Today we explore the way in which education and economic well-being were linked in the USA. My guest, Jon Shelton, calls the link a myth and shows how it prevented alternative visions of education from expanding and furthering social democracy.
Jon Shelton is a Professor and chair of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay. His new book is The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy (Cornell University Press, 2023).
Citation: Shelton, Jon, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 324, podcast audio, July 24, 2023. https://freshedpodcast.com/shelton/
Will Brehm 0:14
Jon Shelton, welcome to FreshEd.
Jon Shelton 0:56
Thanks so much for having me, Will. It’s really a pleasure to be here and I hope your listeners are going to enjoy this episode.
Will Brehm 1:01
Congratulations on your new book. It’s absolutely fantastic. Something close to my heart. I want to start the conversation today by thinking historically about the idea of public education; when did it actually emerge in the United States?
Jon Shelton 1:15
Public education emerged, kind of in fits and starts actually, regionally. So, you have these sort of protopublic institutions in the 1700s in New England. Many of them are connected to religious instruction. I mean, the Puritans had this idea that reading was really important so that future generations could read the Bible, right? And so there was public expenditure on those institutions. But it’s not really until the 19th century that you start to have the emergence of the idea that everybody in say State is entitled to an education, like the right to an education more or less. Like I said, there were schools that existed with some level of public support before the 1830s but there’s a whole reform movement in the 1830s, 40s and 50s. Probably a lot of your listeners know about Horace Mann and his push for public schools in Massachusetts but there are other reformers around the same time who are also pushing for local governments to fund public schools. And what’s fascinating about it is much of this push is not at all connected to the idea of the way we think about this now, that schools are so essential for giving future worker skills. It’s not really what people like Horace Mann we’re thinking about. Mann wrote these annual reports that have become really important for historians of education, and to kind of study these early years of public ed. And what he writes in these reports, he doesn’t even really mention the economic benefits of education until almost kind of in an embarrassed fashion after it’s been several years, like 8, 9, 10 years, something like that of these reports. And what he really argues for is the connection to citizenship, that Americans have this new democracy. He wrote about this in ways that maybe some of us wouldn’t even agree with, right? He kind of says, we need to teach future generations to act responsibly in a democracy. So, there’s definitely an element of social control there but what I think is really important about it is this idea that education is important to instruct future citizens in democracy, not at all really about job skills. And so that’s kind of the moment when things emerge. It happens again in fits and starts across the country. Places like the Upper Midwest, where I live in the state of Wisconsin have these emigres from New England who are kind of driven by these impulses. So, our state ends up with a pretty robust system of public education by the time it becomes a state in 1848. Other areas like the South, the South doesn’t really get full public schools until after the Civil War. And it’s African Americans during Reconstruction actually pushing for public support for schools. The South didn’t really have that before the Civil War. So, again, a lot of it is geographical but for the most part, I would say that on the eve of the Civil War, most states out that side of the South did have at least some system of public education.
Will Brehm 3:55
And what were some of these enrollment patterns looking like? When did the enrollment rates really begin to increase? Because with these fits and starts in these sorts of regional patterns, I would imagine enrollment was patchy and there might have been a slow take up in the beginning.
Jon Shelton 4:10
Yeah. And there was some resistance even, from working class communities in particular, to compulsory education. The story of how working people deal with schools in 19th century is really fascinating. So, in some states, like New York and Pennsylvania, its actually working associations, right – we think of them as unions, although they didn’t exactly call themselves that – in like the 1820s and 1830s that were pushing for public support for education. And there were a number of reasons for that. One reason was this question of citizenship; preparing future generations of working people to fulfill their obligations and rights in a democracy. We’re mainly talking about men but still, the idea is that they need to be kind of capable of organizing and challenging power and building the kind of democratic state that a lot of Americans wanted in the years after the revolution. But in some places, there’s some level of resistance. Massachusetts is one of those places where public education in some parts of the state is seen as something that really elites want. Let’s not spend money on that because that means taxes for working people. It really depends a lot on kind of where you are but going up to the Civil War, more and more Americans – up until, you know, basically if you think elementary school education. They’re going to school in greater numbers. And really by the end of the 19th century, it’s pretty ubiquitous, at least in northern states, and some southern states too, most kids are going to at least some grammar school, right, maybe through fifth or sixth grade, at least. In the early 20th century, that’s when you start to have a push for more secondary education, more high school. But for the most part, the term was common schools, right, because this was for elementary schools, that this was something that everybody would have not just access to, but the obligation to attend. I’d say that’s fairly ubiquitous in the United States that at least the expectation that most kids are going to attend some grammar school by the end of 1800s.
