STAYING IN CONTROL; OR, WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT PUBLIC EDUCATION TO ACHIEVE?

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STAYING IN CONTROL; OR, WHAT DO WE REALLY WANTPUBLIC EDUCATION TO ACHIEVE?

Yuli (Yael) Tamir

President, Shenkar College, Israel

Abstract. In this essay, Yuli Tamir argues that the growing interest in public education in the developedworld in general and in the United States in particular is grounded in a fear of losing global hegemony.The most rational approach to slowing down these hegemonic shifts is to empower public educationand allow the neglected human capital vested in presently excluded communities to flourish. However,moves to improve public education are met by the unspoken though persistent resentment of those whofear the transformative power of education and would like to preserve the present social order. HereTamir reviews some of the moves commonly taken to preserve these ‘‘social gaps’’ and concludes bysuggesting that alongside vocal public support for school reforms promoting equal opportunities, silentyet very effective social strategies have developed that undo the benefits of such reforms and maintainthe present social gaps.

Public education is on everyone’s mind these days. People in Washington thinkabout public education; people on Wall Street think about public education; theWorld Bank, the OECD, not to mention the president, the secretary of education,members of congress, governors, teachers, parents, and even some students allthink about public education and vow to make it better, much better.

This seems to be a welcome development. People care about future generationsand aspire to secure for them a more affluent, advanced, professional, clean, andhealthy world. Because the line connecting the present and the future passesthrough the classroom, the classroom is placed at the center of attention. This,one may think, is the beginning of a new age of enlightenment in which thefostering of an educated person becomes a common goal.

Yet the hope and optimism associated with the Enlightenment are not charac-teristic of our times. Ours is an age of instability and fear. Education is on our mindsnot because we search to revive a debate (central to Western civilization, fromPlato to John Dewey) over human development and the nature of virtue, or becausewe wish to combat the closure of the American mind; rather, education is at theforefront of our thoughts these days because we would like to revive an economicand political state of affairs that is disappearing. People feel their world is changing,and that arouses in them a sense of urgency, of a crisis that calls for action.

Public education becomes the focus of attention, for it is seen as the last resortof a Western civilization in decline, desperately trying to preserve its power andsecure its future. The slow but constant emergence of new (or, more precisely,emerging) civilizations in the East that successfully compete for resources, jobs,and consequently power spreads a sense of insecurity. For those who follow thehistory of education, the association between a crisis of hegemony and attemptsto improve public education rings a bell, echoing the paranoia that motivatedthe race to the moon, the 1983 report A Nation at Risk issued by the NationalCommission for Excellence in Education, and the policy of ‘‘back to basics’’

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that followed.1 It’s back — only now the Asian lions have replaced the Sovietbear.

People start talking about the quality of public education (rather than about thequality of their own child’s education) when they fear that their nation is at risk.The semirational, semiprimordial fear over the fate of one’s nation revives the con-cern about the collective. Suddenly a somewhat repressed and forgotten nationalistvoice is being heard. People talk about ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them,’’ our jobs, our future, ourpower, our hegemony. Even the most liberal social forces take the following line:We have responsibilities to the world, but first and foremost we have responsibil-ities to ourselves, our children; we must think about the next generations, aboutour common fate. If we will not ‘‘out-educate the world,’’ President Barack Obamawarns it will ‘‘out-compete America.’’ We are therefore in the age of competition.

Fear — collective fear — has always provided the strongest motivation fornational actions. And the fear is real, because what seemed so natural and constantin the recent past is nowadays shaky and uncertain. Shifts of hegemony are anatural part of our personal and collective life; logic tells us they are unavoidable,but psychologically they are hard to accept. Fearing the loss of power and authorityis a common human feeling. Parents experience it when their children grow up,priests experience it when the church loses its grip on followers, white peopleexperience it when the power of people of color increases, and Americans feel itwhen they see ancient civilizations awaken from a long slumber.

When we become conscious (and fearful) of a transformation, it has alreadygone too far to be prevented. It is at this precise moment that people develop awish, or an illusion, that things could be returned to their former state of affairs. IfMarie Antoinette had survived the guillotine, she would have been able to teachus a lesson: When the angry crowd gathers outside the palace, it’s too late to offerthem cakes; the ancien regime is over. World order as we know it is undergoinga change. One must therefore try to control and monitor the change, minimizingthe damage and taking advantage of new opportunities.

In moments of transformation — the spread of a new religion, the formation ofa new state or nation, the establishment of a national army, the emergence of a newkind of economy, or the formation of a new democratic regime — public educationtakes center stage. At such moments of structural social shifts, demands for animproved public education system come from the elites. The elites take notice ofthe masses when they fear they may be stripped of their power. Attempting tosecure the supremacy of their religious, national, social, political, and economic

1. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for EducationalReform (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1983).

YULI (YAEL) TAMIR is Israel’s former Minister of Education and the President of ShenkarCollege of Art, Engineering and Design, 12 Anna Frank Street, Ramat Gan 52526, Israel; e-mail<[email protected]>. Her primary areas of scholarship are political philosophy and theory ofeducation.

