the big ideas

We Don't Need No Education

Public education is facing a reckoning in the US. As we're experiencing its collapse, now is a great time to review from the beginning: what is it actually for?

chorui halim

18 Sep 2025 — 15 min read

The state of US public education is so dire right now that, just thinking about it, it's hard not to despair. The system has been starved of funding since the 1980s, especially in low-income and urban communities. Teachers are vastly overburdened and underpaid, while children struggle to keep up with ever-mounting workloads and testing requirements. Public funds are diverted to subsidize the education of private schoolgoers. Chronic absenteeism exploded after the onset of COVID, and while rates are declining, they are still much higher than they were before the pandemic. And to top it all off, the Trump administration is working to shut down the entire federal Department of Education by 2029. The system has been stretched impossibly thin for decades - it's only a matter of time before it finally snaps.

A half-century of neoliberal education policy is coming to a head. It's been 42 years since the federal report A Nation at Risk kicked off a large-scale movement to reform education through the marketization of the school system. The process continued with programs such as No Child Left Behind (under Bush) and Race to the Top (under Obama). This crisis isn't new, but the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of AI both introduced massive stress to the system just in the last several years.

But for all the high-profile discussions about education - school choice, phone bans, reading wars, LGBT content, sex ed, gun violence, etc. - there's one major foundational topic that we hardly ever cover in detail: the reason for schooling in the first place. So today, let's go back to the very basics. Why do we have schools? What do they really teach? And, most importantly, why should we care?

"Is this going to be on the test?"

"Why do we have to learn this stuff?"

"Am I ever going to use this in real life?"

When I was a kid, I remember other students asking questions like these pretty often. We'd get a variety of responses from teachers - mostly exasperation, sometimes impassioned yet condescending polemics about the development of a well-rounded citizenry. Sometimes students would come up with their own reasoning for why we were in school: one popular theory was that Henry Ford developed the modern education system to produce more compliant and efficient factory workers. None of the available explanations fully made sense to me - not that it mattered. We still had to do our problem sets.

Now, as an adult, I think questions like these are some of the most important things kids can ask. Education is a massive amount of work for kids: an average of 6.64 hours a day, 180 days a year. It's unpaid, compulsory labor, often extracted under the threat of state violence. If they have to spend at least 13 years doing it, students should at least be able to ask why they're learning what they're learning.

Thankfully, there is a pretty simple (if circular) answer: the role of education under capitalism is to reproduce capitalism. This view is easier to understand if you're already familiar with materialist analysis and social reproduction theory. Basically, capitalism seeks to sustain itself from generation to generation, and education is part of that process. As workers become unable to work (due to age, disability, or any other reason), new workers must be trained to replace them. Similarly, as capitalists lose their capacity to manage their businesses, they need younger people to be able to take over seamlessly. Crucially, it isn't enough for the number of people in each category to stay stable. The relationship between the two groups - specifically, the system of domination over & extraction of labor from the working class by the owning class - needs to be maintained in order for capitalism to persist. Through education, people learn the logic of capitalism, learn their place in the hierarchy of labor and ownership, and learn how to live within the boundaries that the system presents. As you can imagine, this is a pretty complicated process.

Like with most systems, it's useful to analyze education at both micro and macro scales. Education serves individuals and societies in specific, complex, intertwining ways. It often operates differently at its various levels: primary (K-5), secondary (6-12), and tertiary/post-secondary (university). Let's look at how it works from each perspective:

Individual (Micro) Level

For individuals, the primary purposes of education are job readiness and citizenship development. The citizenship development aspect begins at kindergarten (or earlier!), while job readiness skills are introduced more gradually, eventually becoming the primary focus throughout secondary and tertiary education.

Job Readiness

Job readiness is pretty self-explanatory - it's what most people think about when it comes to education. The job readiness process begins in primary school by exposing children to a wide variety of career options and encouraging them to imagine themselves in those roles. (The roles that are presented as viable options depend significantly on class, race, and gender.) In primary school, children also start learning the foundational skills that will be necessary in any job: reading, writing, and basic arithmetic. Throughout secondary and tertiary education, students learn more and more specialized job skills, often differentiating into tracks (STEM, economics, humanities, etc.) based on their career of choice. Employers can handle some of the highly technical training for specific roles, but the scope of that tends to be very narrow. The education system provides the broad base for people to get started, as well as the opportunity to specialize or retrain.

One of the most valuable services the education system provides to employers is the opportunity to reduce professional training costs. It does this by pushing those costs onto individuals/households (in the form of tuition) or the general public (in the form of taxes). If employers were fully responsible for training their technical workers, then they would have pay for workers' wages for the duration of the training as well as the cost of the training itself. This would be cost-prohibitive for most businesses - but even for those that can afford it, pushing that cost onto others helps increase their profits, at least in the short term. This process also helps enforce class boundaries between professions: for example, medical schools cost thousands of dollars to apply to and hundreds of thousands to attend, so medical students are disproportionately wealthy.

