Capitalism and Education
If anyone held the quaint idea that the education of children was aimed at their fullest, free individual development, a recent report in The Times (30th January 2013) will quickly help to dispel it. In the report, under the banner ‘Prepare children for jobs’, the Children’s Minister, Elizabeth Truss outlined exactly what sort of development she had in mind for our children. It was essential, she said, that children were “properly equipped with the essential skills from the beginning of their lives”. What skills? Those required to “compete in the tough international jobs market.” Praising a primary school in London that teaches Mandarin and mathematics to three year olds, she said: “The 21st century will belong to those countries that win the race for jobs and economic advantage.” So that’s clear then. Our children’s education is to facilitate the competitive advantage of their future employers on the world market. The price of childhood, the cost-benefit analysis of education in capitalism, is the anticipation of a future skilled workforce, increased productivity and, ultimately, future profit.
The debates and reforms in education have a long history and continue apace but the bottom-line is always profit. Spending on education in capitalism is a collective investment of the capitalist class in future expected returns – a skilled, disciplined work force. The idealism of liberal educationalists can only ever make so much headway. But does it have to be like this? No, but short of the removal of the source of the parameters of the education system – the profit system – there can only be resistance, a never-ending struggle against the logic of capitalism.
It is worth quoting from a socialist pamphlet, School’s Today, from 1959 during a previous period of change in the English education system, the analysis of which, in the light of the recent comments of the Children’s Minister, rings true:
“All of these [educational] proposals are concerned with enabling British capitalism to compete and hold its own against other nations in an age of new industrial techniques. The Socialist standpoint, however, is an entirely different one. Its concern is not the employing class’s problems of production …While the fundamental value of education is undeniable, the fact remains that schooling under capitalism is scarcely education at all, but the training of young people in the skills and disciplines the system requires.
What is wrong with our society is its basic condition of ownership by a class; the answer, therefore, is to establish a new social system based on the ownership by everybody of all the means of production. Such a society has not yet existed, though there has been much confusion about it because of the play with the word “Socialism” made by reformers, Labour and social-democratic parties, and admirers of Russian State capitalism. Socialism means that all people will have the same relationship to the means of production. Everyone will take part as he is able, in the necessary work of society; there will be no money, and everyone will have free access – will, in fact, own – all that is produced.
For the first time, there will be true education. Certainly there will be no segregation or selection. There will be the best possible facilities, unrestricted by money considerations, for those who wish to have specialized knowledge or skills, and the possession of special knowledge will have no implication of superior status. Each person will follow his own bent and make his own contribution to society, and the reward will be not individual, but social: a good world to live in.
Children’s education will be shaped, as it has always been, by the needs society discovers. For this reason, its exact form cannot be predicted. New social values, the organization of the home and the family, the different nature of towns and cities, will all bear upon it. Possibly there may be no schools at all for young children: letters and simple skills may be learned at home and the techniques of social life learned through play. If, on the other hand, schools are found necessary, their concern will be for children to learn to live not as wage earners, but as human beings. And it is this, the motive and not the form, that is the important thing.”
There are those that say that such a change is the stuff of utopia. But it is not. It is necessary to free us from the constraints placed on social production and on our individual lives within capitalism. I will let the pamphlet have the last words:
“Can a society like this be achieved? Indeed it can. The conditions needed for its establishment are with us now: the development of the means and methods of production that could create abundance if the profit motive did not stand in the way. All that is lacking is people to bring it to being. Thus, the concern of Socialists under capitalism is education of a different kind – showing the facts about capitalism, and the only answer to the problems which it causes. The beginning of this kind of education is the realization that capitalism’s educational systems must, because of what they are, hide the facts and direct attention away from the answer.” (School’s Today, Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1959)
Part 2
The education secretary recently confirmed that the reality of education provision for our children is a long way from the ambitions of educational idealists. Our children are apparently in danger of enjoying themselves too much. Their school holidays are far too long, Michael Gove claimed. According to the BBC:
“In the most successful East Asian education systems, ‘school days are longer, school holidays are shorter’, Mr Gove told an education conference. Mr Gove added that a longer school day was the norm in East Asian nations… ‘If you look at the length of the school day in England, the length of the summer holiday, and we compare it to the extra tuition and support that children are receiving elsewhere, then we are fighting or actually running in this global race in a way that ensures that we start with a significant handicap.’” (BBC 19th April 2013)
The involvement of the state in educational provision has come a long way since the 1870 Education Act. Then, government educational provision was a controversial subject with fears of social disorder from popular literacy. Today, such fears seem quaint as our children are sweated in the education industry in order to prepare them for the rigours of the global labour market in which British workers must pit themselves against their counterparts in other parts of the world.
The process is well underway in the UK for a remodelled education system in which, in order to accommodate households with two working parents and maximise labour market flexibility, we can look forward to a world where school holidays are no longer than 3 weeks with schools that open from 8am – 8pm.
CSK1904
FROM HERE
1 comment:
It was interesting to read this article and to have it refer to the 1959 SPGB Pamphlet offering a very different perspective to that which prevails today. It is depressing that what has been an active debate over the years, albeit usually framed within certain parameters, posing the question: 'what is education for?' has all but evaporated with the renewed vigour of the utility argument that education is for capitalism. This unitary perspective seems almost ubiquitous at all levels of the education system. University students, among others, don't seem to conceive that their education is for anything but to get a job. The success of this capitalist perspective has been reinforced by student debt peonage and privatisation and marketisation of the educational provision in the UK and in many other countries. Not only is there no alternative model put forward with any conviction, but there seems almost no resistance to the existing dogma; suggesting those that advocate socialism need to do much more.
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