Tamir Staying in Control 397

ideology, the elites discover that they are dependent on the beliefs, skills, andknow-how of the masses — whom they want to educate in order to foster in themtheir own values and preferences.

In the good old days, the elites ignored the educationally dispossessed intheir communities. They believed that globalization turns the world into theirplayground, that their human capital would allow them to invent and invest usingthe whole world as the sphere of their entrepreneurship. Their goal was to bringtogether human capital trained on one continent, financial capital accumulatedon others, and cheap labor inhabiting a third in order to develop new economicopportunities. They thus aimed to create a global free market that would allowthem to enjoy the fruits of their skills and resources regardless of national bordersor civic affiliations.

With the collapse of the Soviet bear, the world seemed secure. Some workersindeed became unemployed and major industries were transferred to the East, butthere was an influx of cheap commodities, and new occupational opportunitiesseemed to compensate for the loss of other, less attractive jobs. Globalization,it was assumed, affected ‘‘poor countries and the poor in rich countries.’’ Whenasking who may be harmed by globalization, social thinkers concentrated on‘‘working people in the United States who may be losing their jobs, farmersmaneuvered off their land, city dwellers who many have to accommodate waves oflandless immigrants.’’2 Globalization thus seemed to threaten only the displacedand the educationally disempowered. The elites and the middle classes seemed lessvulnerable to its negative effects, and they compensated themselves by excessiveconsumerism. Even if you earn less, it was argued, you can still purchase muchmore, and the commodities you purchase make you ‘‘feel’’ richer than ever. Obliv-ious to the consequences of globalization, the middle classes joined the elites inenjoying and protecting the consumer culture made possible by the new economy.

The developed world in general and the United States in particular believedthat they were going to be on the winning side of global processes permanently.Globalization, Peter Berger argued, implies for some ‘‘the promise of an interna-tional civil society, conducive to a new era of peace and democratization. Forothers, it implies the threat of an American economic and political hegemony,with its cultural consequences being a homogenized world resembling a sort ofmetastasized Disneyland.’’3 In other words, it was assumed that if you were onthe right side — namely, the American side — globalization offers nothing butprofit, a world that ‘‘speaks’’ American and produces commodities that serve theAmerican way of life.

Consequently, most of the objections to the process of globalization centeredon the victimization of developing countries. There was some truth in these

2. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds., The Case Against the Global Economy (San Francisco,California: Sierra Club Books, 1996), 5.

3. Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington, Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in theContemporary World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2.


descriptions (and there is still much to be said about the abuse of Africa); but at thesame time, in other parts of the world globalization created incentives not only toconsume and supply cheap labor but also to create local industrial infrastructureand to cultivate human capital.

The results of such moves were clearly reflected in international evaluationand tests.4 On the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)exam, for example, traditional Western elite nations did not perform as well as theyhad expected, or at the level to which they aspired; instead, the results indicatedthat they are lagging behind in the area of education. Aside from Canada, all the topperformers on this assessment were peripheral Western states (Finland, Estonia,and Australia, for instance). Furthermore, the results signaled the emergence ofnew educational empires, most of which (with the exception of Japan) belong tothe Chinese civilization (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and China).

It suddenly became clear that the process of globalization is leading to unex-pected consequences. Globalization can no longer be seen as American colonialismwith an economic face, a way to control and exploit markets and individuals whoare unable to strike back. In our time and age, globalization has regained itsoriginal meaning: an open globe in which power travels across borders in differentdirections.

When such educational and structural developments became evident, marketspreviously seen solely through the prism of economic opportunities became poten-tial competitors. The West discovered that it can be ‘‘out-competed,’’ that otherscan produce qualified, well-educated human power that has an advantage over notonly manual workers on the assembly line in Detroit or in a call center in Texas butalso doctors, engineers, and computer scientists. This is a new kind of competitionthat touches the heart of the middle class and shatters the correlation betweeneducation and income. Since the Industrial Revolution, the education-economicequation has been quite simple: the more you learn, the more you earn. Giventhis, the way to deal with global competition seemed clear: investing in bettereducation that will allow the middle classes in the West to provide the kind ofservices that the less educated masses in the rest of the world are unable to provide.However, nowadays the educated masses in the West confront a competitor — agrowing mass of educated people in the East who can equal the quality of theirwork, yet there are many more of them and they require less in the way of income.The emergence of such a worthy competitor means that globalization embodies athreat to a wider range of social classes; from the very poor and uneducated to the

4. The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is the largest and most ambitiousinternational study of student achievement ever conducted. In 1994–1995, it was conducted at fivegrade levels (the third, fourth, seventh, and eighth grades, and the final year of secondary school) inmore than forty countries. Students were tested in mathematics and science. Altogether, TIMSS testedand gathered contextual data for more than half a million students and administered questionnaires tothousands of teachers and school principals. The TIMSS results were released in 1996 and 1997 in aseries of reports.


middle-class college graduate, no one can rest assured that he or she will remainon the winning side of the process.

