- 276 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
The Education Myth questions the idea that education represents the best, if not the only, way for Americans to access economic opportunity. As Jon Shelton shows, linking education to economic well-being was not politically inevitable. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, public education was championed as a way to help citizens learn how to participate in a democracy. By the 1930s, public education, along with union rights and social security, formed an important component of a broad-based fight for social democracy.
Shelton demonstrates that beginning in the 1960s, the political power of the education myth choked off powerful social democratic alternatives like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin's Freedom Budget. The nation's political center was bereft of any realistic ideas to guarantee economic security and social dignity for the majority of Americans, particularly those without college degrees. Embraced first by Democrats like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, Republicans like George W. Bush also pushed the education myth. The result, over the past four decades, has been the emergence of a deeply inequitable economy and a drastically divided political system.
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Information
Table of contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1. From Independence to Security: Education and Democracy from the Nationās Founding
- 2. To Secure These Rights: Education and the Unfinished Project of American Social Democracy
- 3. Educationās War on Poverty in the 1960s
- 4. New Politics: Democrats and Opportunity in a Postindustrial Society
- 5. āAt Riskā: The Acceleration of the Education Myth
- 6. āWhat You Earn Depends on What You Learnā: Education Presidents, Education Governors, and Human Capital Rising
- 7. Putting Some People First: The Total Ascendance of the Education Myth
- 8. Left Behind: The Politics of Education Reform and Rise of the Creative Class
- 9. Things Fall Apart: The Education Myth under Attack
- Epilogue: A Social Democratic Future?
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index