Gerald Coles – Education, Jobs and Capitalism

Link to an excerpt from the book Miseducating for the Global Economy: How Corporate Power Damages Education and Subverts Students’ Futures (2018) by Gerald Coles:

“Education, Jobs and Capitalism”

 

In Lars Lih‘s excellent biographical study of V.I. Lenin, he noted how Lenin’s parents were involved in education and were frustrated that the tsarist autocracy in Russia prevented education (and widespread literacy) in order to constrain the expectations of citizens, in order to maintain extreme inequality that prevailed under tsarism.  When Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power, reforms were swiftly instituted that resulted in historically unprecedented advances in literacy and education more generally.  It was not a matter of pedagogical impediments to expanding literacy, or a lack of the a notion to improve education and literacy, it was that the education system was subordinated to the maintenance of a particular socioeconomic hierarchy.  What was needed was a shift in who held power, and the ideologies of those people, and Coles’ book excerpt makes that point abundantly clear.  Capitalists simply disavow their real motivations.

 

Bonus links: “The Tech Education Con” and Pedagogy of the Oppressed and “Red Diaper Babies” and Democracy and Education and The Higher Learning in America and …And the Poor Get Prison and The Scapegoat

Matthew Stewart – The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Link to an article by Matthew Stewart:

“The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy”

 

It is worth noting that the discussion of “tax expenditures” in this article is confused, as explained by economists in the MMT school of thought.

 

Bonus Links: Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Democracy and Education, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, The Trouble With Diversity, The Social Structures of the Economy, “Extreme Cities,” …And the Poor Get Prison, “The Myth of Populism,” “Social Service or Social Change?,” “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie”

Erin Thompson – Minority Lawyers Hanging From Their Own Bootstraps

Link to an article by Erin Thompson:

“Minority Lawyers Hanging From Their Own Bootstraps: How Law Schools Fail Those Who Seek Justice”

 

Bonus links: The Trouble With Diversity and …And the Poor Get Prison and “The Decline of the Peoplelaw Sector” and “The Echo Chamber: A Small Group of Lawyers and Its Outsized Influence at the U.S. Supreme Court”

Jerry White – Teachers Unions Intensify Efforts to Suppress Growing Class Struggle in the US

Link to an article by Jerry White:

“Teachers Unions Intensify Efforts to Suppress Growing Class Struggle in the US”

 

Bonus link: Poor People’s Movements and “Making Greater Possibilities Inconceivable: Another Thought or Two on the Logic of Lesser Evilism”

Sarah Bruch & Joe Soss – The Lessons Students Learn

Link to an article by Sarah Bruch & Joe Soss:

“The Lessons Students Learn”

 

Bonus links: “Red Diaper Babies” and Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Richard Shaull Quote (“There is no such thing as a neutral educational process.  Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes ‘the practice of freedom,’ the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”) and Deschooling Society and The Struggle for the Meaning of Society As Such and “Elite Universities Are Turning Our Kids Into Corporate Stooges”