Suddenly the future of the developed world seems much less glamorous.Members of the middle classes — who grew up believing that if they acquiredan education they could expect to have occupational security, to be reassured ofa future safer and more prosperous than that of their parents — have begun torealize that despite their efforts, they may be exposed to the risks of the lowerclasses: unemployment, poverty, and homelessness. Even those who may still findjobs are likely to lose the ability to acquire those luxuries that became necessitiesduring the last century.

A new class of the educated poor is emerging, composed of college graduateswho are economically powerless. The educated poor may be employed, yet theyhold part-time jobs, or jobs that do not suit their qualifications. All of them earnnot only less than they expected, but also less than is necessary to maintainthe kind of lifestyle they experienced growing up. If, in the future, as PresidentObama promises, all children will graduate from college, this class will keep ongrowing.

A survey carried out recently among 1,200 young adults between the ages of18 and 29 reveals that 39 percent of respondents are dependent on the financialsupport of their parents; 33 percent live with their parents or relatives; 32 percentfind it difficult to balance their budget and only 16 percent reported that they livecomfortably. The average young American begins his or her adult life with a debtof $21,900, mostly for the education he or she acquired.

Within the next half-century, processes of automation and computerizationwill replace receptionists in hotels and airlines, computer analysts, and doctors;those professional positions for which a qualified human agent will still benecessary may travel eastward as Indian doctors and Chinese scientists replaceWestern ones. The pressure to reduce the cost of jobs demanding academicqualifications will rise, work conditions will worsen, and the class of the educatedpoor will expand. In short, the global tsunami has reached the middle classes inthe West and threatens to sweep them away.

The opposite process is taking place on the opposite side of the world. InAsia, middle classes are forming at a pace quicker than ever; they understand thatthey need to move from an economy focused on unskilled cheap manufacturingto an economy focused on highly skilled professional industries. Consequently,Asian economies retain the availability of a cheap unskilled and semi-skilledworkforce that can attract Western investment, yet they also support localinitiatives and are building a powerhouse of human capital. They are expandingtheir education in general and their higher education in particular, and theyare establishing world-class research institutions in order to ‘‘out-compete’’ theWest. It is now predicted that ‘‘by mid-century Asian universities will stand


among the best universities in the world.’’5 The West is losing its grip onexcellence.

This process is not new; it has been gathering momentum in recent years.Examining the patterns of growth in Asian educational systems, one witnesses fastand constant growth. True, the initial starting point was very low and there wasmuch to be accomplished. In Japan postsecondary education rose between 1960and mid-1990 from 9 percent to 42 percent. In South Korea the increase over thesame period of time was even more dramatic: from 5 percent to over 50 percent.6

The pace of growth in China and India has been slower than in Japan and SouthKorea, but it has been constant. In the future, growth rates will slow down andeducation in Asia will reach a plateau similar to that reached by many Westerncountries; by then, however, tens of millions of educated professionals will jointhe global market, and it is quite uncertain whether an equivalent number ofwell-paying jobs will be created.

Many of the jobs being transferred eastward nowadays are those of semi-qualified workers as well as professional employees. ‘‘Remember,’’ Microsoftpeople say to their staff, ‘‘in China when you are one in a million — there are 1,300other people like you.’’7 Numerically, Asia has the advantage over the West. Thesense of frustration accompanying this realization motivates the present debateover education. Something must be done to slow down the shift of hegemony; thatmagic panacea is called public education.

The growing awareness that the global world is giving rise to more complicatedforms of competition and exploitation and is creating a multitude of centersof power whose members are qualified to play different roles — investors andinventors, businesspeople, professionals, and manual workers alike — transformsthe picture of the future for those who used to think of their social position asprotected. A rift has been created between a thin elite secure in its power and themiddle classes, between those for whom poverty is a very distant fear and thosewho feel its presence daily. It is this loss of personal security that motivates peopleto adopt a more national pattern of thinking: We must do it together, they claim,realizing that they may not be able to do it on their own.

In a strange way, then, global competition has proven more successful inraising inclusive awareness than the nationalistic discourse. A growing awarenessof unifying risks, rather than of shared values or norms, seems to have been moreeffective in promoting public education as a national priority.

5. Richard C. Levin, ‘‘Top of the Class: The Rise of Asia’s Universities,’’ Foreign Affairs 89, no. 3(2010): 64.

6. Ibid.

7. Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York:Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 265.


National Planning — National Investments

Realizing that their competitors have changed the rules of the gameby introducing centralized, state-guided and state-funded educational reforms,Western states have been forced to question their own educational strategies.When the emerging nations (no longer properly defined as developing nations)start to strive for a better global position by investing heavily in the formationof an intellectual infrastructure — by setting a higher threshold of competence,learning skills, creativity, and inventiveness, and by fostering new educational,industrial, and commercial elites — the nature of the future global division oflabor becomes less clearly defined than before.