Will Brehm 5:58
And in different states, is this when it sort of becomes a constitutional right in many ways, right, where you have to go to school as a child? Like you said, there’s an obligation for you to attend. Is this around when it starts getting sort of passed into the state laws that say you have to go to school?
Jon Shelton 6:15
Yeah. It’s the 19th century over the course of the 19th century that a state -for the most part, I’m trying to think if there were some states who didn’t have that in there. I want to say Mississippi, maybe still didn’t have that in there. I grew up in Mississippi, so I’m kind of familiar with that history.
Will Brehm 6:30
And is that race related?
Jon Shelton 6:31
It’s race related, but -I mean, everything in Mississippi is race related in the 19th century, right? But it’s also the South is this deeply hierarchical society, right? Where even aside from the race question, if you’re not an elite, white person, there was a very conscious effort to try and keep any challenges to power. And so, the idea was, well, the wealthy planter families, they could educate their kids, in some cases, sending them to England, but everybody else, we’re not going to pay for that. It’s not necessary, and it’s a way to kind of maintain these kinds of distinctions that existed even amongst a lot of white people. But yeah, it’s in state constitutions in the 1800s that education becomes a right and I talk about this with my students all the time. I ask them purposely a trick question. I’m like, where in the US Constitution does it talk about education? Because many of them have internalized this idea that they have a right to education, at least through high school. And they kind of think about it, they’re like, I don’t know, that’s a good question. Maybe it’s in there somewhere. Is it in the Bill of Rights, I don’t know. And then I’m like, it’s not in there. The reason you have the right to education is because it’s in all of these state constitutions. Wisconsin, as a good example, again, of these sort of upper Midwestern states, Wisconsin’s initial Constitution has the right to education in it in 1848. And it’s because that’s this kind of idea that everybody is entitled to that, has a duty to do it in the 19th century.
Will Brehm 7:47
It’s really fascinating. And as you’re sort of explaining that the reason that education was seen as sort of valuable was this mix of citizenship, this mix of sort of good for the nation, nation building. But I love this idea that sort of unions also saw it as a way of educating future generations to understand how power worked, to participate in society. And that’s quite fascinating because a union in today’s thinking, and I would imagine a lot of unions do use the language of sort of education has an economic value. And that wasn’t what you’re saying is that they were actually seeing these other values of education. So, I guess, when did this idea of education as sort of skill preparation and having some sort of economic value and can increase economic well-being, when did those ideas really begin to take hold?
Jon Shelton 8:37
So, first of all, it’s important to note that those ideas were there in the United States starting in about the late 1800s. So, you start to have some social reformers who are looking at the Gilded Age and the inequality that exists and the rampant poverty and they’re looking at that, and they’re saying, How could the education system fix that? Maybe we’ve got people that aren’t prepared for the labor market, they can do better for themselves, if they get the right education. And I would really encourage listeners to read a book by a historian named Tina Groeger called The Education Trap. She’s awesome. She points to some of those impulses in the early 1900s. And also points out that there were working people who bought into this. That’s one reason that we have the expansion of, say, high schools in the early 20th century that is particularly for folks who aspire to be in the middle class, particularly for, say, women workers whose opportunities in the labor movement to use unions to get a good job might have been limited, they were pushing for some of these things. So, I don’t want to kind of make it seem like when I talk about the emergence of this human capital idea, which I’ll talk about in a second that it kind of came out of nowhere, right? There were these impulses. What I argue in the book is the primary way that working people thought about improving their lives, however, up until very recently, in fact, was other things than education, right? It was forming unions, it was labor reforms, things like minimum wage laws and maximum hour laws and workers compensation and all these kinds of things. You know, it’s in the economics profession that the idea of human capital comes from. The term starts to be popularized by Chicago School economists beginning in the 1950s, especially Gary Becker, and Theodore Schultz, who we sometimes lump Chicago School folks together and think