Citizenship Development

Citizenship development is a little less intuitive. Under capitalism, the skills employers require from workers go beyond just the minimum necessary to execute basic job functions. To integrate seamlessly into capitalist production (and, really, into society in general), workers must also aspire to be "upstanding citizens." When I'm talking about citizenship here, I don't mean it in the literal, legal, US-passport-holder sense. I'm referring to the sociopolitical ideal: the group of characteristics that make someone an ideal member of the working class. Citizenship development for workers has several aspects, including: labor alienation, white middle-class cultural norms/values, and acceptance of sanctioned violence.

Labor alienation is a key aspect of capitalist production. Children don't start out being alienated from their labor; schools teach them how to do it. When workers become alienated from their labor, they learn how:

To work regardless of whether they want to
To work regardless of whether they feel like their work is worthwhile/fulfilling
To disregard their physiological and emotional needs, especially if they get in the way of being productive
To put the interests of their employer above their own

For white-collar professions (and many blue-collar ones), workers also need to demonstrate the ability to espouse white middle-class cultural norms and values. These include, but are not limited to, the acceptance/valorization of:

Patriotism, paternalism, and legitimacy of authority
Rugged individualism
Legality vs. criminality
Masculinity and hierarchical sexgendering
Eurocentric cultural pursuits such as classical music, opera, ballet, fine art, and the Western literary canon
Punctuality, clock-based time, and "white time"
"Apolitical" professionalism and civility

Finally, to be a Good American Citizen, workers need to be okay with a lot of violence. Most people don't recognize this explicitly - many will say that they are opposed to it. But what they usually mean is interpersonal violence. The engine of the United States, however, is a different kind of violence: structural violence. It was the basis of the founding of the country (the dispossession of land and natural resources from indigenous people), and it continues to be the basis of its operation. Structural violence is inherent to the policing and prison system, to immigration enforcement and border protection, to means-tested welfare programs, to the hierarchy of sexgender. It includes the violence that capitalism inflicts on the working class, of course, but also the violence of:

imperialism
colonialism
racism
sexism
ableism
homophobia
transphobia
intersexism
childism
and so on and so forth.

Schools provide a testing ground for replicating these systems of domination in miniature. In these highly authoritarian settings, children learn their place among various hierarchies of power: class, race, sexgender, ability, et cetera. As they learn about their relative positions, they also practice dominating others. This is why school bullying/harassment dynamics tend to reflect larger patterns of structural violence. This is also why bullying/harassment is so hard to eradicate in school settings - we can say all we want that "we don't treat people that way," but the kids know better than that.

"Being okay" with violence doesn't just mean gleefully cosigning it, though plenty of US citizens do that too. Many liberals critique the violence of the systems mentioned above. Crucially, however, that critique never involves organized, wide-scale action to effectively deconstruct those systems. Instead, they dedicate all their efforts to the electoral system to make incremental change, which either gets rolled back the next administration or works to further entrench the systems of violence it claims to oppose. Basically, a certain level of distaste is generally acceptable to express, as long as it doesn't actually threaten the status quo - and especially if it reinforces the legitimacy of the electoral system. For children, participation in the electoral process is limited to campaigning for issues/candidates or writing letters to representatives.

For the most part, citizenship development isn't something that is explicitly enforced. But you won't get very far in the working world if you aren't intimately familiar with all of these concepts. Fail enough times to conform to these expectations, and you risk ostracization, unemployment, homelessness, incarceration, or death.

Societal (Macro) Level

On that cheerful note, let's look at the role of education on a broader scale. In her book Making Workers: Radical Geographies of Education (2018), Katharyne Mitchell asserts that the two main purposes of education are social reproduction and state formation (pp. 46-47).

I already explained the basic concept of capitalist social reproduction: it's the process of maintaining the working class, the owning class, and the dynamics between them from generation to generation. But there's another key function of education within social reproduction: social management. This argument was first thoroughly developed by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis in their book Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (1968). The education system works to:

Legitimate authority, inequality, and domination
Defuse explosive class relations
Deliver "appropriate" societal norms and expectations

Basically, whenever class relations get heated, the education system helps cool them down by offering a path out of poverty. It maintains the illusion of a meritocracy - the idea that if you work hard enough and smart enough, if you dedicate yourself to excelling academically, you can overcome class barriers regardless of your original circumstances. Most importantly, this aspect of education works to individualize the problem of poverty. You don't need to organize with your fellow workers or residents for better working and living conditions; you can achieve them yourself by going back to school. Inversely, if you haven't been able to escape the conditions of poverty, it's because you didn't work hard enough (or are facing some other natural limitation). In this sense, education is charged with fixing economic inequality not just on a national scale, but an international one.

State Formation

Regarding the role of education in state formation, Mitchell says in Making Workers (pp. 47):

National education systems were an integral tool in creating political loyalty, operating to develop, manage, and sustain the types of myths and narratives of the nation crucial to its initial and ongoing unification. In this view, state schooling was not just about the creation of a literate population or a trained workforce, but was implicated more generally in the creation of a particular kind of state subject - one schooled in the norms and proper codes of behavior related to national citizenship.

