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“To Better Our Condition”: Educational Credentialing and “the Silent Compulsion of Economic Relations” in the United States, 1830 to the Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Extract

In chapter 13 of Leviathan (“Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery”), Thomas Hobbes, that great chronicler of “masterless men” in a competitive market economy, graphically describes the fear and anxiety that pervade life in a state of nature. Hobbes begins by noting that “the natural condition of man” is marked by natural equality, competition, diffidence, and vanity and that life in a competitive society of self-directing individuals is one of constant competition for power, wealth, and glory. Life, Hobbes insists, is a zero-sum contest—a competitive race with all the prizes going to the winners. “The comparison of [the] life of man to a race,” he writes in The Elements of Law, “holdeth so well for our purpose. This race we must suppose to have no other goal, nor other garland, but being foremost.” If it were not for “that great LEVIATHAN … that mortal God … to which we owe … peace and defense,” competition, ambition, and greed would plummet society back into a state of nature and a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

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Copyright © 1996 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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22. I appreciate that this argument does not fully address many of the knotty theoretical issues surrounding the nature and origins of class inequality. However, the purpose of this paper is to explain the expansion of educational credentialing by focusing on the logic of social action in the credentials market, not to take on the sociology of class and stratification.Google Scholar

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25. Parkin, , Marxism and Class Theory, 60; Ehrenreich, , Fear of Falling, 82.Google Scholar

26. For a telling example of the social logic of tracking, see Washington Post, 16 Sep. 1990. Economists tend to see such behaviors as an innocent form of preference aggregation expressed in “voting with your feet” activity—a so-called “Tiebout effect”—by utility maximizing parents seeking to find educational services that are consistent with their educational preferences and their “resource endowments.” They also claim that such behavior moves the market in educational services toward a spatial form of the neo-classical Holy Grail—a Pareto optimal equilibrium of preferences and budgets. The relationship between the housing market, educational opportunity, and the social demography of schooling is well captured in Gary Orfield's investigation of the opportunity structure in Atlanta during the Reagan-Bush era. See Orfield, Gary, The Closing Door: Conservative Policy and Black Opportunity (Chicago, 1991), 6970.Google Scholar

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28. “The high school,” one critic wrote in June 1840, “with its professorships, its extravagant salaries, and its other privileges and immunities, which now absorb so much of the school tax … ought to be abolished” and its funds committed to the provision of a general education to the children of the rich and the poor that “will fit them for any situation in our republic … and render it impossible that they ever should be ruled by any demagogue.” Public Ledger, 30 Apr., 13 May, and 5 June 1840; United States Gazette, 23 June 1842; Dunlap, Thomas, “Introductory Address of the Commencement of Central High School, February 12, 1851” (Philadelphia, 1851), 61.Google Scholar

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30. Washington Post, 21 Jan. 1992.Google Scholar

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32. This by no means suggests that more centralized systems—for example, those developed in the United Kingdom, Australia, or France—have proven especially capable of resisting market pressures. In fact, they have been quite susceptible to corporatist pressures and to the more ideological of their leading national politicians. Rather, a decentralized system of school governance renders educational politics in the United States especially susceptible to popular credentialing anxieties and competitive strategies. Fuhrman, Susan H. and Elmore, Richard F., “Understanding Local Control in the Wake of State Educational Reform,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 12 (Spring 1990): 8296; Wirt, Frederick M. and Kirst, Michael W., The Politics of Education: Schools in Conflict (Berkeley, Calif., 1989); Kirst, Michael W., “Who Should Control the Schools? Reassessing Current Policies,” in Schooling for Tomorrow: Directing Reforms to Issues That Count , ed. Sergiovanni, Thomas J. and Moore, John H. (Boston, 1989); James, Thomas, “State Authority and the Politics of Educational Change,” in Review of Research in Education , ed. Grant, Gerald (Washington D.C., 1991); Cohen, M., “Key Issues Confronting State Policymakers,” in Restructuring Schools: The Next Generation of Educational Reform , ed. Elmore, Richard F. and Associates, (San Francisco, 1990); Murphy, Joseph, “The Educational Reform Movement of the 1980s: A Comprehensive Analysis,” in The Educational Reform Movement of the 1980s , ed. Murphy, Joseph (Berkeley, Calif., 1990).Google Scholar

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37. This is a somewhat different notion of “market failure” than is normally used in economic theory where it is used to designate a condition in which a market fails to attain Pareto optimality as the result of the presence of “externalities” or “public goods” in the market.Google Scholar

38. For glimpses of this tradition, see Hamilton, Alexander, Jay, John, and Madison, James, The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, ed. Earle, Edward Mead (New York, n.d.); Gunn, John Alexander Wilson, “Interest Will Not Lie: A Seventeenth-Century Political Maxim,” Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (Oct.–Dec. 1968): 557; Stourzh, Gerald, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, Calif., 1970); Hirschman, Albert O., The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J., 1977).Google Scholar

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