about them all as being these kind of market fundamentalist libertarians, right? Milton Friedman is kind of the quintessential example. But Schultz was really more of a neo-Keynesian. He wasn’t a sort of hardline libertarian. So, Becker, of course, was, but you’ve got this kind of idea coming from people of somewhat different political dispositions, but they’re all pushing for the same concept, which is that you look at the United States after World War Two and the United States is much more politically and economically equal. There’s much more economic security for working people. In fact, there’s a couple of economists, I think Claudia Goldin was one of the economists who came up with this term, that this is the era of the great compression. But the problem is these economists from the Chicago school, they look at this, and they say, Well, look at education attainment. The reason that things are going so well for working people is because we’ve invested, as a society, in their individual human capital, they’ve gotten more skills. And it’s fascinating, because when Becker was writing about this in the 50s, he even said, this term human capital is deeply problematic because the way people typically think about it, is they connect it to slavery, right? Because in the 19th century, enslaved people were literal human capital, they could be treated as collateral for loans, right? So, Becker says, this is kind of difficult because if we’re going to be able to actually use this term, we got to rehabilitate that. And so, the idea is that a worker isn’t somebody who’s selling their labor, they are somebody who’s entrepreneurial, they’re investing in maybe society, as Schultz wanted, is helping them to get more human capital. Maybe as Becker wanted, they’re investing in their own human capital down the road, right, as you know, in the transatlantic world, that means more loans for future workers. But that investing in human capital, that’s how workers become more successful because when they add to their sort of set of skills that allows them to get a better return on their labor, right? So, it completely kind of flips what’s happening in capitalism, which is that rightly or wrongly, folks are selling their labor and somebody’s taking a cut of it. It changes that dynamic to, hey, people are successful, because they’re investing in themselves, they’re effectively these little kind of capitalists. So, that’s where the term kind of comes from, and then we’ll get into this, but it gets picked up politically in the 60s.
Will Brehm 12:32
It is quite interesting to think that this notion of human capital, which I think from some of the research, I’ve looked at, I think Theodore Schultz used to, or he initially used the term human wealth, and he too, was very uncomfortable with the term human capital. And I never really understood why that term in particular sort of stuck, but like you said, it does allied the labor and the capitalist into one and its sort of like, we’re all capitalists now so, we can therefore never have these sort of big labor struggles that were increasingly common and sort of fighting for all these different rights. You don’t have to do that anymore. You just have to invest in your own education, your own skills, and this will get you future earnings that would be higher, if you didn’t do that.
Jon Shelton 13:13
100%. And it ignores all the other things that are actually happening in the labor market. Let’s say that this idea of human capital is a concept that actually works, right? What it means for an individual worker is not only do you have to invest in an education, but you have to know what the labor market is going to look like by the time you’ve got your education complete. You have to not just have the skills that an employer is going to want but you have to know what skills are going to be in demand in a certain period of time in the future. And it completely ignores things like macroeconomic policies, right? Like what if the economy is in a recession and a particular sector of the economy, it goes under. It ignores things like race and gender, right? These are things that Becker talked about. He referred to racism as “the tastes of employers”. These are things that might be totally outside of your control, but the concept of human capital makes it seem like they are under your control. And so, for that reason, it’s deeply, deeply problematic.
Will Brehm 14:04
One of the other things that you point out in your book that’s sort of similarly problematic is the use of the term equal opportunity to education. It’s a refrain that you hear over and over again, even to this day, I must say, I think you still hear like, we need to have equal opportunity to education and therefore everything’s okay. But that too you argue, sort of erases some of the structural issues in the labor market. Can you talk a little bit about how that sort of works and how this equal opportunity to education is connected to some of these ideas around human capital?
