Education’s centrality in American reform reflects accommodation to capitalism, not ideology
Evidence
Carnegie’s advocacy of schooling as the solution of the all-too-evident social ills of his day was echoed by other corporate leaders, by university presidents, trade union officials, and politicians; education quickly became the chosen instrument of social reformers. Nor has enthusiasm waned with the passing years. Three-quarters of a century later, President Lyndon B. Johnson could proclaim that . . the answer for all our national problems comes down to a single word: education.” Why education for this critical role? The focal importance of schooling in U.S. social history and the attention devoted to it by current policy-makers and social critics can be understood only in terms of the way reformers have accommodated themselves to the seemingly inevitable realities of capitalist development. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 283
Categorization
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the Carnegie-Johnson span really show continuous rhetorical continuity, or does each era deploy ‘education’ for quite different ends?
- XREF: connects to: Horace Mann saw schooling as the sole counter to capitalist class domination — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 333; Early American education reformers aimed to pacify the poor rather than end poverty — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 371; Schooling replaced the frontier as capitalism’s safety valve for unequal opportunity — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 177 (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- Capitalist-class objectives, not reformer ideals, have actually shaped US schooling
#corroborates(0.95) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 569 - Capitalism, not technology, limits what schools can reform.
#corroborates(0.82) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 289 - American school curricula systematically erased imperialist, genocidal, and capitalist dimensions of national history
#exemplifies(0.75) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 352