Marxism & Education

Schooloing Pedagogy

schooling has a purpose reproduction of labour & social relations (ideology)

"The previous ruling classes were essentially conservative in the sense that they did not tend to construct an organic passage from the other classes into their own; i.e, to enlarge their class sphere "technically" and "ideologically": their conception was that of a closed caste. The bourgeois class poses itself as an organism in continuous movement, capable of absorbing the entire society, assimilating it to its own cultural and economic level. The entire function of the state has been transformed; the state has become an'educator' ..."
Gramsci

"Cultivating worker productivity involves massive amounts of behavioral and ideological management on the part of the ruling elite, knowing full well that "without workers, consumers and citizens who are well versed in and accepting of their roles in these processes, the entire capitalist system would grind to a halt"
Ollman

In essence, education can be said to have developed over the last century as a way of

way the world 'enters into' the students.

regulating the
Freire

"Day after day, children are denied the right to be children. The world treats rich kids as if they were money, teaching them to act the way money acts. The world treats poor kids as if they were garbage, to turn them into garbage. And those in the middle, neither rich nor poor, are chained to televisions and trained to live the life of prisoners. The few children who manage to be children must have a lot of magic and a lot of luck."
Galeano

Fast foods, fast cars, fast life: from birth rich kids are trained for consumption and speed, and their voyage through childhood confirms that machines are more trustworthy than people. They feel at home navigating cyberspace the way homeless children do wandering city streets.
Galeano

The processes of ideological and labour construction and reproduction are

contested

"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
Paolo Freire

"A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified."
Freire

"The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration - contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity."
Freire

... education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.
Freire

"Marx saw possibilities for generating, through education, creators rather than consumers which would, thereby, challenge the force of consumer society. By becoming creators rather than consumers the more able we are to affirm our own identity. In that respect alone, education is the best weapon against the patronizing cynicism of the advertising industry, one that assumes that its target audience can only expand its personal identity by association with consumer products."
Sullivan

Education & neoliberalism

"The consumer or client replaces the learner. The curriculum is delivered. Aims are spelt out in terms of targets. Audits (based on performance indicators) measure success defined in terms of hitting the targets. As the language of performance and management has advanced, so we have proportionately lost a language of education which recognises the intrinsic value of pursuing certain sorts of question of seeking understanding [and] of exploring through literature and the arts what it means to be human."
Mansell

Charles Leadbeater, a former Downing Street adviser, argues that one of the main forces ruling the world economy today is knowledge capitalism: "the drive to generate new ideas and turn them into commercial products and services which consumers want. This process of creating, disseminating and exploiting new knowledge is the dynamo behind rising living standards and economic growth. It reaches deep into our lives and implicates all of us as consumers and workers. If we were to turn our backs on the global economy, we would also leave behind the huge creative power of the knowledge economy."

Backing Australias Ability (2001) describes education in terms of developing skills, generating new ideas through research, and tutoring them into commercial success ... inculcating the desire to be entrepreneurial towards all knowledge ... the knowledge economy is about addressing all students as potential entrepreneurs and it treats all knowledge as potential fodder for private accumulation

Julia Gillard, in 2007 speaking to the Australian Industry Group: "In todays world, the areas covered by my portfolios early childhood education and childcare, schooling, training, universities, social inclusion, employment participation and workplace cooperation are all ultimately about the same thing: Productivity. So while my portfolios can be a mouthful, Ill be happy to be referred to simply as the Minister for Productivity."

Young people, education & rebellion

Communiqu from an Absent Future "We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isnt education; its debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around ... If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things. Ones future position in the system, ones relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience. First we pay, then we 'work hard' ... "

"Out of place and subject to a grating diversity of realities that reveal massive unemployment, underpaid temporary work, skyrocketing tuition, escalating rent, rising food costs, deepening poverty, and the indignity of having to live with their parents, youth no longer symbolize one of the most crucial investments enabling a society to build on its dreams. Under a the global reach of neoliberalism with its political economy of mass dispossession and predatory practices, young people are now viewed as trouble, a drain on resources, and relegated to either the infantilizing world of consumerism or to various punishing sites of disposability, such as the schools modeled as prisons, or even worse, the criminal justice system."
Henry Giroux