The developed world is thus beginning to acknowledge the fact that questionsthat seemed irrelevant in the context of an individualistic vision of a free globalmarket are now of central importance. There is greater recognition that when, inthe East, governmental planning intervenes in the market and influences patternsof investment, research, and education, the free market, on its own, cannot providean appropriate response.8

In this setting, international evaluations of different fields of education areseen not only as reports on the present state of education but also as a reflectionof the ongoing educational shift of power, a prelude to a new world structure. Thepublication of a set of international tests and evaluations sketches a picture of aworld that is flat but nationally bounded. They remind us that though knowledge,commodities, and financial resources travel across borders, the wealth of nationsis built from within; and, furthermore, that one’s personal fate, health, longevity,and educational and occupational opportunities are context-related. Residents ofpoor, less educated nations have more restricted and less promising life chancesthan those of wealthy nations.

True, one could immigrate. One could follow money or success to findnew opportunities in the newly emerging global centers. Yet the vast major-ity of the world’s inhabitants live in their home countries. A United Nationssurvey found that in 2005 there were nearly 191 million international migrantsworldwide — only 3 percent of the world’s population. Sixty percent of theseimmigrants live in developed countries; those in the less developed countries aremainly refugees.

Looking at these data, the middle classes are reminded that they are far morerooted than they may have assumed. Their personal fate cannot be dissociatedfrom that of their society. They must therefore think collectively; as a nation,they must seek a competitive advantage.

8. To be sure, despite the discourse on free trade, Western governments did intervene in the market onboth local and global levels. Indeed, some critics of free trade have long claimed that the West ‘‘exported’’invisible hand theories while acting in protectionist ways to defend its own markets. One could claimthat the enormous debts the United States has accumulated are the result of a trade imbalance thatbenefited the West for a few decades and that is now becoming a commercial and political liability.


Assuming that ‘‘the best employers the world over will be looking for the mostcompetent, most creative and most innovative people on the face of the earth andwill be willing to pay them top dollar for their services,’’9 it is clear that thosenations that concentrate on developing their collective human capital will gainmore resources and more opportunities. Fellow nationals must therefore competetogether — fighting to expand the reach of qualitative education to include all thelatent potential of their society and, further, cultivating human capital, resistingbrain drain, and trying to bring the best and the brightest from all over the globe totheir shores. This sounds like the prelude to an age of inclusiveness and equality.Once it is understood that the situation calls for national planning and nationalinvestments, one would expect public education to be transformed. Unfortunately,this may not happen, not only because of budgetary limitations and the inabilityof democratic countries to adopt central planning and make massive, focusedinvestments, but also because educational changes embody a threat as much as apromise. Hence they are met with suspicion and, at times, with active resentmentthat undermines their effectiveness.

Fearing Equality

One of the last ‘‘underused’’ social resources of Western societies is thehuman capital of the least advantaged members of the society. Better educationfor all seems to be the natural goal of societies that start to acknowledge theirown limitations. In order to enable all children to cultivate their human capital(especially those previously excluded from such opportunities), a much improvedand more egalitarian system of public education must become a national priority.

So why does public education fail to reduce social gaps? What can explainthe fact that despite years of discussions, planning, and investments, and afternumerous educational reforms (from ‘‘back to basics’’ to ‘‘no child left behind’’),too many children continue to be excluded from qualitative education? The answeris grounded in the fear of equality — an assumption rarely discussed but oftensilently present in the public mind, that equality embodies a risk some classes arehesitant to take.

In what follows I shall contrast unifying fears — fears that promote a cross-class coalition — with dividing fears — fears that pull the different social classesapart. The former lead to the conclusion that national priorities should supportinvestment in qualitative public education for all, reducing educational gaps andallowing for accelerated social mobility; the latter highlight anxieties promptedby the prospect of intense social mobility that may lead to changes in internalstructures of hegemony.

While the fear of losing global hegemony is a unifying fear that supports thestrengthening of public education and the opening of new avenues of mobility for

9. ‘‘The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workplace 2007,’’ cited in Linda Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will DetermineOur Future (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010), 1.


those previously deprived and excluded, the fear of losing internal hegemony isa dividing fear that leads elites and middle classes to act in ways that will slowdown — and even prevent — equal opportunities and social mobility. Dividingfears are rooted not only in an evaluation of one’s life chances and opportunities butalso in an assessment of one’s social status; they take into account the kind of goodsone can aspire to possess as well as the ability of others to possess similar goods.

In a nonegalitarian society (namely, in the real world), it would be rationalfor people to aspire not only to possess the largest set of goods possible but alsoto make sure that what they own, their financial or intellectual property, willbe translated into social status. It is rational to seek status-related goods, notonly because they are easily translatable into a higher quality of life, but alsobecause they are closely related to one’s ability to ensure that one’s descendentsenjoy certain advantages (or one’s ability to protect descendents from certainrisks). This is particularly true in an age in which the range and quality of futureopportunities is declining. Fearful for the well-being of their offspring, individualsare less generous than before. In an ever-growing economy, when optimism is theorder of the day, social mobility seems a blessing; not so in an age of pessimism,when people seek security for themselves and those they care about.

