The awful truth: education won't stop the west getting poorer

[The Straight Story]

The awful truth: education won't stop the west getting poorer

Western Europeans and Americans are about to suffer a profound shock. For the past 30 years governments have explained that, while they can no longer protect jobs through traditional forms of state intervention such as subsidies and tariffs, they can expand and reform education to maximise opportunity. If enough people buckle down to acquiring higher-level skills and qualifications, Europeans and Americans will continue to enjoy rising living standards. If they work hard enough, each generation can still do better than its parents. All that is required is to bring schools up to scratch and persuade universities to teach "marketable" skills. That is the thinking behind Michael Gove's policies and those of all his recent predecessors as education secretary.

But the financial meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent squeeze on incomes is slowly revealing an awful truth. As figures out last week from the Office for National Statistics show, real UK wages have not risen since 2005, the longest sustained freeze in living standards since the 1920s. While it has not hit the elite in banking, the freeze affects most of the middle class as much as the working class. This is not a blip, nor the result of educational shortcomings. In the US, which introduced mass higher education long before Britain, the average graduate's purchasing power has barely risen in 30 years. Just as education failed to deliver social democratic promises of social equality and mobility, so it will fail to deliver neoliberal promises of universal opportunity for betterment.

"Knowledge work", supposedly the west's salvation, is now being exported like manual work. A global mass market in unskilled labour is being quickly succeeded by a market in middle-class work, particularly for industries, such as electronics, in which so much hope of employment opportunities and high wages was invested. As supply increases, employers inevitably go to the cheapest source. A chip designer in India costs 10 times less than a US one. The neoliberals forgot to read (or re-read) Marx. "As capital accumulates the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/28/education-jobs-middle-class-decline

[rfranklin]

1. But it's those illegal alliens that are causing the problem!

And before that it was affirmative action! And before that it was welfare queens!

[OHdem10]

2. EX-Priminister of UK , Browne has written a book in which

proposed that the major countries meet and restructure
the Free Trade Policies plus use some Keynesian policies
and therefore work our way out of this situation with
a little less pain. No pain can be avoided. Needless
to say he does not buy the Austerity treatment. I watched
his discussion on C. Rose sometime back. He admits the
Trade and Globalization Policies are at the root of this
crisis. Of course his plan would help all classes. Is
this why there seems to be no consideration of such
a plan . The Right Wing Austerity may just make things
worse, in my opinion.