Education System, or Wages System? (2000)

From the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

• We live in a society dominated by the labour market, by the wages system. We go to school, to college, to university, in order to prepare ourselves for entering that market; to gain skills and knowledge we can sell in order to live.
• Students are workers in waiting.
• The education system is a production line, vending skills for the jobs market; and like any production line, it must produce to follow demand.
• If the labour market needs cheap unskilled workers, the education system provides. Academic achievement is not the main goal of the education system, providing for the jobs market is.
• Low academic achievement is factored in, to supply the masses of jobs that don’t need brain work.
• Only a few workers are needed to really think, thus the university system is set up to produce a small élite, to fill that niche market.
• Their skills are valuable because they are rare: but, as in any other market, if the number of graduates available becomes too large—as it does as university education spreads—they are over-produced, and then their value drops.
• Sending more people to university does not guarantee more people with higher wages and does not guarantee more skilled jobs.
• Today people gain skills, and knowledge, only to be never able to use than when they find their McJob. There’s little chance of enjoying the intellectual fruits of society when you’re slaving for a living.
• Fighting for a just education system under an unjust social system is liking trying to roll a boulder up hill, only to see it roll back down again.
• Even if you win, future generations of students will have to fight all over again as soon as the education system comes into conflict with the wages system.
• Justice can only be found through a just society, through social change: only a society where human needs and desires take over from the market, can an equitable enjoyment of the fruits of society’s learning be gained.
• There is only one way to ensure free access to knowledge for all: the Abolition of the Wages System!