This article in Salon tries to understand education from an economic perspective. It says that the great expansion of public education occurred when our factories were expanding and we needed more workers. Now, with outsourcing and autation, society and our elites are less willing to invest in education, and so we live in an era of austerity and privatization.

Eric Levitz writes of the Obama administration’s reluctance to address glaring inequality:

“We have an economy in which 46.5 million Americans live in poverty, the real unemployment rate is above 12 percent, and our 400 wealthiest citizens enjoy as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the population. But a political system designed for gridlock, the grossly disproportionate influence of the rich, and Americans’ ideological aversion to class politics conspire to make it politically inadvisable for a Democratic president to even speak the words “income inequality” before a national audience. Absent the political will to explore redistributive structural reforms, we’re left with “ladders of opportunity,” and a vision of economic salvation through higher test scores.”

Levitz interviews philosophy of education professor David Blacker. He asks him about how charter schools fit into the current era, and Blacker replies:

“I think the logic there is a kind of marketization logic. It’s an ideal of privatization which I think is ultimately tied to… I think privatization is the twin of austerity. Austerity being withdrawal of public commitment and public expenditure. I see those things as hand in hand, and they are symptomatic, from my point of view, of this decrease in commitment to that project of universal public education. Because the market logic sort of implies that education is this contingent matter for individuals. It’s less of a social good. It’s less of something we ought to worry about collectively, and more a commodity that individuals need to seize or take advantage of on their own. Invest in yourself. Or parents, invest in your children.”