School was engineered to serve the economy and social order. It wasn’t made for the benefit of kids and families, as those people would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions, it lasts. At the time of the education act in 1870 it was argued that the expansion of state provided elementary education was vital to Britain’s economic and industrial progress

The dynamics that make forced schooling detrimental to healthy human development aren’t difficult to spot: the work in classrooms isn’t significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual, it doesn’t contribute to solving problems encountered in actual life.

Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a person. Our economy is managed or driven by people who believe the difference between Coke a

...something that some people do to others for their own good, moulding and shaping them, and trying to make them learn what they think they ought to know.

Ellul, forty-three years ago, said: "education no longer has a humanist end or any value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians." We are in the midst of this change in the relationship between society and school, one in which the idea of "good citizen" now merely means an employed person who has been certified by the schools as competent.

Some topics in this essay:
Tufnell Press, According Marxist, Race Holt, Ethnicity Gender, Board Education, Europe Norway, Bourdieu Passeron, John Holt, Francois Lyotard, Introduction School, middle class, giddens 1993, willis 1977, bourdieu passeron, social justice, school system, bourdieu passeron 1997, capitalist society, quality education, passeron 1997, affirmative action, matter type education, children matter type, type education consume, consume guarantee actually,