Schooling as social panacea persisted from Carnegie to Johnson.

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, 282

Categorization

• XREF: The Carnegie-to-Johnson continuity parallels how the book’s ch1 and ch3 trace education’s broken-promise and personality-forming roles across eras. Also echoes the ‘education as panacea’ framing the reader carries from earlier chapters. — connects to: Liberal education’s self-developmental promise was never actually attempted — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 540