Review: Making Workers by Katharyne Mitchell

I've been reading a lot for this project. By a lot, I mean dozens and dozens of books. Some have been better than others, and there are a few that have really stuck out to me and helped me form my analysis. Making Workers is one of those books. I've mentioned it in several articles already: here, here, and here. I also keep recommending it to pretty much everybody I talk to.

I thought it might be good to go over why I like this book so much, and share the notes I took on it. It's inspired me to think critically about education in ways I'd never considered before. If everybody who lives or works with children was familiar with the concepts in this book, I really do think the world would be a better place. It's that good!

Making Workers - Pluto Press

Shines a light on how modern education shapes students into becoming compliant workers.

Pluto PressKatharyne Mitchell

Review

Making Workers isn't just about education. It's about putting education in social, political, and geographical context. It explores many aspects of modern education for both children and adults. It connects discussions about neoliberal governance, the marketization of public education, multiculturalism, lifelong learning, philanthropy, and structural dynamics of oppression. Basically, it shows how no part of the US education system (or any education system, for that matter) operates in a vacuum. Mitchell's main argument is that we should analyze the educational system and the structures of childhood like we do other socioeconomic processes.

I'd done a lot of reading on education before encountering this book, but most of it was centered around practical approaches to pedagogy, not the structural and historical dynamics. Whatever structural critique I read was piecemeal: how racism and classism affects educational outcomes for students, how the privatization/school choice movement continues to hurt vulnerable kids. But this book was my first exposure to a totally different scale of thinking. Everything is connected to everything else:

• Neoliberal education reform is connected to Keynesian free trade agreements and the globalization of the economy
• Changing tax codes are connected to the types of play children have access to
• The rise of the "knowledge economy" is connected to the trend of gentle parenting
• The ethos of multiculturalism is connected to neoliberal state formation

Mitchell proposes that education is not only about career readiness but also about establishing citizenship norms. She also covers the specific strategies that private philanthropists use to undermine public education systems while purporting to improve them, and how this process ends up benefitting the rich at the expense of the poor.

Making Workers pulls together analyses of all these different aspects of education and economics and ties them together so neatly. Reading it was so satisfying because it made so many things click into place for me. Things I didn't understand about education (such as: why is school curriculum often so different from what we need in practice during adulthood?) suddenly made perfect sense.

Though the book didn't go into historical incarnations of childhood around the world, it inspired me to read more about them to better understand how we got here. It also cited so many other cool books that I've been working my way through, like Schooling in Capitalist America by Bowles and Gintis, Learning to Labor by Paul Willis, and Spatial Divisions of Labor by Doreen Massey. I've been so excited to look into more of the existing sociological explorations of these topics.

I only have a few criticisms about this book:

1. The calls to action at the end seem really narrow and inadequate compared to the massive scale of issues discussed throughout the text. I would've liked to see more examples/suggestions of how mass organizations can mitigate the harm caused by neoliberal reform.
2. The book is centered on an imperial core perspective. Mitchell acknowledges this limitation at the beginning of the book. I think her approach could be applied to cultures around the world and throughout history, and I for one would love to read more work like that.
3. It's written by an academic for (what seems like) an audience limited mostly to other academics. I haven't seen this book recommended anywhere towards parents, educators, or any mass audience - I only came across it by chance during a Pluto Press ebook sale! I really wish these holistic discussions were mainstream. Like I said, I think the world would be a better place if they were!

Overall, though, it's a fantastic text. When I finished reading it for the first time, this is what I jotted down in my notes:

Making Workers will be a cornerstone of my historiography/sociological research; it has changed my perspective to the core. The book is so densely packed with analysis and examples that I had to keep putting it down every other paragraph just to think about all the implications. Very, very well done, and it gives me lots of room to expand on the core thesis.

About the Author

Katharyne Mitchell is the Dean of Social Sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology with a broad variety of research areas, including but not limited to

• Education, Neoliberalism, and Democracy
• Migration and Spaces of Sanctuary
• Critical Mapping and Youth Social Engagement

More information about her work can be found on her website:

Katharyne Mitchell | UCSC

Katharyne Mitchell

Notes

These are the notes I took on the book. Disclaimer: I took notes on what was new to me, and I skipped over the topics that I was already familiar with. I hope they're useful anyway!