Economist Robert Samuelson describes the relationship between labor and business as three eras.
He says that over the past century, there were three broad labor regimes.
“The first, in the early 1900s, featured “unfettered labor markets,” as economic historian Price Fishback of the University of Arizona puts it. Competition set wages and working conditions. There was no federal unemployment insurance or union protection. Workers were fired if they offended bosses or the economy slumped; they quit if they thought they could do better. Turnover was high: Fewer than a third of manufacturing workers in 1913 had been at their current jobs for more than five years.” (Sound familiar?)
Then:
“After World War II, labor relations became more regulated and administered — the second regime. The Wagner Act of 1935 gave workers the right to organize; decisions of the National War Labor Board also favored unions. By 1945, unions represented about a third of private workers, up from 10 percent in 1929. Health insurance, pensions and job protections proliferated. Factory workers laid off during recessions could expect to be recalled when the economy recovered. Job security improved. By 1973, half of manufacturing workers had been at the same job for more than five years.
“To avoid unionization and retain skilled workers, large nonunion companies emulated these practices. Career jobs were often the norm. If you went to work for IBM at 25, you could expect to retire from IBM at 65. Fringe benefits expanded. Corporate America, unionized or not, created a private welfare state to protect millions from job and income loss.”
After the recession of the early 1980s, after President Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ strike, things changed.
“Now comes the third labor regime: a confusing mix of old and new. The private safety net is shredding, though the public safety net (unemployment insurance, Social Security, anti-poverty programs, anti-discrimination laws) remains. Economist Fishback suggests we may be drifting back toward “unfettered labor markets” with greater personal instability, insecurity — and responsibility. Workers are often referred to as “free agents.” An article in the Harvard Business Review argues that lifetime employment at one company is dead and proposes the following compact: Companies invest in workers’ skills to make them more employable when they inevitably leave; workers reciprocate by devoting those skills to improving corporate profitability.”
Surely ALEC, funded by major corporations, deserves some credit here for rolling back state laws that protect collective bargaining.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The five day work week is gone. Even teachers are being pressured into working Saturdays either to baby sit for students who have discipline problems or have fallen behind in credits or need special tutoring or re-teaching during what Administrators happily call Saturday School. The schools get hundreds of dollars per student and pay the teacher a small fraction of that, maybe $18 per hour per class which may be 35 or more if the Administration can get enough students to attend. School Administrations make a nice profit, but who are they spending this surplus on during these times of cutting teacher pay? This must have been something created by one of those Capitalists like Bill Gates. I think Micro-soft might use something like this to rate their workers. Lets see, cut teachers pay, then force them to have to work Saturdays to pay for their home mortgage if they have a home or to pay their ever increasing electric or gas bills which seem to increase without any public input. Is this a tax increase? Oh No, it is Capitalism and a group of wealthy people are getting their well deserved profit from their investment. No one gets a profit from any Educational System, unless you live in a foreign country like Germany. So we should not invest in them? Next idea will be Sunday School and We are not talking about Church related Sunday School even though someone may figure out a way to pay the Churches to do it for less and of course it will be more successful if the state pays them enough money and we can do this with vouchers and give the money directly to the family to use at the Church or school of their choice. I wonder why Arne Duncan hasn’t imposed this idea on schools, yet? Oh, he is currently telling the President to fire missiles at Syria and reward with RTTT grands to the different ships depending on how well they perform and close or mothball the worst performing ships and fire all the crew or replace 25% of the crew with SFA (Solders For America) who could be recruiting from the unemployed. He told the President to give Waivers to the ships willing to go ahead without Congressional Approval. No problem, HE is either The Dictator or some GOD, who knows all the correct answers and HE said let the Capitalist System work as it should.
I know a lot of teachers who work two jobs-especially charter teachers.
Education as a corporation has lead to many devastating changes in Teachers compensation. The “new reformers” manage to leapfrog from one position to another, starting one idea somewhere then jumping somewhere else to (destroy) start something else. A major difference is that they are well compensated whereas Teachers have to wait years to make a decent living!
