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- Education Reform is just guise for further oppression of the worker class
Mechanisms---Public SchoolingPublic schools are fundamentally capitalist and serve only to produce future workersKnopp 01 Sarah Knopp, She teaches government and economics and is an activist in United Teachers Los Angeles, 2001(“What do schools produce?,” International Socialist Review, 11/01, http://isreview.org/issue/78/what-do-schools-produce, accessed 6/22/17, EVH) The book also brilliantly describes the contradictions that lie at the heart of public education: since the mid-nineteenth century the dual objectives of educational reformers—equality of opportunity and social control—have been intermingled, the merger of these two threads so nearly complete that it becomes impossible to distinguish between the two. Schooling has been at once something done to the poor and for the poor.… The unequal contest between social control and social justice is evident in the total functioning of U.S. education. Both the conservative myth about schools as “leveling the playing field,” and the liberal dreams of schools as emancipatory sites where everyone is prepared to be a fully developed citizen in a multicultural society, contradict the experiences of the vast majority of us when we go to school. Instead, particularly for students of color and working-class and poor students, schools are a nasty sorting ground. Obedience, rote learning, and most of all boredom rule. Correspondence Theory- The most famous aspect of Bowles and Gintis’ work is their “correspondence theory,” in which they argue that schools serve a particular function in our society—the reproduction of social relations of production. This means, in part, getting future workers ready for their jobs. The hierarchical relations of work and production are mirrored in the relations we see in schools. The hierarchies between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and other students correspond to boss-worker relationships and indeed prepare students to play those roles. Students produce work for external rewards (grades) in much the same way that workers work only for a paycheck, have no control over the product they make and become divorced (or alienated) from its real value. Students don’t “work” for the inherent value of knowledge, but rather do the work they are told to in order to earn a grade, and eventually a diploma. There is a lack of democracy and intellectual control over the content of our studies that’s similar to workers’ lack of control over what they produce. The “utilitarian” value of schools, according to Bowles and Gintis, is not about producing skills or knowledge that directly correspond to those needed on the job. “The reasons why most larger employers supported public education are apparently related to the non-cognitive effects of schooling—in more modern terms, to the hidden curriculum,” according to Bowles and Gintis. The educational system selects for and rewards certain personality traits. They cite a study that shows that in predicting a students’ GPA, personality traits are almost as important as cognitive skills. Some of the highly rewarded traits are dependability, perseverance, consistency, following orders, punctuality, and deferring gratification. Traits that have a negative association with GPA are creativity, aggressiveness, and independence. So, schools promote individuals with the personality traits most associated with “good workers.” Schools also have an important role to play in social control and in assimilation of non-mainstream groups. Compulsory public schools established in the early 19th century in the northeastern United States were born out of an effort to forcibly assimilate immigrant groups in terms of language, culture, and work ethic. Schools were created, in most cases, hot on the heels of factories and served to create stability in the manufacturing towns. Compulsory schooling was, at its inception, undemocratic at best and fundamentally violent at its most extreme, as tens of thousands of Native American children were kidnapped and forcibly assimilated at Indian boarding schools. Lastly, schools hide the exploitive relations of work in a capitalist economy. The values and behaviors rewarded and reinforced in schools provide “employers with workers with a built-in supervisor,” say the authors. The “self-directed” worker thinks that his salary, prestige, and success at work depend on his intellectual capabilities and work ethic, because, after all, we all got an “equal chance” to go to school. Mechanisms---ReformEducation reform only improves for neoliberals—policies are shifted away from minorities.Slater 13—Graham B. Slater, a doctoral student in the Department of Education, Culture, and Society at the University of Utah, research focuses on a political, economic, and ecological critique of neoliberal globalization, primarily from the perspective of autonomist Marxism, and critical and decolonial theories of education, work has appeared in Policy Futures in Education and is forthcoming in Educational Studies, 2013 (“Education as recovery: neoliberalism, school reform, and the