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a clarification: financial success in a particular context means that you happen to be functional within that context. if the context were stable--like a thing, not a process--then setting up an educational system that reproduced that class system--and by extension privileged only those competences which were materially functional now--might make sense. but the context is not stable. it is a cheap political expedient to pretend that it is, trading away not only the potentials of kids but even more the adaptive potentials of the system itself to pretend that the context is like a thing.
private schools and the vouchers that would slightly widen access to them do not even start to address this. there is nothing about a private school that makes it any more likely to not fall into this political circle than a public school--if anything private schools are even less accountable than are public. all they do is privatize the problem, remove it from the realm of the political. such is the conservative solution.
run away from the political.
same thing obtains for homeschooling. you do nothing to or about the political assumptions that underpin the public system by opting out of it and chances are that you impose even more limitations on your kids for doing so.
second clarification: if this class reproduction system were rigidly efficient, i wouldnt be talking. if this class system were rigidly efficient, it would have collapsed long ago. fact is that folk are able to think their way out from under what is and that you can get the tools you need to operate and be coherent--but you have to know they exist and want to get them in order to do so. such tools should be available to everyone.
i think kids should be taught philosophy. i dont think it'd solve everything, but it'd help--because philosophy helps you learn to structure how and what you think, and it enables you to relativize the context in which you find yourself. if this were a democracy--or anything like one--exercising power would require these kind of intellectual tools. the risk involved with this is that such tools can encourage dissent. personally, i think that the risk of dissent is outweighed by the value of this education and that the system itself would benefit from taking that risk.
folk are afraid of risk, they are afraid of change.
and as a political expedient, the american educational system functions to train people to be incapable of dealing with change.
you reap what you sow.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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