We live in a world dominated by capitalism, and education is no exception. Recently there has been talk centering around the infiltration of capitalism into the classroom, with vouchers, corporate sponsorship, and capitalist hegemony saturating the curriculum, but few have addressed the structure of the classroom that is capitalist in nature.
The capitalist classroom functions as a preparatory marketplace that operates within the dual marketplace structure. This system of education acts to produce a raw material for capitalism proper through a series of hegemonic placement within the student. It does this through a system of exploitation not unlike Marx’s analysis of the capitalist system.
A close examination reveals the similarities to Marx’s critique and an opportunity for change. Within the classroom students come to acquire a commodity. This commodity is a certificate of completion. Once in the classroom, the student labors over a given period of time that they exchange for this certificate. A closer examination reveals an interesting fact of the capitalist classroom: that knowledge operates as labor. Here then we see the opportunity for exploitation. The educational capitalist creates the situation where the student labors on a given assessment, and all the knowledge that is not rewarded is that knowledge that is hegemonic in nature.
The fact that the capitalist classroom converts knowledge into labor is an important feature of capitalism in general; however, in the classroom this is not enough. Within education capitalism creates a system of machinery, standardized tests, that attempt to back the value of the money unit, grades, in the classroom as well as spread the problems and contradictions throughout the system through the fictitious capital grades and transcripts come to represent. This system of capitalist education creates a raw material out of the child through a multilevel system of exploitation that binds the student to the capitalism proper through dependence and cooperation. Over time the degree to which the student supports the system reveals the value inherent in them as a raw material to be shaped by capitalism proper. Those that fail are dropped out of the system of capitalism, only valuable through their failure and status as an underclass group of workers with no power to change the system. In the end, knowledge is converted to labor and the student is transformed into a raw material. Our only hope to transform this is to attack the system at its source of hegemony: the classroom.
TW (WSPUS)
1 comment:
Yeah, I didn't understand it either.
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