“The second marshmallow”
A growing body of literature has linked the ability to delay gratification to a host of other positive outcomes, including academic success, physical health, psychological health, and social competence. Delayed gratification simply put is being able to wait for the “second marshmallow”.
As a young financially struggling Teacher, it was difficult but I was willing to delay gratification (compensation). I knew that someday in the future I would be able to make a decent wage, buy a house and send my children to college. It was a struggle as my children entered schools nearly qualifying for “reduced lunch” and my old car kept breaking down but I waited for the “bigger steps” in our guide. I always felt that the “second marshmallow” was there if I could make it through the hard times.
Today, with the “reform” movement, the “second marshmallow” has been stolen! As we have seen throughout the Nation, Teacher’s guides have been decimated, with additional steps, reduced compensation for degrees and lower starting salaries. Teachers can no longer plan for the future. Excellent Teachers cannot even expect to be retained since their job now depends on a faulty VAM score or a SPG score that was not even designed to evaluate a Teachers influence on student growth. Today’s Teachers are expected to accept delay gratification without the promise of a “second marshmallow” in their future! This is wrong and if continued will lead to the destruction of Public Education.
We must take a stand and take it now!
A couple points here
1. “Fewer than a third of manufacturing workers in 1913 had been at their current jobs for more than five years.” (Sound familiar?)” Given that most of the population at that time was rural and rapidly urbanizing it would be surprising if much more than a third of manufacturing workers had been on the job for more than 5 years. The expansion in the numbers of teachers in the 1980’s had the same impact on median years of experience, temporarely droping it down to 8 years.
2. It might be best to look at the post war years as being unique in that much of the capital of other countries was blown up and several large countries were isolated from the world economy (much to the detriment of their citizens).
3. You might want to think of some of the social programs cited in the posts as subsidies to businesses. Unemployment insurance, for example, makes seasonal work more attractive and allows those firms to pay less to attract workers.
1. The 1890 census showed manufacturing exceeded farming for the first time – 23 years before 1913. And in 1913 1/3 of global industrial production came from U.S.
2.Unionization and labor issues were not a post WWII phenomenon and unique to that time period. Philadelphia shoemakers organized in 1792.
3. Unemployment in our state requires 12 months of work and part time, seasonal workers do not qualify. You might want to think of public education as a very generous subsidy to business with more of the burden shifted to parents and middle class.
On your first point, I think you are looking at the value of manufacturing, not the distribution of the population. Here are the census figures for population:
1900 30,215 urban, 45,997 rural
1910 42, 064 urban, 50,164 rural
1920 54,253 urban, 51,768 rural
All in thousands of people. From the Historical Abstract of the United States, link: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/hist_stats.html
The rural population increased by about 12% over that time period, the urban population increased by a little under 80%.
On your second point I certainly agree that unions predate world war two. One could argue that the guilds of the middle ages were a type of union. What was unique in the post war years was the economic circumstances a worker in the United States found themselves in relative to the rest of the world. Much of the rest of the world’s productive capacity destroyed, many tens of millions killed, the world’s most populous country closed off from the world economy.
On your third point, I do see education as a subsidy to private businesses. This semester a higher proportion of my intro students are in the school of engineering than is typical. Clearly firms that employ engineers benefit greatly from the education subsidy that the citizens of my state provide for the students education. The issue is complicated by the fact that those businesses also provide benefits to those same citizens by providing services that the citizens value and the concern that businesses have about extensively training employees only to see them take jobs with rival private firms. Two different issues I know, but I am trying to keep this comment as short as I can.
The Harvard Business Review is no place to look for insight into the possibilities facing workers this labor day. They just trumpet what they think is their victory over us. We’ll just have to bargain collectively without the protection of laws then, won’t we?
