[lit-ideas] Re: education

An hypothesis (with a tip of the hat to George Ritzer, *The
Macdonaldization of America,* and Pierre Bourdieu, *Distinction*):  After a
brief democratic distortion in a few decades following WWII, education is
returning to its traditional social function, to equip members of the
ruling elite with the cultural capital and social networks required to play
their class role in society. Moderate amounts of literacy and numeracy will
be required for the masses employed as sales clerks, fast food restaurant
staff, construction workers, etc., but the same polarization now affecting
incomes and other signs of class distinction will affect all levels of
education in the same way. A minority of the upper clerisy to be will
receive excellent educations from k-12 on, thanks to parents with the will
and income to provide them. For the rest, education will decline to a
minimum commensurate with the social demands of physical labor and service
industry employment. The middle-class myth that saw education as an endless
stairway to upward mobility for all offered the opportunity to receive it
will come to be seen as an historical aberration, interpreted along the
lines of More's *Utopia*, a possibly beautiful but impossible dream.

Feeling grim in Yokohama,

John


-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/

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