Jon Shelton 14:35
The way I would kind of find the entry point into that conversation is to compare the word opportunity with the word security, okay. And so, all those working people who are fighting for unions and social reforms, all that stuff culminates in the 1930s and 40s with the New Deal. And so, you have policies, things like literally the Social Security Act, which has the word security in the title or as FDR talks about when he talks about the economic Bill of Rights in 1944. He says all of these rights spell security because what all these working people were fighting for, and they totally understood this, was protection from the market. Because the market brutalized them, right. I mean, there were economic depressions every few years, lawyers basically just kind of threw people out on the street when they got hurt on the job. And so, security was the idea that you are protected from the market, right. And opportunity is a term that’s been used very differently over the course of American history. I’m not suggesting that like nobody used the term opportunity before the 1950s and 60s, but the way opportunity is used during that time, it starts to change, and it starts to go from being something that really has sort of a lot of wide possibilities, and something that can coexist with something like economic security, to then by the 60s, and especially beyond that 70s 80s and 90s, becoming really the stand in for the economic prospects of working people. That no longer do people need protection from the market. The market is actually something that can liberate people and as long as everybody has an equal opportunity in that market, that’s really all that they’re owed. And so, human capital, I think, beautifully makes it possible for people to believe in that idea because when you basically say like, Hey, you’ve had the opportunity. You got a good education, we’re going to reform the education system to make sure every kid gets an equal opportunity, then how can you argue with the failure of working people, let’s say, in an urban area like Milwaukee, or Watts or anywhere else, to then go out and get a good job. They had the opportunity to get the right education. And it completely ignores the fact that there might not be a lot of jobs in a place like Milwaukee or Chicago because employers have moved elsewhere. They’ve moved out of those areas and the federal government hasn’t done very much to ensure that those places had jobs. So, when you think about the kind of quintessential example of this is the Great Society in the 1960s, which, the Johnson administration, I think, had a good faith effort to try and do something about the rampant poverty. They were pushed to do so by the civil rights movement among other activists. But they settled on this idea of opportunity because there was less of a political cost, right? It didn’t upset people, it didn’t challenge the power of employers, and it kind of fit with notions of meritocracy that were, I think, growing in American politics. And so there was a real choice during the 1960s to kind of follow the trajectory of the New Deal and privilege economic security or privilege, this idea of let’s reform the education system, help people to navigate the labor market better instead of doing things to change the labor market in the favor of workers. And the Johnson administration largely chose the human capital approach. Not totally. I mean, they did things like we get Medicare and Medicaid from the 1960s but the big things they pushed for were Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and other job training programs with not great results.
Will Brehm 17:57
It’s interesting how that notion of equal opportunity, sort of; you can individualize failure rather than seeing it as some sort of structural issue. And in a way, that’s the point in a way of human capital, right? By thinking that all laborers are capitalists you can sidestep some of those structural issues that would take real political change and real sort of structural change in the labor markets. It’s fascinating how that comes about. What also is fascinating in your book is that you constantly point to alternatives. Although this idea really began to take hold in the 1950s and 1960s and you show how that happened through the different politicians and different academics and ideas. You also show that these other ideas of the value of education sort of still existed, even if they were marginalized and didn’t necessarily gain hold. And one of the examples you point to that I didn’t know about, and I found really fascinating was this idea of the Freedom Budget. Can you explain what the Freedom Budget is and how it had a different sort of vision of what education is and was?
Jon Shelton 18:56
Yes. And let me just take a quick divergence because I think it’s really important to understand this kind of bigger question. You know, there’s a debate in historical circles that’s been going on for quite some time, but has really been important over the past, I don’t know, 10 or 15 years, which is the legacy of the New Deal. And there’s a historian named Jefferson Cowie wrote this book called The Great Exception. It was an essay version and a book version. And he basically says the New Deal was this really kind of important moment but it was a really a parenthetical moment in American history. That actually most of American history really is about these bigger principles of market fundamentalism and lack of solidarity. And I don’t think he’s right about that. And the Freedom Budget helps us understand that because what I think happened in the 1930s. Again, you have this culmination of all of these workers efforts to fight for economic security, FDR comes out with this proposal for an economic Bill of Rights in 1944. And the order of those rights is really, really important. What he says is, you’ve got these civil liberties that come out of the original bill of rights in the 1780s. He says our society has changed dramatically