The SEIU is leading the new era, and a new chapter of the history of American workers’ power is being written in real time, on the streets and on the web, by the lowest paid sector of our class.
http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/09/02/can-the-fast-food-strikes-revive-american-labor-unions/
Samuelson is a pro-business/pro-“free-market” economist. His analysis (in this excerpt and in the full Washington Post opinion piece) reflects his biases.
Today, American workers (with the possible exception of some upper-middle-class professionals) have much less economic power (and hence have a smaller percentage of national income/assets) than they did 60 or even 30 years ago.
As Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich explains in his book “Aftermath”, this decline in the relative income/wealth of American workers is the result of important but generally ignored changes in national policies that started in the late 1940s and accelerated starting in the 1980s. National policies regarding labor, taxes, corporate governance, and finance all evolved from policies that favored equal distribution of economic power/income/wealth to polices that favored the extremely wealthy at the expense of the working and middle classes, with the poor originally benefiting from the early changes and now suffering from the more recent changes.
In the late 1940s, the Taft-Hartley Act outlawed some of unions’ most potent weapons (most secondary boycotts and organizational picketing); in 1959, the Landrum-Griffin Act outlawed other weapons (certain remaining secondary boycott tactics). Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s and 1970s effectively allowed employers in many circumstances to close union facilities and reopen the facilities as non-union; other court decisions effectively allowed employers to replace (in effect discharge) economic strikers. President Reagan’s decision to discharge the striking air-traffic controllers in the early 1980s made it socially acceptable for employers to exercise their theoretical right to replace/discharge economic strikers. Court and National Labor Relations Board decisions starting in the 1970s erected procedural obstacles to the processing of election objections and unfair labor practice charges that, taken together, made the remedies for unlawful employer practices effectively meaningless — the delay from when the misconduct occurred until when the misconduct was remedied often stretched into years, in effect gutting union organizing campaigns and strikes. And, the remedies for the employer misconduct were so limited as to make committing the misconduct a sound business decision for any employer facing a union campaign or strike.
Over this same time period (particularly since the early 1980s), the effective tax rate (income + payroll) on lower and middle-class earners has remained roughly flat while the effective tax rate on the rich has fallen dramatically (lower top rates, lower rates for capital gains and dividends, and effective elimination of the inheritance tax). This means that, after all the federal taxes are paid, the rich have more $ relative to the lower/middle class than they used to have. The changes in corporate governance and financial regulation practices are more complicated, but the bottom line of these changes also is that the rich get richer and the lower/middle class have less.
All these changes, taken together, have the effect of redistributing national income from the middle class to the rich. This is bad for everyone because, as Reich explains, the middle class spend virtually all their income while the rich spend only a small fraction of their income. In the long run, when total expenditures in the economy lag behind total income, there is not enough demand for the goods/services being produced by the economy. This results in employers/producers reducing production and laying off workers. The reduced production means the economy is performing below optimum capacity and the laying off of workers means there will be significant unemployment. When — as now — employers anticipate flat demand in the future, rational employers do not increase inventories, expand production facilities, or start new businesses. This, in turn, triggers continued unemployment and continued lack of consumer demand; a vicious cycle. Of course, the high unemployment/underemployment puts constant downward pressure on wages, further exacerbating the lack of consumer demand.
According to Reich, the simple — if difficult to implement — solution is to reverse all these changes in national policies so that more of the national income once again flows to the spending middle class and less to the non-spending rich — t hat is, a return to the prosperity the nation enjoyed in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.
Reasonable enough.
“Corporations are people, my friend.” –Mitt Romney (with “Justices” Roberts, Kennedy, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas concurring).
40% of state legislators are “owned” by ALEC. That’s a lot of legislators working for big business instead of the people they are supposed to represent. We have the chairman of the Education Committee in the New York State Senate, John Flanagan, working for ALEC. No wonder NY is full steam ahead with implementing the Common Core, closing down traditional schools and opening up more charters.
Dawn…this is a very cogent point. So many in current education leadership, and throughout the Broad Academy grads, are linked to ALEC.
