Description
Book SynopsisThe 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 lik
Trade Review
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.
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Table of ContentsIntroduction
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?