by the 1930s and what people actually need when most of them are selling their labor in the marketplace are economic rights. They need economic security. These are the rights I said earlier that spell security. The first right is the right to a job. And then there’s a whole set of other rights that probably you and I would agree most people should have. Things like housing and health care. And it’s not until the last right, the 10th right, that he gets to education. And I think that’s intentional, right? FDR believed that everybody had the right to an education but what that tells us about the way it was laid out is that having a good job and having all these other things wasn’t contingent on the kind of education that you got, right? And when FDR thought about education, it certainly wasn’t the kind of education that we think about today, right? That like, Hey, this is just about getting new skills in the marketplace. The reason that I think that’s so important is because you have a continued push that’s in the political mainstream by lots of political actors going as late until the end of the 1970s, where you have FDR New Deal kind of ideas in the political mainstream. And those ideas are vying with the human capital Idea until you get to that point. So, you can carry this through to -there was a huge debate over a bill that almost passed that would have almost literally guaranteed Americans jobs in 1945 and 1946, that I talk about in the book, and then you get to the 1960s and the Freedom Budget, which was this proposal by maybe the most important American in the 20th century that probably most Americans haven’t heard of A. Philip Randolph and this veteran labor activist who was really -the March on Washington in 1963, we think about King because he gave this really incredible speech there but it was really Randolph’s idea. He had been pushing for a march on Washington as early as the 1940s. Randolph and fellow labor activist named Bayard Rustin came up with this proposal. This was in 1966. Think about the Civil Rights Movement, you got Civil Rights Act in ’64, the Voting Rights Act in ’65. And they really saw the Freedom Budget as the next phase of the civil rights movement, right? Like this is how we’re going to guarantee economic security because what they understood is that political rights, voting rights wouldn’t be sufficient. That to stop some of the kind of racial divisions in the country and frankly, just to end poverty on a moral level, it was necessary to have the sort of economic rights. And when Bayard Rustin wrote a lot of the proposal for the Freedom Budget, and he actually invokes FDRs four freedoms from the 1940s. One of which is freedom from wants. And Rustin says the Freedom Budget is how we’re going to kind of carry on that legacy of freedom from once. So, the Freedom Budget would have -education is in there but again, it was in many ways a proposal that was very similar to the economic Bill of Rights. It would have effectively guaranteed people jobs, massive investments to rebuild cities, in particular, with good housing and great schools. And the idea of, hey, we’ve got to build these schools so that people can get the right skills. That wasn’t part of the argument. The argument was everybody deserves these things. And this is how not only are we going to end poverty but also the next step in racial equality in this country. And what both of them understood, right, this is something that wouldn’t have been exclusively for Black people, but it would have disproportionately helped Black people, but it would have helped everybody. And so, that was the proposal. And this was a time when the United States was very prosperous. And they basically said, we can spend this money without having to raise taxes, right. This would effectively be a dividend from how productive the economy has been. It doesn’t happen. There’s a lot of reasons why it doesn’t happen. The Vietnam War is happening at the same time and that really kind of distracts people from it. Johnson wasn’t really predisposed to do it in part because he was predisposed to a lot of these human capital things. But you can imagine a different scenario, say where the Vietnam War doesn’t happen, where these activists are able to really kind of push this proposal or something like it to happen. And then in the 1970s, it doesn’t go away. King had been supporting the Freedom Budget. After he gets murdered by a white supremacist, his wife, Coretta is pushing for a jobs guarantee in the 1970s. So, these things continue. And that’s one of the things I think I’m most proud of in the book is to kind of show, this isn’t all just doom and gloom, right. We had some alternatives to this human capital argument. It’s tragic that we didn’t get there but we can look to that past to help us to chart a different future.
Will Brehm 24:16
Thomas Piketty calls these sorts of moments in history that could go in different directions, he calls him “switch points” at least in the English friends. I always love that idea. Like, it’s this moment, and two radically different versions of the way society and the economy should be organized happen, and for whatever historical reason that you go down one route and not the other. And it seems like in the US that there’s been many switch points. It’s always been returned and yet, it’s sort of the one towards social democracy sort of falters a little bit, particularly since the 60s, let’s say. So, I guess, from the 70s, the 80s and 90s, where you sort of say this notion of what you call the education myth sort of gets turbocharged and it becomes sort of commonplace. People just assume that educational opportunity is the way to think about it. Human capital is the way to sort of understand the value of education. Are there still alternatives? You said Coretta Scott King was pushing for a jobs guarantee after her husband was murdered? Do we still see these things in the 70s, the 80s and the 90s? And even today, do we see them anywhere?
