Education simultaneously raises worker productivity and defuses class conflict to preserve profits

Evidence

It is immediately evident that profits will be greater, the lower is the total wage bill paid by the employer and the greater is the productivity and intensity of labor. Education in the United States plays a dual role in the social process whereby surplus value, i.e., profit, is created and expropri­ ated. On the one hand, by imparting technical and social skills and appro­ priate motivations, education increases the productive capacity of workers. On the other hand, education helps defuse and depoliticize the potentially explosive class relations of the production process, and thus serves to perpetuate the social, political, and economic conditions through which a portion of the product of labor is expropriated in the form of profits. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 226

Categorization

• DEFINE: Surplus value is profit here, and the passage is the load-bearing definition of education’s dual role in producing it.
• XREF: This is the purest statement of the correspondence principle which the whole book borrows from Bowles—connects to any later chapter documenting how class relations are reproduced through schooling. — connects to: Schools replicate workplace dominance hierarchies to produce a docile labor force. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 1120; Education can nurture workers unwilling to accept workplace domination — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 249; Education is shaped by the economic need for children’s productive labor. (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Education can nurture workers unwilling to accept workplace domination #contradicts (0.85) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 249
• Colonial education served economic productivity and loyalty-building simultaneously. #exemplifies (0.85) — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 275
• Schooling can breed workers unwilling to accept workplace subordination #contradicts (0.85)
• Education is shaped by the economic need for children’s productive labor. #expands (0.80)
• Capitalist formation required the continuous re-education and cultural remaking of working people #expands (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 993
• Recession conditions let education groups convert schooling into a tool for industrial needs #exemplifies (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1124
• Differentiated schooling reproduces rather than abolishes class divisions #qualifies (0.75)