Thus the continuing extension of mass education for the nonprofessional categories of labor increasingly lost its connection with occupational requirements. At the same time, its place in the social and economic structure became ever more firmly guaranteed by functions which have little or nothing to do with either job training or any other strictly educational needs. The postponement of school leaving to an average age of eighteen has become indispensable for keeping unemployment within reasonable bounds. In the interest of working parents (the two-parent-job-holding family having become ever more common during this period), and in the interest of social stability and the orderly management of an increasingly rootless urban population, the schools have developed into immense teen-sitting organizations, their functions having less and less to do with imparting to the young those things that society thinks they must learn. In this situation the content of education deteriorated as its duration lengthened. The knowledge imparted in the course of an elementary education was more or less expanded to fill the prevalent twelve-year educational sojourn, and in a great many cases school systems have difficulty in instilling in twelve years the basic skills of literacy and numbers that, several generations ago, occupied eight. This in turn gave a greater impetus to employers to demand of job applicants a high school diploma, as a guarantee—not always validof getting workers who can read.
We cannot neglect the direct economic impact of the enlarged school system. Not only does the postponement of the school-leaving age limit the growth of recognized unemployment, but it also furnishes employment for a considerable mass of teachers, administrators, construction and service workers, etc. Moreover, education has become an immensely profitable area of capital accumulation for the construction industry, for suppliers of all sorts, and for a host of subsidiary enterprises. For all these reasons—which have nothing to do with either education or occupational training—it is difficult to imagine United States society without its immense “educational" structure, and in fact, as has been seen in recent years, the closing of even a single segment of the schools for a period of weeks is enough to create a social crisis in the city in which this happens. The schools, as caretakers of children and young people, are indispensable for family functioning, community stability, and social order in general (although they fulfill even these functions badly). In a word, there is no longer any place for the young in this society other than school. Serving to fill a vacuum, schools have themselves become that vacuum, increasingly emptied of content and reduced to little more than their own form. Just as in the labor process, where the more there is to know the less the worker need know, in the schools the mass of future workers attend the more there is to learn, the less reason there is for teachers to teach and students to learn. In this more than in any other single factorthe purposelessness, futility, and empty forms of the educational systemwe have the source of the growing antagonism between the young and their schools which threatens to tear the schools apart.
It follows that the growing recognition among corporate managers and educational researchers that the commonly made connection between education and job content is, for the mass of jobs, a false one, will not necessarily result in a reversal of the educational trend and bring about an earlier schoolleaving age. Capitalist society in the United States has little choice but to maintain this educational establishment as a social institution with transcendent functions. Yet the recognition of how little is accomplished in the years of elementary and high school attendance in the way of job preparation, and how little in the way of educational preparation these jobs require, is spreading.
Ivar Berg, for example, in one of the more detailed examinations of this subject carried out in recent years, arrives at the conclusion that educational “achievements" have already“exceeded requirements in most job categories," and that the demand for “better-educated"labor cannot therefore be explained by “technological and related changes attending most jobs."15His most startling finding is that investigations show that education may in fact be a liability for the employer. His study of productivity, turnover, and absenteeism in a group of textile workers found that “educational achievement was inversely related to performance thus conceived."16 A sample study in the clerical field yielded the same conclusion: “Performance in 125 branch offices of a major New York bank, measured by turnover data and by the number oflost accounts per teller, was inversely associated with the educational achievements of these 500 workers. The branches with the worst performance records were those in which a disproportionately (and significantly) high number of employees were attending educational programs after working hours! There was also evidence that performance was worst in precisely those branches in which, besides the educational achievements being higher, the managers stressed education in consultation with tellers concerning their futures with the bank."17 Berg was able to report instances in which managers automatically assumed that their most competent workers had more education, when the opposite was true, “as in one company in which managers reported that the better-educated technicians in their employ were the best' technicians." The data from this company showed that “the less-educated technicians received higher evaluations from supervisors and had longer service than technicians with higher educational achievements in comparable jobs; the managers, however, assumed that these better’ employees had completed more years of schooling!"!8 In part, the explanation for this may lie in the finding, also reported by Berg, that “education is more often than not an important factor accounting for dissatisfaction among workers in many occupational categories. . . .9
304
Labor and Monopoly Capital
A Final Note on Skill
305