The Education Fantasy

[kmo]

I posted a New York Times article to my Facebook feed about how West Virginia used to be a Democratic stronghold, back when the Democratic Party stood up for working people. I selected a pull quote warning that "when the average American feels looked down on, his interests minimized or ignored, he can not only become less generous, he can also

Comments

re: The Education Fantasy

[coremarc]

I agree with many points of your post. And, tossed off "Monkeys" references is no way to make a point about those being addressed as such. I'm sure that was not his intention

It's a hard meme to kill---

[ext_4015793]

I can remember graduating from university during the late eighties, which were if anything, worse than nowadays for trying to get a job. You never saw a sign saying that people were being hired---instead you saw lots saying "don't bother, we aren't taking applications". I went to my home town for Yule and the local bar was giving free turkey dinners to people (hard times.) I remember sitting around a table with guys that I went to high school with. Two of us had jobs---I'd been accepted for a Master's degree in philosophy and had a pittance of a teaching assistanceship, and another guy had a commission to paint a mural on the city hall. The rest---who had all studied "practical" subjects were out of work: engineers, heavy diesel mechanics, etc. One guy exclaimed "I didn't have any fun at all at university and I still don't have a job

[peristaltor]

Good observation. It's amazing how old and thoroughly debunked this trope is:

...[It] is evident that intelligence, which is or should be the aim of education... can operate upon wages only by increasing the effective power of labor.... And it can raise the wages of the individual only in so far as it renders him superior to others. When to read and write were rare accomplishments, a clerk commanded high respect and large wages, but now the ability to read and write has become so nearly universal as to give no advantage.... The diffusion of intelligence, except as it may make men discontented with a state of things which condemns producers to a life of toil while non-producers loll in luxury, cannot tend to raise wages generally, or in any way improve the condition of the lowest class-the "mudsills" of society, as a southern senator once called them-who must rest on the soil, no matter how high the superstructure may be carried.

Henry George, Progress & Poverty, 1879, Book IV, Chapter I, paragraph 19.
That book almost single-