Political Economy of Schooling

As we discussed in class yesterday, education has gone through four main transitions throughout the years, some good, but many that are hard to understand because of the complete lack of reasoning.

The enlightenment model was the dominant model until the 1950’s. Its purpose was solely on learning for the sake of learning. People believed of education as an expense.

Next, was the human capital model, which was dominant after the 1950’s. The main purpose of this was for economic development. People had changed their minds about education only being an expense that was necessary, but to an investment that after enough years, they would get their money back in other ways. For example, if someone decides to go through University and get a degree and possibly their masters, they are destined to be in school for many years. The functionalists say that with a human capital model that by going to school, although they are making major investments currently, one day they will soon make that money back with their good paying jobs. The question is, does this really add up? In addition, with the knowledge that you are acquiring, will there be jobs suitable? They had beliefs that educations would fix individual social problems such as racism, sexism and class because education would give these individuals skills in order to be successful. They actually found that racism was the problem; that even with the proper skills, these people would not be able to get the jobs anyways, so why try? Because of the recession in the 1980’s and the fact that everyone had become educated, there were no jobs. Instead of solving problems, it intensified them and people were unable to get jobs anyways. The government, in this time, spent a lot of money because they believed that all of it would go back to the government through taxes, so there was a massive expansion. It is unbelievable to think that the government spent so much on each schools, teachers, and classrooms and allowed every teacher to get a sum of money to buy what they needed for the classroom. Something like this would never happen again. It is sad to see how much money teachers have to spend of their own to have the things that they require in their classroom. Are there any possible solutions to this?

The manpower model was a refined version of the human capital model. It was a more directed economic development. The government, unlike before, only wanted to put money into certain types of education that was an investment into economy. This is also very sad, as something has to be making money for the economy in order for it to be seen as important enough to support financially.

Lastly is the idea of a Consumerism Model, which is also current, as is the manpower model. It is the idea that state funding will be given to things that will have some kind of economic return, but anything else is privatized, which means you have to pay for it yourself.

It is evident that everything that education is based on throughout each of these models has to do with money and the development of the economy.

On a side note, we also talked about the 5-year program that teachers now need to take. This was mostly because there were too many people who wanted to be teachers and there were not enough jobs for everyone, so in order to cut back, they increased the amount of years to five. I find this extreme, as we are reacting towards the way that economy was then, and not the way it might be later on. I hope that from these few extra years we are able to be better teachers. However, have there actually been any changes because of the years of the program?