civilization, and because they do not wish to expose how their own systems of governance were repressive and brutal). These systems end up being a mixed bag (feudal economies and capitalist economies of the industrial and information economy stripes all appear to some degree in these places), and I do not yet trust my analytical abilities to properly analyze these places. Third-world countries I feel are also feeling the effects of globalization and European domination, and European countries are on the other side of both of those processes and systems, which means that their development will likely take a fundamentally different path from European countries, and I honestly doubt that they will ever reach a post-industrial society under the thumb of first world countries.
One thing this piece rests on is the idea that school is a microcosm of the workplace, designed to train individuals to be workers, as opposed to letting them flourish as individuals. This is obvious through the way school is taught- we are taught how to follow orders, we are taught how to perform a few tasks but often not the tasks we want (here they even admit that they are preparing us for the workplace- who hasn't heard the excuse “This is what you'll need to know in the workplace” given by a teacher when you complain of boredom in class?), essentially we are turned into automatons, who only serve the purpose of reproducing capital for the capitalist.
Industrial society required the workers to be intelligent, to know exactly what they were doing, and be competent in several areas to make sure a factory ran smoothly, so they could produce at the maximum efficiency. There are many reasons for this. For example, to know how to machine things like engines and other mechanical parts, you need to have a decent level of literacy and math comprehension. Seeing as a lot of industrial work is being able to machine things, it was important for the bourgeoisie to have educated proles to do their manufacturing. This doesn't mean they needed highly educated people, but they definitely needed people who knew their maths and their language. So the implementation of public schools that were very effective at getting kids ready for the job market (working at a factory) was helpful to the bourgeoisie.
Take the US for example. In the late 1800s public education finally had spread to the rural areas of the US, after nearly a century of public education in the US. This all happened right around the same time as the industrial revolution, which began in the 1760s and made the industrial economy the standard by the 1820s-1840s (which is, coincidentally, right when public secondary schools came into existence, which happened in Boston in 1821). Of course, correlation does not necessarily imply causation, so what is the evidence that the industrial revolution was partially due to the better circumstances in education?
Well, for one, we can see that Thomas Jefferson (who was a heavily bourgeois politician) believed that their should be two tracks for education, essentially dividing people into classes of elites and labourers from the very beginning. But the point was to get effective labourers from this education. This was stated in 1779, shortly after the commencement of the industrial revolution. Also, in 1805, the New York Public School Society was created by a number of bourgeoisie. The school was meant to be only for poor children (which we know the bourgeoisie see as potential labour). The schools they started also heavily favoured qualities like discipline and obedience, which factory owning bourgeoisie liked to have in their workers. A few years later, in the late 1810s, a proposal is brought forward in Boston (heavily supported by the rich and the bourgeoisie) to establish public secondary schools. The wage earning proletariat opposed this because they did not want to spend their already meager funds on taxes.
I think you get the idea. This general trend continues for many years. But does a single country give evidence that an industrial economy causes the bourgeoisie to grant us a better education?
England seems to have a slightly different history for their state-funded schools. In the early 1810s, religious schools were founded, which were given state funding in the 1830s (but were not official state schools). Most schools were started by middle class (which was much more wealthy then than what we consider middle class today) folk who were doing “charity”. This was primarily the way things went until 1870, when the Elementary Education Act of 1870 was introduced. It was enacted because it was seen that there was a need for Britain to keep up with the rest of the industrialized world. This was a reform demanded by industrialist bourgeoisie. Which, seems to me, to show fairly definitively that we only got better education when it benefited the bourgeoisie.
Lets take a look at the post-industrial education systems, now that we've discussed industrial education. First, lets take a look at what we know about the post-industrial job market. First, we know it is primarily composed of service industry and information handling jobs, with all the heavy industrial jobs shifted to third world countries (which is why globalization occurs- there will always need to be industrialized areas ready to produce capital rather than simply moving it or data about it around). Here is what a service industry job is: the movement of capital. Whether you are working in McDonald's or as a salesman in a car dealership, all you are doing is moving around capital. Often, massive amounts of it. On the other hand, there are information handling jobs, which are comprised of moving the information about capital around, which are in the category of what we call “good jobs” when they reach a certain position. Information jobs also have another interesting quality: there are less of them. This is because one person who handles capital information for a living can handle the information regarding the capital it would take many, many people to move around in a service job. An extreme example of this is, of course, the stock market, where brokers handle the information of entire companies, sometimes even entire industries, and redistribute it to maximize profits for the investors, who are usually bourgeois. Of course some workers may benefit, but their own benefit ultimately helps the bourgeoisie at the top because when their company is being invested in it becomes worth more, thus making the bourgeoisie richer.
This is not new knowledge.
So, let us see what this has done to our education. Unfortunately we run into a problem: no one seems to be entirely sure when the post-industrial revolution hit. Many sociologists, economists, and Leftists have used the term since the 1960s, which implies it hit sometime around the early 1960s, but only recently have mainstream economists and politicians given it any thought.
But what we do see is this: in this time period (that is admittedly large) we have seen huge budget cuts to education. Especially in the few latest years, we have seen massive cuts to education. To bring back the United States as an example, many states (all but two) have decreased the amount of money they spend per student from 2008 to 2013, averaging out to a staggering 25.52% loss in funding per student. Now, like we said before, correlation does not imply causation, but it certainly seems that it once again will be correlated due to causation. However we know that the bourgeoisie get massive tax breaks due to tax loopholes, while the average person (I think the bourgeoisie call us the “labour force”) have to shoulder the burden, while also not having as good of public education. Lets pick a city as an example (as it is just a microcosm of the larger issue at hand)..
Portland, Oregon, my hometown. We have had several years worth of austerity cuts hit us, with these measures supported by groups such as the Portland Business Alliance, who refused to give Portland Public Schools money recently. We have a deficit all the time, but the problem isn't that the money isn't there, it's that those who can afford to pay aren't. So the workers have to deal with their public programs being scrapped, and thus they have to sink more money of their own into them, causing them to pay lower taxes due to inability, thus creating a deficit... The cycle continues.
If one looks they can see this same trend all across the United States, and furthermore, the first world. In some places it is more extreme than others, but it is always there. We have been hit by austerity due to post-industrialism, as once again the bourgeoisie are responding to their own needs. Whereas before they needed an educated workforce, now they need one who can do basic operations on a calculator (hey teens, ever notice your parents talk with dismay about you being aloud to use a calculator for your math class, even on simple problems?), as that is all a cash register is.
They don't want us smart... They want us profitable.