Response # 5 Corporate Heavy Weights Forcing Education on the Little Man

Corporate Heavy Weights Forcing Education on the Little Man

By: Jonathan Livers

English 102: Michael D. Benton

The education system has developed over the years to accommodate the newer century, just as it always has. But is there to a point where we need to stop moving forward with progress and stop? During the industrial revolution, when companies were becoming empires of business, they took reins of the education system to better suit their needs for employees. Soon after came the cooperate era, which sought after bright intellectuals to take over their companies; later requiring all employment with a prerequisite of education, which would make them even more profit. But this nation can only learn so much before we have to ask our self’s, do I need a college education to run an assembly line? Workers in their positions retain within their own ranks the knowledge of how the work is done, and therefore exercised a considerable degree of control over the labor process. Therefore, control of the labor process by owners and managers was often more formal than real. (Foster)

                How much do we learn in school about a factory job? Basically nothing, a little of addition and multiplication may come into play with a machines diagnostics, but nothing of a large magnitude of intensity. Now we take the comparison of what we’ve been taught in high school and compare it to college learning. I’ve had a similar class, Algebra, 4 years out of the last 6 I’ve been in school. First being taught in high school teachers drilled into my head that I darn forgot this information, for it will hold the key to the future of my learning, and as I progressed through the years, taking it in college now, I’ve been told countless times that the systems of equations I’ve been learning will rarely ever been using unless I’m a specific field of study. Giving us the notion which we need to view the sustainability of education needs to be viewed in multiple perspectives, not by just wanting the most intelligent country. (Wheeler 1) Sustaining the education we have now is nearly killing the students which try to accomplish something many of them can’t, a higher education.  Forcing them to move back home, work factory jobs part time, pay back their student loans, and hope every night that they get hired on full time the next day.

                How does this system of education come from our economy and work force? Mainly because our structure of education is based widely on a capitalistic course set mainly due to Cooperate heavy weights. A huge tree which passes down information based on knowledge and rank, Just as the Department of Education would tell a state who would determine the core content, which would be passed down to board of education, which henceforth be giving to teachers which would carry out the lessons teaching the children which would perform the prompted work. How does the government come to the conclusion of what the students need to learn, they have no idea how that specific community works. I compare my home town, an Alcohol producing community, to Pikeville, KY, a coal mining village, to New York City, New York, a Cooperate slaughterhouse of businessmen. Do we truly need to be all taught the same advanced information?

                I’m all for a change in the paradigm of education, but we need to take time to research the right steps into which we need to take action. Not just making the amount of standardized testing more, or raising educational standards. We need to take into consideration in which this economy needs to get back onto its feet.

Citation Page

Foster, John Bellamy. "Education and the Structural Crisis of Capital ." The U.S. Case . The Monthly Review, July-August 2011. Web. 7 Sep. 2011. <http://monthlyreview.org/2011/07/01/education-and-the-structural-crisis-of-capital>.

Wheeler, Keith A. Education for a sustainable future: a paradigm of hope for the 21st century. 1st. 1. New York City: Kluwer Acedemic/Plenum, 2000. 1. Print. <http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_Po4f9HCioUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=changing+education+paradigm&ots=Kai4cl_47k&sig=0tgj-4aYl_D9DjrQaUz1i-aMkdc#v=onepage&q&f=false>.