When evaluating a distributive policy, a rational decision maker must take intoaccount the kind of risks one may be exposed to during a lifetime (as well as therisks of those one cares about). In cases where risks and opportunities are classdependent, then one’s distributive interests will also be class dependent.10 This isparticularly true if social class closely correlates with racial, ethnic, or religiousidentity.11 Class-related fears give rise to class-related risk analysis, which in turnstimulates social and political moves meant to preserve the advantage differentclasses have over others. Such moves are accelerated by a social reality in which,in most cases, the lowest classes and less well performing children are immigrantchildren, children with distinct ethnic, racial, and religious identities. In suchcases, a real improvement in public education securing equal opportunities for allwould lead to a redistribution of social powers: the promise turns into anxiety.

10. I assume individuals do not, as John Rawls suggested, avert risk hence considering the point ofview of the worst off, but are rationally prudent: namely, they would like to minimize their risks andmaximize their well-being, taking into account what they know about the social structure and alsoabout themselves. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UniversityPress, 1971).

11. For example, if I assume that I (and those I care about) will never be poor, it will be irrationalfor me to support a distributive policy that provides for the poor. Knowing my social position, it willbe rational for me to support only those social policies that provide the kind of services that I may notbe able to secure for myself on my own: I will have some interest in health services that will producean infrastructure I may enjoy. Being of a certain gender I will have an interest in health services relatedto that gender (indeed, some have suggested that since most policymakers are men, there has been anunequal distribution of resources invested in health problems related to women and men). My interestin policing services and prisons will depend on my exposure to risks related to crime and violence, andmy ability to buy equivalent private services. National defense will probably rank high on my list ofpreferences, as such services, by their very nature, are collective and impossible to purchase privately.


The Struggle Over Internal Hegemony

If public education had the power to provide equal opportunities for all childrenand to dissociate a child’s future from his or her own parental background, then itwould be the most powerful revolutionary force, one capable of underminingclass structure and effacing social and economic differences, providing eachgeneration with a new beginning. Unfortunately, the transformative powers ofpublic education are much more limited; one’s social and economic backgroundremains the most accurate predictor of one’s future educational success.

Can we conclude from this that the belief that qualitative changes in pub-lic education will promote equality is overrated? Or that public education is afalse panacea — a fictitious cure that may heal our conscience but not our soci-ety? Not really. Public education does make a difference, and could have madea much greater difference if its consequences had not been watered down bycounterreactions meant to preserve the present class order.

In a process that is hard to trace, but whose consequences are quite apparent inretrospect, members of the different classes evaluate the risk of losing their socialposition and act accordingly — namely, they act to preserve the present socialgaps in order to grant their children future advantages.

One can examine some of these strategies in an attempt to understand how achain reaction, ignited by fear and resentment of the possible emergence of hiddenpowers vested in the disempowered members of society, works to prevent themfrom moving up the social scale.

The reaction works in one of two ways: nullification or gap preservation.Processes of nullification are processes meant to reverse moves that threaten toreduce class differences, even when the price is educational regression. Processes ofgap preservation are those that allow social and educational improvements to occuryet preserve educational gaps in order to protect the advantage of the better off.

Processes of gap preservation are very common and are motivated primarilyby educational success. When only a small segment of the population could readand write, literacy was an economic power. When literacy became so widespreadthat it no longer constituted an occupational advantage, a high school degreebecame a necessary requirement; nowadays, a college degree is almost a necessity.We live in the most educated era the world has ever known. This is one of themajor achievements of public education, yet by raising the educational bar we havereached neither equality nor equal opportunity. In each stage of progress, new kindsof educational advantages are redistributed in ways that preserve socioeconomicgaps. Such advantages — including the kind of schooling one enjoys, the level ofteaching, the richness of the curriculum, and the reputation of the educationalinstitute — all serve in one way or another to draw a distinction between differentkinds of educated individuals.

The most recent stage concerns college graduation. In an age in whichacademic education is spreading fast, class structure is preserved by the unequaleconomic worth of degrees achieved in different academic institutions. The more


affluent send their children to the most exclusive universities that provide a bettereducation and form a net of social and academic connections; the less affluent sendtheir children to state universities and community colleges. All graduate with acollege degree, but trading on this degree in order to secure an ample and reliableincome is not as simple as one used to believe.

College graduation allows one restricted mobility but generally preserves thepresent class structure. One should not be confused by the generous support givenby most Ivy League universities to students coming from the poorest families.Indeed, Ivy League universities do admit and support a small number of studentsfrom the lower classes, thus allowing them to acquire the tools necessary forupward mobility, yet they are less open to middle-class students.12

While the partial exclusion of the middle classes from support systems is not aplanned move of exclusion, neither is it coincidental; given that the power of socialchange lies with the middle classes, those who see them as their competitors areconstantly looking over their shoulder, eager to keep a distance. This is less trueof members of the lower classes who are socially distant enough not to constitutea social threat. The few exceptionally gifted students from the lowest classeswho attend the most exclusive universities can succeed in changing their ownindividual class affiliation, but they will not change the general class structure.

One can therefore regard the process of social transformation due to animprovement in public education as a twisted kind of relay race, in which the lastcompetitor cannot possibly pass the first, even if all of them run faster than before.In this educational relay race, competitors look back not only in order to safelypass the baton but also to make sure that the gap is not closing.