Jon Shelton 25:17
So, absolutely in the 70s. And my next book, I don’t know when I’ll have the chance to get to it. But I might write a book about a Humphrey-Hawkins Act, which was this law that was passed in 1978. And the original version of it – there was a few different versions, but the kind of robust version, the version that would have actually, I think, changed things dramatically had it passed – was the brainchild of a senator from Minnesota named Hubert Humphrey, who was LBJ’s vice president and then went back into the Senate, very important historical figure in American history. He was pushing for civil rights as early as the late 1940s, huge friend to labor unions. And Augustus Hawkins, who nobody has written very much about at all. Hawkins represented Watts in California, the Watts neighborhood in Congress. He was African American, he was a co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, and he actually played a significant role in writing the employment clause of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So, he was kind of always coming at things from an economic security angle, and they came up with this proposal called the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill, that effectively would have guaranteed everybody a job. The original version that Hawkins came up with would have allowed individuals to sue the federal government for a job if they didn’t have a job. Now, Coretta Scott King was deeply behind the organizing effort to get this done. At one point, I think it was 1977, there were hundreds of demonstrations around the country, the Democratic Party platform in 1976, the right to a job is central there. If people want to find hope in the past with the Democratic Party, go look at that party platform. And so, they pushed hard for this, and there was a real chance this could have happened. The problem, however, is that this was the moment that the Democratic Party starts to move in a different direction and Jimmy Carter becomes president after a very contested primary in 76. Humphrey was thinking about running but ended up getting cancer and tragically died just before the Humphrey-Hawkins Act was passed. So, that would have changed things dramatically if Humphrey had been the nominee. But Carter was part of this group of newer Democrats who were saying, No, we actually – Joe Biden was one of them, too, by the way – who are kind of saying we need to lower the expectations of what government can do, we need to accept some of the realities that this kind of labor liberalism that had been at the core of American society was failing because you’ve got inflation and unemployment and all these things. So, there’s this big debate in the Democratic Party about do we kind of rekindle the social democratic promise? That’s what Humphrey and Hawkins wanted. Or do we basically lower expectations and agree to versions of market fundamentalism? That was Carter. I mean, I know he’s very sick now and everybody’s kind of celebrating his life. And he did the Habitat for Humanity thing but as a president, my view is that he was deeply responsible for taking the party in a very different trajectory with very problematic results. So, he said he would support Humphrey-Hawkins on the campaign trail in 76 but never did. He gave it very little support and actually pushed a version that was really pretty toothless. They just said, Hey, we’re going to have employment goals. And that’s really the moment, I think it’s the Carter administration, where I think the last kind of big mainstream alternatives have the best chance of passing. And that’s why I want to write this book because I think that’s a moment where it’s sort of the last best chance to build the kind of multiracial democracy that we all deserve. So, you move through that kind of failure. And I think Reagan wins in 1980 because Carter actually diminished Americans expectations and said, Hey, we’re not going to actually do anything. I think a more social democratic presidency for him, he probably gets reelected after that first term. But then the problem is, is that Democrats moving forward -not all of them, but a lot of them- continue to take the message, Well, Reagan wins, we got to move to the right because Reagan’s hard right and he’s winning. Democrats still controlled Congress for most of the Reagan years. People forget that. Democrats weren’t winning congressional elections. They took the lesson from this that what we should do is move further right. You have these entities like the Democratic Leadership Council building on things like the movement of the Atari Democrats, people like Gary Hart in the early ’70s. And what they’re saying is, no, we’ve got a global economy, we need to lower working people’s expectations, accept the realities, and education is a really, really convenient thing to latch on to because you can say, well, we’re not going to do anything to make things easier for workers because that is going to anger businesses but what we are going to do is give them an education. When Clinton again coming out of the DLC negotiates NAFTA in 1993, over the massive objections of organized labor and the unions that helped him get elected what he goes around the country saying and his Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich too is don’t worry, we know people are going to lose their good manufacturing jobs but we’re going to help retrain them. The party moves in, I think, a very problematic direction. You can take this through Obama too who gets elected really, I think people wanted things to change. I mean, you think about how he differentiated himself from Hillary Clinton in that primary in 2008. And I write about this in the book, he says, we’re not going to accept a Washington DC that privileges trade deals that help corporations. He actually criticizes her healthcare plan for not having a public option on the campaign trail but then gets elected and it’s more of the same. We get education reform. Look at his speeches, which I document in the book, where he basically says, the best path to a good job is education. Doesn’t do anything for labor reform, effectively bails out the banks, doesn’t help people whose mortgages are getting foreclosed on. And so, I think what we have is by 2016, really, in both parties, an exhaustion with this idea. And I could talk about Republicans too because Republicans had embraced the education myth. I mean, No Child Left Behind. You’re not going to find a more bipartisan piece of legislation, probably in the last 30 years. Maybe it’s some of the post 9/11 stuff, like the Patriot Act but other than that, No Child Left Behind is probably the most bipartisan thing you’re going to find. So, there’s an exhaustion with that idea, I think in both parties. And so, where I kind of conclude in the last chapter is look at the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, challenging this kind of neoliberal idea in the Democratic Party, and then look at Trump and the Republican Party, and this grotesque argument that he’s going to go somehow jawbone corporations into bringing back jobs. But for people, I think, across the country who are just frustrated with this continued, government can’t do anything for you, the only option you have is to go out and get a good education. I think that level of frustration is largely responsible for the real kind of political turmoil in both parties that existed in 2016. I think we’re living in that world since I think everything’s up for grabs right now. So, I’m really encouraged because I do think that we’ve seen alternatives in both parties. Some of them in the Republican Party in particular are very scary. But there’s been a shift in the Democratic Party to where at least some Democrats understanding bigger social democratic alternatives are necessary. And in the Republican Party, certainly, a shift away from the education method although the direction they’re going is very scary,
Will Brehm 32:07
Is the direction that the Republicans are going – the one of book burning and banning books, and funding cuts, and censoring academics – I mean, is that the direction that they’re going?
