Socialists and education

In the present society the main aim of education is to provide the knowledge and skills base necessary for employment in capitalism. We must first be educated (trained would be a more accurate word to describe what really goes on) to take our place in capitalist society. A workforce educated according to the demands of the profit system will then maintain and boost the wealth of the owners of the means of production. There is a conventional mythology surrounding the noble ideals of education. Schools are said to be places where young minds are nurtured, where boys and girls are prepared to become responsible citizens. Political leaders and mainstream educationalists usually claim that the purpose of education is along the following lines:
(1) Acquisition of knowledge, development of mental and physical skills and personality to enhance the life of an individual.
(2) The achievement of the above, it is then declared, will enable individuals to make a contribution towards the overall economic, social and cultural wealth of society.

Education for life has long been a goal set up and discussed by teachers and others. Capitalism is increasingly eroding that role, transforming it into education for employment. In a class-based society such as capitalism, education, like much else, is subordinated to the interests of the ruling class. Those interests fundamentally involve the creation of profit which is a vital source of the wealth of the capitalists. The reality is that schools, colleges and universities are not independent of society—they are an essential feature of it. It has taught students to accept the status quo and to fit into it. This lack of radicalisation of students has been maintained through the following factors: The very limited nature of the education received by many students. Most of that education is geared to the demands of industry and commerce. Capitalism has so far at least, managed to pressure most students into thinking more about getting employment at the end of their course, rather than to consider becoming radical. The prevalence of status quo ideas in the education system: the values of religious organisations in feudal times and, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the values of the capitalist class. In more recent times most people’s understanding of the society in which they live has been influenced hugely by an expanding media, much of which is controlled by wealthy corporate owners and other commercial interests. What is not considered, despite much rhetoric to the contrary, is that each child is an individual, ironic for a system that lauds individualism.

When state education was established towards the end of the 19th century learning by rote, lots of copying. This reflected industrial processes for which those children were being prepared. Today the direct influence of capitalism is to be seen in the managerial approach; the setting and measuring of targets, a tightly controlled and prescriptive national curriculum, all inspected by OFSTED. School league tables are meant to indicate how well a school is "performing", but in fact help to instil "market discipline" as schools compete for pupils. The encouraged relationship of parents to schools is that of the marketplace. with parents as consumers, entering into a contract with the school that is itself, a self-run business. Here, the values of the market have been adopted. The marketplace frustrates rather than promotes self-improvement for the vast majority of people. The market is incompatible with any equitable sharing of society's wealth of knowledge and culture. As it stands, what is called education merely reflects the society in which it exists, divisive, demanding, pressurising, merely an alienating system, a vast factory, for turning out workers tuned to our masters' requirements.

Education of the young is the first way in which they are given a foretaste of what life will be like when they reach adulthood. The whole curriculum, from start to finish, is conducted within an atmosphere of competition and stress, together with a weeding-out process which segregates those with supposedly superior talents from those less fortunate. This is accomplished through the use of tests, examinations and grading, all of which have a direct bearing upon ultimate occupations and potential earnings. Such an environment prevents the pleasurable pursuit of education as a primary end in itself.

For the employer class the education of workers is a cost that must be borne as economically as possible. Universities are to be allowed to charge the going market rate for their courses. Once in employment, former students would begin to repay the cost of their loans (together with interest). Huge numbers of young people, on modest salaries will face these loan repayments, on top of either having to pay high rents for accommodation or taking out large mortgages.
The result of this is that most working class students will have an unenviable choice: either (1) to enter higher education and to be burdened with enormous amounts of debt, especially when accommodation and maintenance are considered, or (2) having to give up higher education altogether, with the probable consequence of stunted intellectual growth, temporarily, at the very least. This is all capitalism can offer the vast majority of people: a huge burden of debt which induces a form of enslavement or missing important opportunities in life in order to reduce the debt.
The rhetoric about the university is that it is a community of scholars. While some of the medieval universities were no doubt founded on this ideal, today the label "academic capitalism" seems more apposite. Academic capitalism denotes market behaviour on the part of universities and faculties. There has been a shift from state block grants to grants and contracts targeted on commercially useable results. Centres within universities that form government-industry-university partnerships are encouraged. Faculties are obliged to look for commercial research funding—projects that are applied rather than basic, that are tied to the needs of national or multinational corporations. Academics look for commercial funding for projects that are tied to national policy institutions and are partnered by prestigious firms, usually national or multinational in scope. Their own advancement is no longer dependent primarily on publications. Instead it depends at least partly on success in marketing activity.