PLEASE, EVERYONE WHO VALUES TEACHERS RIGHTS AND AN END TO THIS MADNESS, SIGN THIS PETITION BY ASSEMBLYMAN AL GRAF TO GOVENOR CUOMO TO REPEAL RTTT AND TEACHER EVALUATIONS (AND SPREAD THE WORD)!
The so called “free-market” system in education is perverse. Maximize revenues by charging taxpayers the largest amount of money possible regardless of outcome. Minimize costs by reducing investment in teachers and students to operate classrooms on a shoestring. All to satisfy the Profit = Revenue – Cost equation and increase shareholder wealth. The misnomer “choice” really betrays the truth that in a corporate run, inevitable monopolistic education model, parents and students end up with LESS choice. Free markets only work when the participants have reasonably equal power and information is transparent. What we should be using as a criteria is “freedom”. The public school model offers freedom – freedom to elect school boards, freedom for parents to set agendas at a local level, freedom for teachers to educate unhindered by political threats and the profit motive.
In the growing corporate model of education, both choice and freedom no longer exist.
This Samuelson article is an accurate depiction of our economic history, and I would be able to teach a term using his information. I suggest not only reading his links, but also those at the bottom of the page, in particular Pearlstein on How to Save Capitalism. Samuelson covers much of it and our colleague on this page, Labor Lawyer, expands our education.
Pearstein speaks about the nation being “in thrall” (sic) during the Reagan era. He does not however mention that this was the when the greatest number or personal bankruptcies took place, family farmers went broke and had to give up to Big Agra, Air Traffic Controllers took heavy hits as Reagan acted to kill their union, Stockman’s trickle down theory (which he reconsidered and abandoned) caused the start of the major redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class upward to the wealthy who are now the uber-wealthy. Bush exacerbated this redistribution with excessive tax laws that gave these super rich an opportunity to pay only 15% on their investment income which is the greatest part of their wealth. But the rest of us got tax increases to pay the real freight of keeping our country going.
Pearlstein, the darling of the WSJ, also does not consider 1981 – 83 was the era of the Savings and Loan debacle which partnered as the cause of the economic crash of the 1980s. MIT economist Lester Thurow wrote about how the Wall Street crowd profited going both ways with this disaster…and this was far earlier than Naomi Klein’ recapping it in Shock Doctrine. Again, it was an era of few regulations and much the same sort of machinations by lenders as in the 2007 – 2013 era. Yes, without Glass-Steagall, I see it as still ongoing.
And the bankster and Wall Street thugs from that era are still the economic thugs of today…see almost all the heads of the major Wall street firms and banks…and include Summers and Rubin. But sadly we must now add to this list Obama, Clinton, Geithner, Furhman, Orszag, and those who still in diapers over three decades ago.
Thank you Labor Lawyer for your historical input. As you will remember, Clinton dumped Reich for being too liberal and not playing ball with the deregulators. I agree that Aftermath by Reich, and the two recent Stiglitz books, Freefall, and The Price of Inquality, are the lessons of these times for all of us to learn, and to teach these lessons to our students.
Calling Robert Samuelson an “economist” is a bit much. He studied “Government” in college and has been a journalist his whole life. He has the same last name as Econ Nobelist Paul Samuelson, but he is unrelated (unlike Larry Summers, whose father was Paul’s brother but changed his name from Samuelson to Summers…). In any case, Robert Samuelson is a professional pundit, not a preofessional economist, and many economists consider him to be pretty incompetent in economics (Dean Baker criticizes RS all the time, for instance).
In the column cited by Diane Ravitch, Robert Samuelson chose to omit the role that conservative political polices had in eviscerating jobs, and the middle class.
Ronald Reagan showered supply-side tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy, engaged in laissez-faire regulation of the “markets,” and waged war on unions, infamously firing the air traffic controllers. His plutocratic allies supported, and followed, his lead.
