Posted by Pinky.
Please don't mind me - just parking some resources here for a presentation I'll be doing next week. The following illustrations are from Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis's classic Schooling in Capitalist America (1976):
Bowles & Gintis, Table 7-1.
Bowles & Gintis, Figure 8-1.
Bowles & Gintis, Figure 5-4.
The first page of Chapter 1 from the same book:
Those who take meat from the table
Preach of contentment...
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come...
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For the ordinary.
- Bertolt Brecht, 1937
"Go West, young man!" advised Horace Greeley in 1851. A century later, he might have said: "Go to college!"
The Western Frontier was the nineteenth-century land of opportunity. In open competition with nature, venturesome white settlers found their own levels, unfettered by birth or creed. The frontier was a way out - out of poverty, out of dismal factories, out of the crowded Eastern cities. The frontier was the Great Escape.
Few escaped. Railroad companies, mine owners, and before long, an elite of successful farmers and ranchers soon captured both land and opportunity. The rest were left with the adventure of making ends meet. But throughout the nineteenth century, the image of the frontier sustained the vision of economic opportunity and unfettered personal freedom in an emerging industrial system offering little of either.
And now a couple of old quotes from the same book.
The government of schools... should be arbitrary. By this mode of education we prepare our youth for the subordination of laws and thereby qualify them for becoming good citizens of the republic. I am satisfied that the most useful citizens have been formed from those youth who have not known or felt their own wills til they were one and twenty years of age. (Benjamin Rush, 1786)
In order to compensate for lack of family nurture, the school is obliged to lay more stress upon discipline and to make far more prominent the moral phase of education. It is obliged to train the pupil into habits of prompt obedience to his teachers and the practice of self-control in its various forms. (from a statement signed by seventy-seven college presidents and city and state school superintendents and published by the U.S. government in 1874)
Blocking exercise:
1) Time spent in life. (sleeping, eating, transportation, TV/movies, etc.)
2) Time spent at work.
3) Areas of study and consciousness.
4) Participation in Dominant Economies.
And finally, two points of reference that I'll be using in the talk (from Terry Eagleton's Ideology: an introduction):
1) Ideology is a group of ideas characteristic of a particular social class which help to legitimate a dominant political power over other social classes.
2) The process of legitimating these ideas generally follow one or more of the following strategies: promoting agreeable beliefs and values; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge them; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself (a.k.a. 'mystification').