Think College and Careers and the workforce steering that comes with Common Core and PARCC. Then read this. The Neo-Marxian scholar Antonio Gramsci (1992, 4.55) wrote in his Prison Notebooks. In the modern school, I believe, a process of continuing degeneration is taking place: the vocational school, which addresses immediate practical interests, is gaining the upper hand over the “formative” school, which does not have an immediate interest. The greatest paradox is that this type of schools appears and is proclaimed to the “democratic,” while in fact it is really designed to perpetuate social differences. How does one explain this paradox? I believe that it stems from an error in historical perspective that confuses quality with quantity. The traditional school was “oligarchic” because it was attended only by children of the upper class who were destined to become rulers, but is was not its mode of teaching that made it “oligarchic.” It is not its students’ acquisition of leadership skills nor its propensity to form superior individuals that gives a particular type of school its social character. The social character of the school is determined by the fact that every social stratum has its own type of school designed to perpetuate a specific traditional function within that stratum. In order to break this pattern, then, one must not multiply and promote vocational types of school but rather create a unified type of preparatory (elementary-secondary) school that would guide the youngster to the threshold of choosing a career and, in the process, form him as a person capable of thinking, studying, and ruling – or controlling those who rule.
Posted on: Sat, 14 Jun 2014 21:25:51 +0000
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