Tactics of gap preservation allow a society to improve its educational skillswithout changing its social structure. While the society as a whole, as well aseach individual member on his or her own, makes a considerable move forward,social mobility is very limited and the class structure remains intact. Confusinglyenough, such policies are often the result of strict equal distribution of socialand educational resources. By funding all public education institutions equally,a society allows individuals to move a certain distance from their starting point.Ironically, those who are better off to start with will make better use of theseresources and will move much faster than those who are less privileged, keepingthe gap constant or even allowing it to grow. This is why in many cases effectiveinvestment in public education actually undermines equality.

The second strategy is that of nullification — namely, an attempt to undoa certain social move by initiating a countermove that will efface the effectsof the first one. The countermoves I refer to do not necessarily amount to anopen policy; they are rarely defined and declared but their effects are very visible.The unanticipated fate of racial integration after Brown v. Board of Education of

12. In many ways Rawls’s view of one’s moral duty to channel support to the worst off is a preservingrather than a reforming social move, as the threat posed by the restructuring of the social order comesnot from the worst off but from the lower middle classes who have the greatest potential for mobility.


Topeka, Kansas, testifies to the power of the process of nullification.13 Despitewidespread belief that the Court’s ruling would start a process of desegregationleading to racially mixed schools, it is now clear that no dramatic changes in thelevel of segregation have occurred.

In 1964, a decade after the Brown decision, 98 percent of African Americanstudents in the South were still enrolled in all-black schools, and over 70 percentof African American students in the North were enrolled in predominantlyminority schools. After passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there was a slightimprovement in these rates. However, during the 1990s, segregation in publicschools increased again; furthermore, even within integrated schools, classroom-based segregation created a largely segregated experience for many students.Thus, with respect to school segregation, ‘‘America stood at the gateway of thetwenty-first century, almost exactly where it stood 30 years earlier.’’14

Once the law disallowed segregation, middle-class families moved out ofmixed neighborhoods in order to allow their children to attend segregated schoolswithout violating the law. Attempts to desegregate schools thus led to a processof geographical segregation. Many African Americans and other people of colorwitnessed demographic changes that made ‘‘minorities’’ into majorities as whitefamilies migrated to the suburbs. The few whites left behind were mainly poor,thus intensifying the class structure.

In their attempt to preserve their middle-class identity, and in order to providetheir children with advantages over those with whom they may be forced tocompete in the future, members of the middle classes make considerable efforts tooffer their children better educational opportunities. For that purpose, they preferthat their children learn in relatively homogeneous classrooms ‘‘uninterrupted’’by less well-off fellow students. Fearing the outcome of integration and wantingto partner with other parents who, like them, are ready and able to invest inschooling over and above state funding, middle-class parents seek schools thatcater to ‘‘their kind of people.’’15

Territorial segregation is a nullifying uncoordinated response to schooldesegregation; it is neither planned nor publicly declared, yet it is a powerfulsocial force. Once the process begins, it reinforces itself as inner distinctions(related both to education and income) within the middle classes come to playan important role in shaping a person’s life plans. Given their awareness ofthe communal impact on the educational success of their children, it becomesrational for parents to move into neighborhoods where families are slightly more

13. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483 [1954].

14. Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education, 35.

15. One should acknowledge, however, that as an ideology the sufficiency principle provides a wayto deal with both the desire to provide all members of society with the skills necessary to grant acompetitive advantage to an economy, as well as to preserve the present social structure.


successful economically and educationally than they are, and by this means todistance themselves geographically from the worst off.16

Hillary Clinton’s ‘‘it takes a village’’ thus receives a new meaning. One needs avillage in order to educate a child — but the right kind of village, a village that canprovide your child with better opportunities than he or she can get at home. Thisis particularly true when educational funding is local and therefore reflects thesocioeconomic strength of a community. As long as the future of one’s childrenis determined by the neighborhood school they attend, the desire to nullify theprocess of desegregation may be immoral but it is not irrational. We have createda vicious circle that reinforces itself, and with it social and economic gaps. Once astructural motivation for gap preservation has been established, we should expectsocial and economic stratification to grow, or, at best, to remain constant.

Regressive State Policy

The reason we are often surprised and disappointed by the preservation ofsocioeconomic, racial, and ethnic gaps is related to the centrality of ‘‘closing thegap’’ arguments in our political discourse. We hear so frequently about the moraland political commitment to pursue equal opportunities that we are easily deludedinto believing that the educational policies necessary for closing socioeconomicgaps have actually been adopted and implemented. Yet like personal preferences,public policy tilts between the desire to raise the level of public education andproduce highly qualified national human capital and the desire to preserve thepresent social order. Consequently, when educational reforms start underminingthe advantage of the elites and the middle classes, they are often reversed.17

As already suggested, regressive social and educational changes are triggeredby success. Every step of improvement leads to social insecurity and then toa nullifying move. Consider the following example: With the passage of theElementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, Linda Darling-Hammondargues, significant resources were channeled to the neediest communities. This,together with a welfare and employment policy that reduced child poverty, paidoff. By the mid-1970s and early 1980s the achievement gap was reduced, being cut