Jon Shelton 32:18
Yeah. And think about how they’re feeding off of resentment toward the education system, right? So, you have an education system, and you have a political discourse that for years has said, look, the only path you really have to getting a good job is to go to college. And if you’re not going to college, which by the way, is like 65-70% of Americans who don’t have college degrees, think it’s about 65%. If you’re not going to college, you don’t deserve a good job. That’s implicitly what so many working people have been told. Well, there’s going to be resentment toward the education system, especially toward higher ed. The things you and I do, Will, right. And if you think about what’s happening is Republicans in the US, they’ve weaponized that. They’ve said, look, we can see that people. I mean, Trump was so good at this. He was like a savant in terms of thinking about grievances and he would just at speeches try things out. Whatever got the biggest applause lines, that’s what you’re saying next. So, you start kind of talking about how universities are indoctrinating people. That finds resonance with people who have been told that this is the only path to getting a good job. And so, they’ve doubled down on that and they’ve weaponized these wedge issues like gender and sexuality, and race, really in a very disingenuous way. They’re telling people many of whom don’t go to college, they’re telling them that these are the things that are happening in university settings. That’s not at all what’s happening, right? We’re exposing students to ideas; we’re not indoctrinating them at all. You’ve probably and probably your listeners too, if I could indoctrinate students, they’d be like reading the syllabus. We’re not indoctrinating students but they’re able to feed off of that resentment and to push toward, hey, we’ve got to discipline these people. They’re the elites that are actually hurting you not the corporate elites who are the ones that are really holding everybody down.
Will Brehm 34:01
It’s so fascinating to think of this education myth, as you call it, and how in many ways, the way in which human capital was developed in some of the ways it individualized success and individualized opportunity and sort of it sidestepped a lot of these structural issues. And then once education sort of massified and people were getting these opportunities, and then still there were all of these economic problems and people weren’t able to get the jobs and sort of grow and do everything that they were promised through this sort of education myth. That now there’s this reaction. And so, on the one side, there’s the Trump Republicans, let’s call them and maybe that spread a bit more widespread sort of the negativity towards what really is the value of education. On the other side, are there any sort of recent examples of people actually saying let’s focus again on the structural issues. Let’s not focus in on education as such. Let’s zoom in on why the labor market looks the way it does. Let’s think about some of the issues that were coming up in the Freedom Budget, some of the issues that were coming up in the New Deal? Do we see that today anywhere?
