The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy

by Jon Shelton

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501768149
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2023
Series:	Histories of American Education
Pages:	270
Sales rank:	1,106,842
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jon Shelton is Associate Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He is the author of Teacher Strike! Follow him on X @prof_shelton.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. From Independence to Security: Education and Democracy from the Nation's Founding
2. To Secure These Rights: Education and the Unfinished Project of American Social Democracy
3. Education's War on Poverty in the 1960s
4. New Politics: Democrats and Opportunity in a Postindustrial Society
5. "At Risk": The Acceleration of the Education Myth
6. "What You Earn Depends on What You Learn": 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?

What People are Saying About This

Jennifer C. Berkshire

Required reading for anyone concerned about the fate of American democracy. In making an urgent, compelling case that there is no 'rule by the people' without public education, Shelton lays out the path toward ensuring the revival and survival of both.

Cristina Viviana Groeger

Impressively researched and highly readable, The Education Myth presents us with a definitive account of how education policy displaced a broader social democratic agenda in the US, and how education has defined the fault lines of contemporary politics.

John Nichols

Jon Shelton reveals the hidden history of how—and why—the United States failed to implement social reforms needed to guarantee health care, education, and employment as human rights. If you want to know why this country is faced today with overwhelming inequality and injustice, you must read this book.

Lily Geismer

In rethinking the idea that access to a good education is a pathway to economic security, Shelton offers us a provocative and inspired intervention into debates about education, inequality, and the political realignments of the last half century.

Editorial Reviews

Given the current intense political divisions, Shelton's analysis is especially timely and, despite appearance, not doctrinaire. The analysis will challenge readers, no matter their political affiliation, to think differently about education and its relationship to "economic security and social respect" (p. ix). Shelton's style is accessible and honest, laying bare his commitments such that readers can determine for themselves how they influence his analysis.

Choice