The fact is that “Personal disposable income has grown nearly 6 times more under Democratic presidents” than under Republicans, and “Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has grown 7 times more under Democratic presidents” than under Republicans. And, as Bill Clinton noted about jobs, “Since 1961 … our private economy has produced 66 million private-sector jobs. So what’s the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 (million).”
See: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/06/bill-clinton/bill-clinton-says-democratic-presidents-top-republ/
Yet Samuelson says not a word about any of this.
Corporate profits right now are huge. They have tons of cash. Yet, they clamor for more tax cuts and give-aways. Samuelson says not one word about this.
The current economy is not intractable. It is a creation of conservative supply-side economic policy. And, it can be rectified. But it takes a willingness to do so.
However, we have a conservative House of Representatives (and minority “leader” Mitch McConnell in the Senate) dead set against doing anything that will help Obama, promote the general welfare of the country, and demonstrate to the citizenry that government actually works.
But naturally, Robert Samuelson didn’t say anything about any of that either.
May I ask, Mr.or Ms. “democracy” what happened to the economy after the Reagan tax cuts? Did it expand providing millions of middle class jobs or did it contract with more people on food stamps and unemployment.
May I also ask, Mr. or Ms. “democracy” what has happened to the economy since President Obama took office pumping a great deal of “stimulus” money into the economy, raising taxes, and increasing the debt to almost 16 trillion and in general involving the government in more and more areas of the economy?
Your scorecard is skewed. It is putrid, paltry, partisan, prevaricating propaganda.
And finally, Mr. or Ms. “democracy” (or should we say “Democrat”?), may I ask whether YOU personally support the proposal of Elizabeth Warren to reenact Glass-Steagall? There is a petition. My name is on it. Is yours (whatever your name is)?
Part 1
Robert Samuelson’s column is a prime example of poor-quality economics reporting. I wrote previously on this blog about about the sorry state of education reporting in the U.S.
See: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/08/31/david-coleman-the-most-influential-man-in-u-s-education/comment-page-1/#comments
Now comes another egregiously-bad example, linking education “reform” and economic competitiveness. Lee Lawrence at the Christian Science Monitor has the lead piece, titled “Education Solutions from Abroad,” in “cover story project” that purports to outline “global lessons for American schools.”
Lawrence’s first paragraph notes that students are heading back to school “amid an intensifying debate as shrill with urgency as the bell urging them to their desks: how to ensure that they will be able to compete in a global market when they graduate.”
Here’s the beginning of her second paragraph:
“Study after study in recent years suggests that American children fall well behind kids from Seoul to Helsinki, putting them at a great disadvantage in an increasingly knowledge-driven and global economy. The United States ranked 30th in mathematics literacy, 20th in science, and 14th in reading in the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test administered every three years by theOrganization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)”
See: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2013/0901/Education-solutions-from-abroad-for-chronic-U.S.-school-problems
Reading is considered to be a key to learning and school achievement. Let’s see what the data really show. Below are 2009 PISA reading scores (disaggregated for the U.S., which has an incredibly large, diverse, and increasingly poor student population:
Average score, reading literacy, PISA, 2009:
[United States, Asian students 541]
Korea 539
Finland 536
[United States, white students 525]
Canada 524
New Zealand 521
Japan 520
Australia 515
Netherlands 508
Belgium 506
Norway 503
Estonia 501
Switzerland 501
Poland 500
Iceland 500
United States (overall) 500
Sweden 497
Germany 497
Ireland 496
France 496
Denmark 495
United Kingdom 494
Hungary 494
OECD average 493
Portugal 489
Italy 486
Slovenia 483
Greece 483
Spain 481
Czech Republic 478
Slovak Republic 477
Israel 474
Luxembourg 472
Austria 470
[United States, Hispanic students 466]
Turkey 464
Chile 449
[United States, black students 441]
Mexico 425
[Note: data can be gleaned at http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2009highlights.asp ]
Part 2
There’s no nuance, or explanation, in Lawrence’s piece. None whatsoever.
