Where the buck stops: class differences in support for education

Abstract

There has been little critical scrutiny of the extent to which the members of different social classes support current public educational institutions. This paper explores the attitudes toward education of class groups in relation to the declared agendas of class leaders, using public opinion surveys conducted regularly in Canada's economic heartland of Ontario between 1978 and 1996. An analysis of class leaders’ public discourse indicates that corporate leaders stress the waste and inefficiencies of the current school system, the need for market‐driven initiatives to overcome these problems, and a general belief that such reforms coupled with cost reductions and lower government deficits can lead to economic growth and job creation. Some labour union and other leaders associate declining school quality with spending cuts, defend equal access to education, and promote measures such as a reduced normal workweek to address the education‐jobs gap rather than continuing deficit reduction and more reliance on private and individual initiative. Corporate executives are shown to hold much more strongly consensual, fiscally restrictive views on education than other class groups. Other classes hold less consensual but equally coherent and fiscally responsible attitudes on education spending. Professional and managerial class groups, whom some analysts predict to be most disaffected, have only decreased their degree of support for increased education spending and taxes. Support for education funding among working‐class groups has increased since the early 1980s. There is also now at least plurality support for a shorter workweek in all class groups except corporate executives. Corporate business attempts to resettle the social contract with a downsized state education system are so far failing in the realm of public opinion. It is a question of whether we can grasp the real nature of our society, or whether we persist in social and educational patterns based on a limited ruling class, a middle professional class, a large operative class, cemented by forces that cannot be challenged and will not be changed. The privileges and barriers, of an inherited kind, will in any case go down. It is only a question of whether we replace them by the free play of the market, or by a public education designed to express and create the values of an educated democracy and a common culture (Williams 1961: 155)