I really take issue with describing this as some sort of well documented absolute fact that education is about labor. It isn’t the 1850s! Just because capitalists interested in skilled labor were “some of” the biggest supporters of English public schools in the 1850s doesn’t mean we should forever commit our society to their designs.
From the Marxist paper backing that article:
England initiated a sequence of reforms in its education system since the 1830s and literacy rates gradually increased. The process was _initially motivated by a variety of reasons_ such as religion, enlightenment, social control, moral conformity, socio-political stability, and military efficiency, as was the case in other European countries (e.g., Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland) that had supported public education much earlier.15 However, in light of the modest demand for skills and literacy by the capitalists, the level of governmental support was rather small.16
In the second phase of the Industrial Revolution, consistent with the proposed hypothesis, the demand for skilled labor in the growing industrial sector markedly increased (Cipolla 1969 and Kirby 2003) and the proportion of children aged 5 to 14 in primary schools increased from 11% in 1855 to 25% in 1870 (Flora et al. (1983)).17
Sorry if I sound challenging or rude - just hurts my soul to imagine people giving in to the capitalist’s desire for us to interpret our prison as a fact of nature
Pre AI today it seems like we’re in some weird place where IQ scores are dropping in ways that don’t match the Flynn effect and people like Bryan Caplan argue that education is just virtue signalling to gain access to higher status and paying bullshit jobs (David Graeber). Everyone here talks about how real that is in the world of whiteboard interviews and rest and vesters. It seems pretty true elsewhere in the world of white collar nepotism.
What are we really educating kids for these days? To have advantage over other kids because we have no fair meritocratic way to allocate resources or meaning in society?
Won’t AI just make this infinitely worse.
Like, one vision is more teachers and more students learning better, and another is less teachers and more baby sitters and lower government budgets for education leaving students with the equivalent of an automated telephone answering service menu instead of a real human call centre?
From the Marxist paper backing that article:
Sorry if I sound challenging or rude - just hurts my soul to imagine people giving in to the capitalist’s desire for us to interpret our prison as a fact of nature