She says nothing about the pernicious effects of poverty, which affect (primarily) minority students ins the U.S. She states simply that “These shortcomings take their toll on the economy. And then she cites economist Eric Hanushek, of all people, to “explain” the ties between education and the economy (as if he knows).
Eric Hanushek is a conservative economist. He touts all of the conservative, corporate-style “reform” ideas for public education: school vouchers, more standardized testing, valued-added teacher evaluations, and “accountability.” There is little if any research to support these initiatives (and much to reject them), but that never gets in the way of Hanushek (or his brethren).
Hanushek has been caught fudging (and this is the polite term for it) his “research” on class size and achievement. He dismissed the results of Project STAR –– the rigorous, well-designed Tennessee state study that found significant achievement gains as a result of small class size in early elementary grades –– because “the kids were not tested before the program began,” that is, BEFORE they even entered kindergarten.
Hanushek has said that we have to stick with the “reforms” of No Child left Behind, because even if those “reforms” have yet to yield much, if any, of a return on the huge increases in time and money spent on the “accountability” of high-stakes testing, “over 75 years even a reform that takes effect in 20 year… yields a real GDP that is 36 percent higher ” than without “reform.” Hanushek even makes the claim that gains as small as 0.08 standard deviations result in (as Jay Mathews of The Post described it) “trillions of dollars more in the gross domestic production.”
If that’s the case (and it isn’t), then why have achievement gains over the last three decades, at the same time that the student population has become much more diverse, not led to robust economic growth, healthy budgets and well-funded social programs, and prosperity for all citizens in this country?
[Note: Hanushek makes the extraordinary statement that “Bringing all countries up to the average performance of Finland, OECD’s best performing education system in PISA, would result in gains in the order of USD 260 trillion.” Of course, what Finland does educationally to attain its achievement scores is antithetical to Hanushek’s conservative ideological dogma, and is directly contrary to the kinds of “reforms” he supports.]
Part 3
Hanushek, and people who cite him, say that American economic competitiveness is dependent on school “reform.” Hanushek cites economist Robert Lucas to bolster his contention. Lucas is the prototypical free market conservative who subscribes to and believes in “supply-side policies.” Lucas thinks that the economy has slowed due to “ fiscal policy that threatens higher taxes on the rich, and promises higher spending on programs like healthcare,” even though the U.S. has the biggest – by far – income stratification gap in the developed world, now spends far MORE on health care than any other developed nation, and the Congressional Budget Office says the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 will help to reduce health care spending and decrease the deficit. Lucas said economists who supported President Obama’s stimulus package “were either incompetent (“schlock economics” was the phrase) or corrupt.”
Not surprisingly, both Robert Lucas and Eric Hanushek signed onto 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s plans to make the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 permanent and to reduce corporate income taxes
Eric Hanushek has written that “if we could replace the bottom 5%-10% of teachers with an average teacher—not a superstar—we could dramatically improve student achievement. The U.S. could move from below average in international comparisons to near the top.” And, American economic competitiveness would be restored (with those trillions and trillions of dollars added to the economy). But Hanushek’ assertions don’t seem to add up. Maybe because they’re just made up; they’re not true.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) ranks nations each year on their economic competitiveness. When the U.S. drops, the WEF cites things like “a number of escalating weaknesses,” including poor business “auditing and reporting standards,” declining “corporate ethics,” “repeated fiscal deficits,” and unsustainable public debt. The WEF notes that “mapping out a clear exit strategy will be an important step in reinforcing the country’s competitiveness going into the future.”
This year (2012-13) the WEF dropped the U.S. to 7th place, citing problems like “increasing inequality and youth unemployment” and, environmentally, “the United States is among the countries that have ratified the fewest environmental treaties.“ The WEF noted that in the U.S.,”the business community continues to be critical toward public and private institutions” and “trust in politicians is not strong.” Political dysfunction has led to “a lack of macroeconomic stability” that “continues to be the country’s greatest area of weakness.”
