Note: It's the industry I work in, so I'm also broadly complicit in it, as well as being a victim of it.1
- Liberalism works very hard to inculcate in us some quite unfounded beliefs about schools, such as that schooling is inherently beneficial because knowledge is good, and especially that schooling is a good tool for social advancement of classes of people, such that increasing, for example, the graduation rates at various levels will increase the economic fate of groups
- Is knowledge good? Questionable, really. But even assuming it is, are schools good at instilling it in people? ::wiggels hand:: meh. There is not a negative correlation between being highly educated and being a total fucking fool, in my experience.
- Education, under capitalism, cannot socioeconomically advance whole classes of people, because capitalism requires the existence of impoverishment. There was enough slack in the system for affirmative action to be really great for middle-class white women, for a while. That was pretty much it. After that point, what you get is rampant credential inflation where the more people we turn out with x level of education, the less value that level of education has to those who receive it. This, coupled to student loan bs, has produced tremendous misery for people who are now falling out of the middle class as a result.2
- Thus, never trust policy proposals which pin the hopes of people of color or working class and poor people on educational outcomes with the assumption that those educational outcomes will confer the ability to afford food and housing.
- The ability of schools to push people to the left is vastly overstated, and is contrary to their original purposes. This is particularly true in the US, where literally from the inception of the nation, you can see the rush to make sure that textbooks are clear that while the American revolution was good, future revolutions Will Not Be Required.
- To the extent that schools live up to their hype as meritocratic institutions, they function to filter out talented people from lower classes and convert just those individuals to upper class people, and not for the benefit of their class. (Again in the US, see Jefferson's arguments in favor of public schooling.)
- The process of scaling up education to universal institutions in the US and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries was largely to achieve goals related to the production of a workforce fit for industrialized production and to establish and maintain social hygiene. For those who are not uplifted by the gatekeepers to higher spheres, the purpose is to create a clean, obedient, efficient, orderly worker and national subject.
- This process is extremely hand in hand with the development of the modern police and prison apparatus, as can be seen in everything down to the way the buildings are constructed.
- The school to prison pipeline is extremely real, and schools play an active role in it. I sometimes feel obligated to point out that teachers are cops and, let me tell you, a lot of teachers are fucking cops.
::looks at list:: oops, I guess those feelings aren't very mixed, they're actually just very bad, lol.
The mixed part comes from the fact the fact that everything mentioned above is also contested within schools. On a daily basis people are fighting that shit. Powerful work is being done. But it's very important to have a clear view of the context for that contest, and to bear that context in mind as we shovel bodies into the brink. Going to school, whether as a student or as a worker, is one of the sadly endless ways in which we are drafted into the class war.
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One of my favorite short dialogue exchanges, from one of Lawrence Block's Mathew Scudder novels: "Earlier you made her sound like a victim. Now she sounds like a villain.” / “Everybody's both."
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Most "millennial vs. boomer" shit is actually just basic class conflict, with the complicating factor that what's been happening for the last few decades is middle class boomers (and to a degree gen x) have been (perhaps without realizing it) pushing their own children into a lower socioeconomic status.