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 the 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 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