People like Hanushek place the blame and burden on public schools, though they had absolutely nothing to do with the Great Recession, deficits and debt, and job losses. The new mantra is “Common Core.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says that ““Common core academic standards among the states are essential” toU.S. competitiveness. The Business Roundtable resurrects the “rising tide of mediocrity” myth of A Nation at Risk, saying (falsely) that “Since the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983, it has been increasingly clear that…academic expectations for American students have not been high enough.” Sadly Arne Duncan parrots what they say. So too do most mainstream education “reporters,” if they can be called that.
In plain speak, alleviating poverty and its pernicious effects, and providing children with high quality environments before they get to school, and following up with health and academic and social policy programs while they are in school, result not only in high-quality education but also in a high-quality citizenry….and in promoting the general welfare of the nation. This is surely not what the “reformers” want. It might – it will – require a cessation to their gaming of the “markets” and the tax system.
The public education system in a democratic republic is supposed to develop and nurture democratic character and citizenship. That’s the kind of reform we need.
But it’s exactly the kind of reform the “reformers” don’t want.
I must wonder Mr. or Ms. “democracy” about your fundamental premise that the purpose of the “public education system in a democratic republic is supposed to develop and nurture democratic character and citizenship.” No it’s not. It is to enable people to gains skills to perform jobs so that they can be independent and productive people and not a burden on the government/society. The purpose of public education is NOT to indoctrinate politically, as you seem to assume.
Obviously, Harlan, your knowledge and understanding of public education, and its historical origins, are severely limited.
Aristotle perceived the importance of public schooling to democratic citizenship, noting that “each government has a peculiar character…the character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarch creates oligarchy, and always the better the character, the better the government.” Democracy is government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” while oligarchy is government by a relatively small (and usually wealthy) group that “exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.”
Early state constitutions in the U.S., like those of Massachusetts (1780) and New Hampshire (1784), set up and stressed the importance of a system of public education. The Land Ordinance of 1785 provided for public school financing in new territories. In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson sought a publicly-funded system of schools, believing that an educated citizenry was critical to the well-being of a democratic society. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1794), Jefferson wrote “The influence over government must be shared among all men.” Many early advocates for public schools –– Jefferson, George Washington, Horace Mann, for example –– agreed that democratic citizenship was a – perhaps THE – primary function of education.
Aristotle believed that that a democratic society was contingent on a citizenry that understood and was committed to democratic values. Pericles had defined them four decades earlier: openness, popular sovereignty and majority rule, equality, justice, tolerance, and promoting the general welfare. They are written into our Constitution. In any democratic society, the people are the government (or at least, they’re supposed to be). Aristotle and many of the Founders knew that if all citizens are part of self-rule, then they are “a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.” That is the essence of the social contract.
And that is precisely why public education is so important. It’s also what the oligarchs and ideologues – the corporate-style “reformers” – are determined to unravel. And privatize. For their own personal gain, and for even more power.
The well-orchestrated and -financed effort to force the “market” into public education is not just about schooling.
It’s also about the very nature and health of democratic governance, and a society dedicated to the democratic ideals of its founding.
Now this is an extremely helpful and patient “teaching” of me about the relationship of ‘public education’ and the justice of the state. I don’t mind having my ignorance exposed when it is done so clearly and calmly. I see that there are areas in the history of education of which I am sufficiently ignorant that I must study to see whether I think your explication of the relationship of the Athenian (and Greek) city state to ‘education’ (women excluded, of course), and of the early state establishers of the common schools, and of our practices today are sufficiently parallel to illuminate each other. It may very well be that the current modern public school systems teach anti-democratic values, and is actually the creature of the kind of oligarchy of which it is supposed to be a counterweight. But I see that I shall have to do a good deal more reading than I have done before I can speak in a properly informed manner to the points you raise. Do you perhaps, have one or two titles on the history and values of education which you might recommend?