The process of state formation is the reason for citizenship development on the individual level. While on an individual level, the main concerns are about "fitting in" in the workplace or in general society, the concerns on the state level are more complex. Governments have to know how to direct the attention and activities of their citizens: how to get them to feel patriotic, how to inspire them to action, how to calm them down during a crisis or leverage their anger. Central to all of this is the process of mythmaking: establishing historical and cultural narratives. There are multiple systems that support this process, including the media and religious institutions, but the education system is the most widespread and powerful of them all.

Finally, the biggest function of the education system with regarding state formation is the removal of children from public life for the purpose of civilizing them. Before the industrial revolution and the birth of capitalism, children were integrated into public life. They would perform agricultural & domestic labor or apprentice for expert artisans. They also had a lot of autonomy: ability to participate in their local economies, freedom of movement, participation in festivals. The rise of industrialization overlapped with the rise of the modern education system - as adults shifted from agricultural labor to industrial wage labor, children shifted out of public and into schools. The "civilizing" aspect of school was especially pronounced for indigenous, Black, immigrant, and poor children. And of course, the specific norms and ideals taught about how to be a "good citizen" differed by race, gender, class, (dis)ability, region, and time period.

From Schooling in Capitalist America (pp. 37-39):

Since its inception in the United States, the public-school system has been seen as a method of disciplining children in the interest of producing a properly subordinate adult population. Sometimes conscious and explicit, and at other times a natural emanation from the conditions of dominance and subordinacy prevalent in the economic sphere, the theme of social control pervades educational thought and policy. The forms of school discipline, the position of the teacher, and the moral conception of the child have all changed over the years, but the overriding objective has remained. [...] Children, it appeared, were ungodly, altogether too playful, lacking in seriousness, and ill-disposed toward work.

[...]

While the education practice of regimentation of children has persisted, the fundamentalist conception of a child as immoral or savage has given way, through various stages, to a more appreciative view. To modern educators, the child appears as the primitive embodiment of the good and the natural - the noble savage, if you will. Children are spontaneous and joyful, unpredictable and trusting - traits to be cherished but sadly evanescent in the path toward maturity.

At the same time, the educator's view of the family has changed. Once the trusted engine of moral training for youth, to which the school was considered a complement and ballast, the family increasingly appears in the writings of educators as the source of the child's inadequacy. Thus in the thought of the culture of poverty and cultural deprivation advocates, the school has been elevated to the status of family surrogate in the well-engineered Society. The social roots of this transformed concept of the family-school relationship have little to do with any alteration in family structure, and less to do with any heightening of the public morality. The impetus stems rather from the professional educator's profound mistrust of, and even fear or, the families of black and poor children, and in an earlier period, of Irish and other immigrant families. Nor is this mistrust alien to the logic of social control. For all its nobility, the noble savage remains savage, and integration into the world requires regimentation.

The most striking testimonial to the hegemony of the social-control ideology is perhaps its clear primacy even among those who opposed such obvious manifestations of the authoritarian classroom as corporal punishment and teacher-centered discussion The most progressive of progressive educators have shared the common commitment to maintaining ultimate top-down control over the child's activities. Indeed, much of the educational experimentation of the past century can be viewed as attempting to broaden the discretion and deepen the involvement of the child while maintaining hierarchical control over the ultimate processes and outcomes of the educational encounter. The goal has been to enhance student motivation while withholding effective participation in the setting of priorities.

Y'all, do me a favor and just read the whole book. It was published in 1968 but every word is still applicable to our current situation. Everything changes, but nothing ever changes.

Why does any of this matter?

We can't understand even half of our current moment in the US until we understand the role of education. If we want to understand:

Why half the country voted for Trump against their own economic self-interest
The erosion of the American middle class despite higher rates of college education
How bullying and sexual harassment evolves into assault and domestic violence
Why trans people are being targeted with violence despite comprising only 1-3% of the population
How AI actually affects student learning

Then we need to understand the education system.

And most importantly, we need to do better. Fascism is rising around the globe, and white supremacy is enjoying a renaissance in the West. It's not enough to pretend that teaching kids tolerance, love, kindness, media literacy, critical thinking, etc. through the public education system (even a well-funded public education system) is enough to fight back. It's not enough to sit back and bemoan "anti-intellectualism" without fully understanding why various demographics distrust various educational institutions. We can't keep pretending that education can solve wealth inequality on a mass scale. We can't "school choice" our way out of a cratering economy.

This is nothing less than a fight for the survival of the working class, including and especially our children. We have to take this seriously. That means not only evaluating the role of the US education system in getting us to this point, but also committing ourselves to building a new system from scratch. One that puts children's needs first, not capital's. One that enables children to leave the shadowy margins of society and rejoin the public sphere.

One that reproduces the society that we actually want to see.