Class, Educational Ideologies, and Mass Opinion in Capitalist Crisis: A Canadian Perspective

Abstract

There is agreement among theorists of nearly all political stripes that the advanced capitalist societies are now in a period of protracted social crisis. While capital-intensive restructuring has recently permitted some industrial corporate enterprises to reverse the declining profits trend of the past decade, the private propensity to invest in new production initiatives remains generally depressed, high unemployment rates persist, especially for young people, and collective consumption capacity continues to be limited by declining real wages and high interest rates. Governments also operate under growing debt burdens and the fiscal necessity to hold down public expenditures, while both infrastructural/natural environmental requirements and established social welfare entitlements demand increases. general public's trust in the leadership of many major institutions appears to have declined significantly since the mid-1960s (e.g., Lipset and Schneider, 1983), and numerous social indicators, such as the increasing incidence of property crimes, point to a mounting breakdown of social order. Publicly funded educational systems have been particularly prone to criticism during this social crisis. Since World War II, increasing educational attainment levels have been associated with public perceptions of the declining general quality of schooling. More recently, declining birthrates have decreased the demand for school expansion, and growing numbers of elderly people have exerted their own social welfare priorities on government budgets. Finally, the presence of large numbers of relatively highly schooled yet unemployed youths graphically contradicts long-held assumptions about the benefits of current forms of schooling (e.g., Meyer and Rowan, 1977) and directly encourages growing questioning of the adequacy of school performance and standards. As Boyd (1983:4) puts it, The overall effect of the context of decline is inevitably a scramble for scarce resources, intensifying special interest group activity and the politicization cf education. Indeed, given the evident crucial role of schooling in shaping the next generation and the persistence of very strong popular faith in the potential of education to facilitate societal development (e.g., Gallup, 1982; Livingstone, Hart, and McLean, 1983), educational reform proposals have once again become a central focus in public debate about resolving the crisis (cf. Curti, [1935] 1959). This article attempts to explain the basic impetus for educational reform initiatives in the current crisis from an historical materialist perspective and, in particular, attempts to identify major social forces influencing educational restructuring efforts. 1 More specifically, the focus is on social-class relations and the manner in which structural constraints of class location and the subjective choices of class leaders and class actors generally *are related to the maintenance and change of current educational forms. primary sources of evidence are studies that have been conducted over the past several years in Ontario-Canada's industrial heartland. These studies examine changing class structure, the educational rhetoric of leading class spokespersons, and mass opinion on educational issues. Government commissions in Ontario have recently put forward recommendations for major reorganization of both high school and higher education systems (Secondary Education Review Project, 1981; Committee on the Future Role of Universities in Ontario, 1981). This analysis considers class-based views of basic educational practices implicated in these commission reports. Different historical origins as well as different locations within the world capitalist system may be associated with survey data used in this article are drawn from the OISE Survey of Educational Issues, which has been conducted since 1978 under the auspices of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. I am grateful to Doug Hart for his assistance with the data analysis, to Kari Dehli for library research work, and to Vivian Crossman for typing. comments of Philip Wexler and three anonymous reviewers were also appreciated. Address all correspondence to the author at the Department of Sociology of Education, O.I.S.E., 252 Bloor St. West, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada. I epistemological and methodological assumptions, the social vantage point, and the model of social totalities on which this interpretation is based are specified in Livingstone (1983).