politics of crisis”, Taylor & Francis, November 15th, Available Online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02680939.2014.904930, Accessed on 6-28-2017, HL) My hope is that the theory of recovery conceptualized in this essay provides such an invention: an imaginative contribution to education policy studies charting the machinations of neoliberal education reform. Recovery is by no means a comprehensive concept, nor do I argue that recovery has primacy over other fruitful analytics deployed by neoliberal critics and policy scholars. Recovery is shifting and contingent and is not necessarily operating in every moment of neoliberal school reform. However, it is a driving logic behind many reforms and is a discursive tool that is deployed with increasing regularity and precision by neoliberals. Thus, it is crucial to recognize that the logic of neoliberal recovery further positions education and educational subjects as responsible for restoring social order and well-being after crisis. As crises increase in scope, magnitude, and regularity, the lure of neoliberal recovery must be resisted. The Trojan horse of neoliberal reform needs to be left at the gates.1 This of course is no easy task. It can be argued that working-class communities and communities of color already violated by the ‘externalities’ of neoliberalism will disproportionately bear the burden of ‘not recovering.’ However, this clearly illuminates the deceitfulness of neoliberal recovery. That is, recovery serves only to secure neoliberal futures within an economic framework that is fundamentally predicated upon violence, inequality, and racialized and gendered divisions of labor. The Möbius loop of crisis–accumulation–crisis must be understood as simultaneously a loop of crisis–recovery–crisis. In facilitating this violent cycle, recovery fortifies capital and expedites the arrival of subsequent crises. It is important to acknowledge that many communities have already begun to denounce recovery and to reject neoliberal reforms. As several scholars have noted (Buras et al. 2010; Gandin and Apple 2002; Lipman 2011; Porfilio and Malott 2008; Stovall and Ayers 2005), communities – in places like Chicago, New Orleans, Seattle, Porto Alegre, and other cities across the globe hit hardest by decades of neoliberalization – are forging autonomous lines of flight from the cycle of neoliberal recovery. Critical policy scholars should affirm and support these efforts. By framing recovery as ‘common sense,’ neoliberal reformers exploit the immediate material needs of communities in crisis, while simultaneously appropriating the political potential of educators and communities. Conceptualizing neoliberal education policy responses to crises as palliative measures that do not work to fundamentally transform the conditions that actively seek to produce crises demands a shift in critical educational discourse and praxis: From responding to crises on the deceitful terms of neoliberal recovery, to valorizing the autonomous responses of communities, especially when they challenge the hegemony of the state and the expectations of a market-driven understanding of education. Conceptualizing crisis in this way is a crucial step toward constructing an alternative educational politics that preserves the integrity of students, teachers, and communities and that can derail the nefarious cycle of capitalist domination. Education Reform is just guise for further oppression of the worker classDave Hill, Professor of Education Policy at the University of Northampton, For twenty years he was a regional political and trade union leader. He recently completed a study for the International Labour Organisation on the impacts of neoliberal education policy on equity, democracy and workers’ rights. 2010(“Class, Capital and Education in this Neoliberal and Neoconservative Period”, 4/22, http://libr.org/isc/issues/ISC23/B1%20Dave%20Hill.pdf, accessed, 6/26/17, EVH) In education, the combined neoliberal-neoconservative educational ‘reform’ has led to a radical change in what governments and most school and college managements/ leaderships themselves see as their mission. In the 1960s and 1970s (and with long prior histories), liberal–humanist or social democratic or socialist ends of education were common through the advanced capitalist (and parts of the anti-colonialist developing) worlds. This has changed dramatically within the lifetimes of those over thirty. Now the curriculum is conservative and it is controlled. Now the hidden curriculum of pedagogy is performative processing and ‘delivery’ or pre-digested points. Now the overwhelming and nakedly over-riding and exclusive focus is on the production of a differentially educated, tiered (‘raced and gendered) social class workforce and compliant citizenry. Differentially skilled and socially/politically/culturally neutered and compliant human capital is now the production focus of neoliberalised education systems and institutions, hand in glove with and enforced by a neoconservative ideology and state. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.3 Mb. Share with your friends:
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