School in class society: competition, but please for everyone

Education is seen as a panacea for social ills. This is also how the current trend in the education system towards the fight against discrimination of all kinds can be understood: “discrimination based on social origin”, also known as classism. The aim is to guarantee more participation, opportunities for everyone, more justice. It is said that the education system can take care of all of this. Because education is the key to social participation, maturity, but also to success and social advancement. Education can open up perspectives and enable each individual to develop his or her talents.

nd.DieWoche – our weekly newsletter

With our weekly newsletter nd.DieWoche look at the most important topics of the week and read them Highlights our Saturday edition on Friday. Get your free subscription here.

At this point, however, the educational idealists find a contradiction between the possibility of education and its current reality. It has been proven for decades that the German school and university system in particular does not dissolve social inequality, but rather reproduces and cements it. The factual finding is that working-class children are disproportionately represented in higher education. This finding is presented as a criticism of the education system, with the accusation that education policy does not ensure that working-class children have the same opportunities in mainstream schools as children of academics. Subsequently, education policy is criticized for failing to do something that is actually its task and purpose. What is not criticized is what educational policy actually does tutor even Why she does that. Instead, the criticism hits upon an ideal that cannot be found in reality.

Because of social advancement

All sorts of statistics show us that the level of education of the parents actually has a significant influence on the children’s schooling. Here, critics of classism discover a flawed construction of the education system. Your criticism of the education system is based on a social criticism that applies a certain moral standard. It goes like this: It is found that there is a gap from rich to poor – and accordingly a gap from well-paid academic jobs to low-paid jobs for workers. The critics of classism criticize this as unfair and formulate the demand that everyone, and especially the children of workers, should have better chances of getting good jobs in this system. This implicit standard is used in order to derive consequences for the education system: one wants to enable “advancement through education” – through equal opportunities, and more recently also equal opportunities.

But the same problem applies to both demands: this criticism ignores its own judgment about society, which provided the reason for the criticism in the first place. The criticized gap between rich and poor is tacitly affirmed, as the realization of more opportunities for advancement for working-class children would logically result in the decline of academic children. Because from a social perspective, all jobs in the existing, capitalist-established professional hierarchy have to be filled – even the many crappy ones.

Let’s take the standard of equal opportunities seriously – what good is it anyway? According to critics of classism, working-class children have fewer chances of advancement in education because the state education system does not provide equal opportunities: for example, due to faulty selection mechanisms, especially the prejudices of so-called gatekeepers. As a result, many children are assigned to schools that are attributed to their supposed social position. By raising awareness of classism, especially at so-called educational thresholds, it would be possible to ensure that children would no longer be sorted according to classist attributions.

Sorting is not an issue

The desired goal is for students to be sorted into schools with forms of learning that are “suitable” for them. And here, an awareness of classism is once again making it legal for the school system to be allowed to make differences! Critics of classism only want to bring about the abolition of so-called irrelevant evaluation standards. For example, the name, language behavior or knowledge of a parental home that is not very cognitively stimulating or supportive should not play a role. (By the way: All of this definitely plays a major role in the ability of students to do well in the school system – and will not be changed by later “anti-classist” measures!)

What should ultimately be strengthened here is a real, more efficient and equal opportunity society. An education system in which – completely without discrimination – the only meritocratic standard that counts in evaluation is: earnings based on work performance. The constant competition, the constant competition of all against all with the aim of the necessary exclusion of many from higher education in order to be able to assign them to the lower levels of the professional hierarchy in accordance with their factually and objectively determined level of performance – that is justice. The basis of this standard of fairness is the idea of ​​the student who is willing to learn and perform and who can do it if they just try hard enough.

Meanwhile, the constant effort, constant competition and incessant competition lead to feelings of guilt, humiliation, exclusion, dissatisfaction and frustration for the majority of learners. If this is done without discrimination, at the end of the day the same number of students will still be left humiliated, excluded, dissatisfied and frustrated. The feeling of guilt will be even greater, because in a truly fair, purely performance-based competition, the only reason for failure in comparison with the others is personal failure: I can’t do enough, I don’t want enough, I’m not good enough. Inequalities – learning deficits, financial deficits and the like – that already existed before entering the school system are ignored and, so to speak, legitimized. Everything was done fairly, in other words, completely fairly!

Meritokratische Ideologie

In reality, the bourgeois education system does the ideological, functional preparatory work of not only accepting the class relationship, but also internalizing both the competitive relationship with other people and the guilt for one’s own failures. An education system that organizes learning as a competitive event with equal opportunities and necessarily produces a mass of educational failures automatically ensures that the blame for failure is systematically attributed to itself. The objective achievement of the anti-classist theory here is simply to make more usable resources available in general competition.

The meritocratic ideal – an understanding of justice in the sense of fair distribution through individual, even equal opportunity performance – is an ideological legitimation of the existing conditions that serves capitalism. It is precisely on this level that criticism of classism operates as a moral ideal. Therefore, the development of classism criticism beyond an anti-discriminatory position and towards an anti-capitalist position is necessary. Without a sustainable, economically meaningful concept of class, without an analysis of the production process, ownership and exploitation relationships, the causes of classism cannot be taken into account.

Subscribe to the “nd”

Being left is complicated.
We keep track!

With our digital promotional subscription you can read all issues of »nd« digitally (nd.App or nd.Epaper) for little money at home or on the go.
Subscribe now!