The education system is a production line, vending skills for the jobs market; and like any production line, it must produce to follow demand.
Academic achievement is not the main goal of the education system, providing for the jobs market is. Low academic achievement is factored in, to supply the masses of jobs that don't need brain work. Only a few workers are needed to really think, thus the university system is set up to produce a small élite, to fill that niche market.
Their skills are valuable because they are rare: but, as in any other market, if the number of graduates available becomes too large—as it does as university education spreads—they are over-produced, and then their value drops. Sending more people to university does not guarantee more people with higher wages and does not guarantee more skilled jobs. Today people gain skills, and knowledge, only to be never able to use than when they find their McJob. There's little chance of enjoying the intellectual fruits of society when you're slaving for a living.

Education in Socialist Society
What would education be like in a socialist society? Socialism will put human need first. The welfare and needs of people, both as individuals and as a community will be treated as a priority. The importance of developing to the full, the mental, physical and social abilities and talents of everyone, as individuals, will undoubtedly be recognised. Most significantly, education will inevitably be considered a lifelong process and certainly not something to be compartmentalised into time slots, like happens under the present system. As a result of this, people will be able to lead far more satisfying lives than could ever be even remotely achieved under capitalism. This satisfaction would derive from the contributions to the overall material, intellectual social and cultural wealth of society which people would be able to make and, of course, from the fact that, as individuals, they would be able to enjoy the fruits of the common store. What can we say about education in socialist society? It is easier to foresee what will no longer take place than what will positively develop. With no employment, schooling will lose its function as preparation for employment. No more McDonaldisation of education, no more economics (though economy history, as part of history, may well survive). The knowledge and skills needed to run a society which inherits the best from the past and rejects the worst will be circulated and developed among adults, and the ability to think creatively and critically transmitted from generation to generation. There will surely be different approaches to—even controversies about—what task. Socialists have no difficulty with the concept of from each according to ability, an obvious recognition of difference, to each according to need, a guarantee no one can suffer or prosper due to congenital factors. Of course capitalism cannot act on this basis. The absolute need to produce for profit requires a trained workforce, why else make school attendance a legal requirement, pupils being the only members of our society forced by law into an institution without being convicted in court. Education has become associated with a punitive regime rather than a wide variety of ways everyone, whatever their innate abilities, could enhance their lives. Education will only be transformed along with society in general.

Marx’s concept of education was a polytechnic - the combination of physical, mental and technological education with productive labour (Instead of abolishing child labour, he believed that it should be regulated and combined with education. He divided children into age groups. The amount of time a child could work would increase with age.)
His ideas can be summarised as folows:
– A high level of education for everybody;
– Overcoming the division between manual and mental work: polytechnic education is pointless if one person spends a lifetime doing purely mental work, and another only manual labour;
– Removal of the distinction between working and learning, between school and work; every child should take part in socially necessary production from an early age; every adult should have the chance to go on learning, both at work and elsewhere;
– Everybody must participate in planning and decision-making; once polytechnic education has given everybody an understanding of social aims and technological problems, there can be no justification for excluding anybody from the organs of planning and decision-making: a society with polytechnic education cannot but be a democratic society.

Marx held that education should be a community function controlled by people in the locality. He writes in the Critique of th Gotha Programme "‘Elementary education by the state’ is altogether objectionable. Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc., and, as is done in the United States, supervising the fulfilment of these legal specifications by state inspectors, is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people! Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school."

Schools under capitalism resembles a factory in which materials are tested, classified and put through processes which will mould them into finished products for the market ranging from the cheap, mass-produced to the costlier high-grade article. In "The Education Dilemma" edited by J Simmons we read "It is true that schools have 'inputs' and 'outputs' and that one of their nominal purposes is to take human 'raw material' (i.e. children) and convert it into something more valuable (i.e. employable adults)."