16. It is rational for parents to want their children to study in a social environment that is richer — interms of financial resources as well as of culture — than that of their own family; their children willbenefit from this experience, and it will open up for them a wider range of possibilities. It is interestingto view the subprime crisis in light of this segregation process: People opt for houses in neighborhoodsthat are beyond their economic reach, hoping this will pay off in the short run by getting their childrenbetter schooling and in the long run by promising their children the ability to earn more and repay theinvestment. We thus witness the development of an economic strategy that privileges giving childrenbetter life chances by providing them with a better educational environment rather than by saving andleaving an inheritance behind. This makes housing loans exceptionally tempting, and when these aretoo generously offered, the seeds of a loan crisis are sown.

17. The processes we examined in the previous section were not guided by state policies but aremotivated by an ‘‘invisible hand’’ that coordinates actions carried out by unrelated individuals who donot plan their life together but are highly sensitive to each other’s decisions. Mark Buchanan describesprocesses of this sort in The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and YourNeighbor Usually Looks Like You (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007).


nearly in half in fifteen years. For a brief period African American and Hispanicstudents were attending college at rates comparable to those of white students:

However, this optimistic vision of equal and expanding educational opportunities, along withthe gains from the ‘‘Great Society’’ programs, was later pushed back. Most targeted federalprograms supporting investments in college access and K–12 schools in urban and poor ruralareas were reduced or eliminated during the Reagan administration in the 1980s.18

Investments in the education of students of color that characterized the schooldesegregation and finance reforms of the 1960s and 1970s were never reestablished.Ironically, Darling-Hammond observes, ‘‘had the rate of progress achieved in the1970s and early 1980s been continued, the achievement gap would have been fullyclosed by the beginning of the twenty-first century.’’19 Maybe the term ‘‘ironically’’should be replaced with ‘‘not surprisingly.’’ If, as I have suggested, elites and middleclasses are interested in improving education without changing the class structure,then programs that are too successful will be ‘‘corrected’’ to produce the right kindof results. The ‘‘correction’’ will not recreate the original state of affairs, as progressis rarely reversible, yet it will produce a new basis for class stratification.

In other words, when the fear of an internal power loss creeps in, school reformswill meet a class-defined glass ceiling and are likely to be reversed. Put differently,when educational policies not only improve the average level of human capitaland skills but also redistribute human capital in ways that shatter the presentclass structure, they turn from a promise into a threat and are diluted.

Such changes are not supported by open calls for the preservation of the presentclass structure or for restrictions on social mobility; rather, they are defended interms of new priorities due to recent educational developments and needs, thedevelopment of new technologies, the urgent requirement to reduce public spend-ing, or the need for increased efficiency or budgetary limits. The new policies aredesigned to allow for further investments in education that may raise the generallevel of acquired knowledge and skills but that will not ‘‘threaten’’ the presentsocial order.

The delicate interplay between progression and regression is essential for thelegitimacy of such moves. No one, not even the most conservative politicians andpublic activists, will openly talk about gap preservation tactics. The language usedis instead focused on fostering talent and excellence, ensuring equal opportunities,or promoting social mobility. One needs to read behind such statements into theactual workings of social change in order to understand their meaning.

Policies that embody double meaning are not hard to detect. Take, forexample, the notion of mobility. Social mobility could be interpreted as a meansof challenging the present class structure. Yet, as Christopher Lasch observes,social mobility can also be regarded as the ‘‘saving grace’’ of a hierarchical socialorder. The ideal of mobility became a necessary illusion, according to Lasch, ‘‘the


19. Ibid., 20.


persistence of which reconciled people to inequality and softened the otherwisetroubling contradiction between egalitarian ideology and the hierarchical divisionof labor required by modern societies.’’20 Individuals, having internalized the mythof the ‘‘self-made man,’’ too often sacrifice class solidarity in the hope of individualadvancement. Worse still, ‘‘they accept a failure to advance as a moral judgment ontheir own lack of ambition or intelligence.’’21 To be sure, the illusion of mobilityworks only if some individuals are allowed to improve their position, but theymust not be too many, nor should the process lead to a new social arrangement.Mobility, as a conservative tool, must lead to an internal state of affairs thatlies somewhere between a strictly class-based social order and a dynamic socialorder.

We can monitor the effectiveness of mobility by the ability of publiceducation to weaken the correlation between class, race, ethnicity, and educationalachievements. Research has shown that most systems of public education allowfor a limited mobility. The best indicator of a child’s success remains his or herparents’ (especially the mother’s) education and income. Social mobility, then, is‘‘under control,’’ giving enough hope to those who seek it and enough security tothose who dread it.

