My hope, however, is that more education journalists will soon, like Bacon, address the issue of overreliance on education that is detailed in my book.
My hope is that more education journalists will address the issue of overreliance on education.
As I have thought about the implications of my argument, I keep coming back to the physicist Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm shift.
A paradigm is a fundamental way of approaching the world, and, importantly, it is socially constructed. In other words, we have a collective framework for understanding the world, but that framework can change when we are presented with enough new information to destabilize our worldview. In that instance, a paradigm can change, opening the way for something new.
The paradigm we have been living in was constructed in the 1950s by Chicago school economists like Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker, who popularized the concept of human capital as the explanation for the increasingly prosperous and more equal economy that emerged after World War II (much more important, in reality, was the power of labor unions and a robust social welfare state).
We’ve been living in that world ever since as politicians, beginning with the Johnson administration, sought to alleviate poverty by focusing on the supposed deficiencies of individual working people. Never mind that most people in the 1960s who were impoverished — especially African Americans, as civil rights activists like Bayard Rustin pointed out — were in that position because they lived in cities where jobs and other social opportunities didn’t exist.
——-
more.