Jon Shelton 35:06
Yeah, we absolutely do, and I can give you two examples. The easy one is the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, which I think deeply changed the American Left. And I know a lot of people on the Left now are pretty frustrated with the direction Biden has gone on some things, but the Sanders movement wasn’t really about one person, it was about this very long shot candidate who had these ideas that almost immediately started resonating with people in 2016, especially young people. And I hear this with my students all the time, that this resentment about the fact that like, Well, I’m not going to be guaranteed a good job but going to college is my only chance. And oh, by the way, I’m going to have to take out 10s of thousands of dollars of debt to do it. This generation of young people now, in particular in the US, they fully understand this system is rigged and this is a labor market that is not working for us. And so, I think that’s why you saw so much support for Bernie among young people in 2016 and in 2020. But you could also look at, in the US, some of the teacher unions in the past decade or so. Not all of them but you’ve seen teacher unions in places like Chicago and Los Angeles that are organizing around the idea that it’s not just teacher salaries and working conditions that are important, they’re pushing for those things, let’s not deny that. But they’ve got a strategy called bargaining for the common good and the idea is that the education system is only going to be successful if the school district and really the city writ large, is paying attention to all of these structural things. So, when the CTU (Chicago Teachers Union) came out with this document in the early 20 teens, right after they had a big shift in their leadership. They had an election in 2010 that brought a new leadership sort of committed to the some of these principles led by Karen Lewis, who passed away a couple of years ago. They came up with this document called The School Chicago’s Children Deserve and I talk about this in the book that says, students aren’t just numbers. In order to have an education system that is successful, we have to think about all the stuff that these students are dealing with. They need to have a nurse in every school, they need to have a social worker, we need to stop putting so much emphasis on standardized test scores. And then they’ve had a series of very successful labor actions in the US over the past decade. And then one of the last bargaining sessions they were pushing for things like having the city invest more in affordable housing. You know, things that would typically be so far afield from the purview of a teacher union, but they were saying this is what actually needs to happen to end poverty in the city. Not just give everybody this idea that they’re going to get a good education. And so, they’ve done that very effectively. But you know, there are other teacher unions in other places again, like LA and Minneapolis-St. Paul, they’re doing similar things. And I think this has really shown the way to think about how education is embedded in some of these bigger structures. And for listeners who don’t know about this, the city of Chicago just had a massively important election about two months ago now, where they elected Brandon Johnson, who had been an organizer for the CTU. And so now you’ve got this connection between a Democratic mayor and the union, and you can think about the structure of the city and connecting that to what it is that kids actually need in the education system in some really powerful ways. It’s very exciting.
Will Brehm 38:12
It’s quite fascinating just because it goes back to the history of education in the US where it’s been so state-focused, so localized. And so of course, it seems like some of the alternatives that might take root, that might go against the education seems to be like, yeah, of course, it would have to happen at this local level, at the state level. And it seems like that’s where we need to really be focusing on today.
Jon Shelton 38:34
I think it’s both. I think, absolutely state and local. I’m the president of my faculty and staff union here at UW Green Bay, and also vice president of higher ed for AFT Wisconsin, so fully agree that a lot of this stuff has to happen at the state and local level. But it also does have to happen at the national level too because so many things -and that’s really where the money is. So many things that are happening at the state and local level are hamstrung by not having the same financial resources. And just like as it happened in the 1930s and 40s, we need to see the stuff that we’re doing at the state and local level culminate in national politics in some way. Because if they don’t, and we can’t get frankly, I don’t believe a third party is really viable. So, whatever my criticisms are of the Democratic Party, reforming the Democratic Party and making economic security central to everything that happens at the national level is so essential to the success of this country because if we don’t do that, we have Republicans that are -I don’t think I’m overstating to say that at least half of the candidates in the Republican primary are essentially fascist at this point. And so, if we don’t come up with the kind of coalition that can really marginalize them, we’re one bad electoral outcome away from some really, really bad things happening. So, the future of the Democratic Party at the national level is also really important. And I think there’s a way to take these things that are happening at the state and local level and really push for them, but this does have to happen at the national level too and sooner than probably a lot of Americans think.
Will Brehm 40:01
Well, Jon Shelton, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Really a fascinating book and I learned so much from you. So, thank you so much for joining.
Jon Shelton 40:08
Thanks for reading and hope your listeners got a lot out of this.
Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com
Related Author Publications/Projects
Education myth: How human capital trumped social democracy
Public workers in service of America
The teacher uprising, 2010-2021
Teacher strike! Public education and the making of a new American political order
Teacher unions and associations
Mentioned Resources
Lectures and annual reports on education – Horace Mann
The Education Trap – Christina Groeger
The role of government in education – Milton Friedman
Investment in human capital: A theoretical analysis – Gary Becker
Investment in human capital – Theodore Schultz
The problem with human capital theory
A freedom budget for all Americans: A summary
The Great Exception – Jefferson Cowie
Education policy in the Carter administration
How Obama’s education reforms threaten the working class
Bill Clinton on free trade and financial deregulation
NAFTA and labor in North America
Trump’s bait and switch: Job creation in the midst of welfare state sabotage
Bargaining for the common good
The Schools Chicago Children Deserve 2.0
Brandon Johnson, Union organizer and former teacher
Recommended Resources
Oral history interview with Augustus F. Hawkins
The untold story of Coretta Scott King
Left challenges inside the Democratic Party
Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and the new democratic economics
Strike for America: Chicago teachers against austerity
The Chicago teachers’ strike ten years on
Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com
