Someplace like America responce

Michael Keene’s response

Dale Maharidge’s Someplace Like America

Do we as Americans have the knowledge, understanding and dedication to overcome the economic turmoil that we are facing?  America has been built on the principle “United we stand, divided we fall.” This is the way the American people, through generations of adversities, have built this great country that we survive in.  As Dale Maharidge states in his book Someplace Like America, “Some say that Americans are no longer able to stand up to the tough times the way the greatest generation of the 1930’s Depression and World War Two did”.

Let’s look at the reasons for America’s unstable economic state.  Major corporations are leaving U.S. soil to pursue avenues of cheap labor, lower taxes, and ultimately a lower production cost, causing higher profits.  On paper this briefs well to the executives who have financial interests in their company.  The promised profits then trickle down to the stockholders, who give their vote for the company to relocate to a non-first world country.

This causes unemployment to skyrocket.  Communities depend on citizens to be employed.  Without jobs people are forced to abandon their former lives and create a new existence.  “The eyes of a woman who has fallen from upper class privilege and is now standing in a charity food line are still proud and hurting a year after she lost her big home.  A frugal white collar mom raising children on her own works two jobs year round, in some seasons, three: her eye’s fill with tears as she talks about how she is barely surviving…  There is something else visible in these eyes: toughness… You cannot defeat people with eyes like these.” (Maharidge, 3) Even the depressed have faith that America will again rise to better times.  We live in a country of opportunity, regardless of the economic state.

There are tears for the laborers and cheers for the others—two opposite reactions due to major corporations relocating to third world opportunities.  The times are depressing by day and optimistic by night.  Will this perspective be enough for the American people to find a stable middle ground?  I hope so, but if not I believe America can still survive.  Maybe not as we know it to be now, but there is still time to change.

Bibliography

Maharidge, Dale   Some Place Like America. Berkeley and Los Angeles California: University of California

            Press, 2011                                  

Responce to education and the structure crisis of capital

Michael Keene Response

“Education and the structure Crisis of capital”

The present structure of the United States public school system is based upon the principles conceived by Fredric Winslow Taylor.  In his publication the “Principles of Scientific Management,” he outlines the principles of how a corporation can effectively control the production with structure, rules, and regulations.  The United States Government took these ideas and implemented these standards for the structure of the Public School system.  The ideas morphed public schooling into what could be classified as information production lines.  Students are seen as raw products that can be molded to perform specific tasks.  At predetermined ages, or stages in production, detailed data is injected into the public classroom, to produce a standardized model student.

In 1913 Franklin Bobbit, a specialist in education administration at the University of Chicago wrote in the Supervision of City Schools:  “The worker, [student] must be kept supplied with detailed instruction as to the work to be done, the standards to be reached, the methods to be employed and the appliances to be used…, Teachers cannot be permitted to follow the caprice method.  When a method which is clearly superior to all other methods has been discovered, it alone can be employed.  To neglect this function and to exercise one’s negligence by claiming the value of the freedom of the teacher was perhaps justifiable under out earlier empiricism, when the supervisors merely promoted teachers and on the scientific side at least little more about standards and methods than the rank and file.” (1)

Various programs are introduced into public primary and secondary schooling districts based upon socio-economic status.  Depending on your status in society the government has a predetermined curriculum.  “Schooling therefore, is meant to service production and replicates the hierarchical division of labor of the production system.”(2)

            “In this view, the forms of consciousness and behavior fostered by capitalist schooling are designed to reproduce existing classes and groupings, and thus are meant to reinforce and legitimize the social relations of production of capitalist society as a whole. Working-class students and those destined for working-class occupations are taught rule-following behavior, while those arising from the upper middle class and/or destined for the professional-managerial stratum are taught to internalize the values of the society. (Those between these two groups are mainly trained to be reliable, in addition to following rules.)”(3)

            In reaction to said topics the public school system is in theory a factory.  Based on financial status in society, the student is molded and modified to meet production standards.  Does this product (student) possess the qualities of a laborer, or is this student on the managerial path?  Our school system is fitted with standardized tests and regulations as a check in quality control.  This guarantees that the factory (public schooling institutes) operate at peak performance, thus creating a model publicly educated student.  America is the land of the free, and the home of the mass produced student.

            Biblography

1                Franklin Bobbitt, The Supervision of City Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1913), 54-55, 89, 93-95; Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, 87-93.

2              Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 13, 48, 130-32; Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “Prologue: The Correspondence Principle,” in Mike Cole, ed., Bowles and Gintis Revisted (New York: The Falmer Press, 1988), 1-4.

3             Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 131-40. This tripartite division of labor markets was backed up by considerable empirical work, which evolved into segmented labor market analysis, developed by radical economists in the 1970s and ‘80s