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Tuesday, April 16, 2013

What Price a Childhood: 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 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)

Colin Skelly

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