Like mobility, arguments regarding sufficiency have a similar ability tomotivate social changes that do not amount to dramatic changes in a given classstructure. The doctrine of sufficiency is described by Harry Frankfurt in his essay‘‘Equality as a Moral Ideal.’’ What is important from the point of view of morality,he argues, is not ‘‘that everyone should have the same but that each should haveenough.’’22 According to the sufficiency argument, public education should provideeach and every child with the ability to develop the skills deemed necessary forbeing a productive adult. Once granted such personal abilities, the child can beregarded as having acquired sufficient personal tools necessary to fend for him- orherself. Sufficiency in education is therefore measured both from the point of viewof public investment in education and from the point of view of the human capital itcan produce for a child. For many children who do not presently receive sufficientfunding and educational support, sufficiency arguments have a transformativepower that can lead to a major improvement in their public education. Sucharguments, however, take for granted that in the extensive educational sphere thatlies beyond sufficiency, it is morally legitimate for social gaps to persist.

Two groups benefit from sufficiency arguments: the worst off, who aredeprived of sufficient educational support, and the better off who can still retaina considerable advantage by securing their children an education that goes farbeyond the limits of sufficiency. For the elites, this is an ideal situation. It allows

20. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton,1995), 52.

21. Ibid., 53.

22. Harry Frankfurt, ‘‘Equality as a Moral Ideal,’’ in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1988), 134.


for limited mobility of the worst off while restricting the upward mobility of themiddle classes who could threaten their status.

The discourse regarding mobility and sufficiency reminds us that educationhas a conservative power as much as a transformative one. The question regardingwhich of the two powers trumps the other is closely related to the way inwhich individuals evaluate their interests as well as their fears. If external fearsabout losing hegemony seem more immediate and urgent, it is rational to seek amajor educational reform even if it will trigger social transformation; if internalfears are seen as more immediate and urgent, conservative forces will determinetransformative educational developments.

Between Two Fears

There are numerous reasons for Western states in general and for the UnitedStates in particular to support improvements in public education that will slowdown the hegemonic shift to the East and make them much more competitive inthe future. Such changes can only occur if new participants join the educationaland economic game. This is especially true given the size of the populations in theemerging economies in the East and the demographic crisis in the West. The con-clusions are clear: In order to retain some of their power, Western countries mustadopt far-reaching educational reforms that will allow them to explore and exploitthe talent of each and every child. No child should be allowed to fall through theholes of the educational net. Yet, as the discussion in this essay demonstrates, thefear of losing internal hegemony prevents taking the necessary educational steps.Four social conditions will determine how threatening a social transformationmight be, and consequently how far-reaching an educational reform will be:

1. The more homogeneous a society is ethnically, racially, and religiously,the less threatening social mobility will be. In those societies in which agrowing percentage of the young generations belongs to a different race,ethnicity, or religion, internal fears of losing hegemony are likely to trumpexternal fear.

2. The more insecure the middle classes are, the more likely they are torebel against social mobility. Fearing that the range of new opportunitiesis shrinking, they will try to preserve these opportunities for themselvesand for their children, in order to secure better life chances for them.

3. The more unequal a society is, the more its members will fear changesin its class structure, because the losses one can suffer, if one is unableto retain his or her social position, are considerably higher in a polarizedsociety than in an egalitarian society.

4. The more centralized a society is, the more it will be able tomake national investments in education that will improve its nationalperformance, disregarding the fears of specific classes or interest groups.Centralized societies (and those that are less democratic) pay less attentionto internal fears; they have the ability to make expensive and extensiveeducational changes.


Looking at these factors, one can easily understand why school reform efforts inthe United States are unlikely to lead to a real social transformation:

1. Demographic trends indicate that by 2025 the majority of studentsin public schools will be children of color. Social, ethnic, religious, andclass-related fears will therefore intensify rather than decline.

2. The growing insecurity of the middle classes, associated with theemergence of the class of the educated poor, influences personal andnational considerations. More and more members of the middle classessuspect that they will not be able to provide their children with thesame life chances they themselves have received. They are therefore veryprotective of their social status and unlikely to be convinced to open upthe class gates for newcomers.

3. Being an unequal society, members of the middle class know that losingthe social competition may bring with it a major fall in life standards.When the fear of falling is stronger than the hope of climbing up, socialstagnation seems a blessing rather than a threat.

4. The decentralization of education characteristic of the Americansystem does not allow for a redistribution of educational resources inways that will allow those who are presently excluded from qualitativeeducation to have real educational opportunities.

According to all four categories, the United States is more likely to succumb to thefears of the elite and the middle class of losing internal hegemony and is thereforeless likely to be effective in defending its global hegemony.

At the end of her book The Flat World and Education, Linda Darling-Hammond argues that none of us ‘‘benefits by keeping any of us ignorant, and, asa society, all of us profit from the full development of one another’s ambitions.’’23

This indeed is an optimistic message with which to end a book — but it reflectsthe view of those who are secure in their social status; the rest are less optimisticand more suspicious. They are not ignorant, irrational xenophobes, but rationalindividuals who know all too well that their world is less secure than ever. If wedo not understand their fears and find ways to meet them by making society moreegalitarian and cohesive, if we do not offer ways of making them partners in anecessary educational change, there will be little change.


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STAYING IN CONTROL; OR, WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT PUBLIC EDUCATION TO ACHIEVE?