One of the most important aspects of education in a capitalist society is the maintenance of social inequality. This social inequality, or class system, is vitally important to capitalist society as it structures what is known as the division of labour. This latter term refers to the social fact that certain groups of individuals perform large amounts of menial and productive labour while a smaller amount focus solely on what is generally termed intellectual labour. A productive capitalist society requires a large amount of people who either languish in unemployment or do nothing but produce commodities for sale and a much smaller group of intellectual labourers engaged in the ideological sphere or as some form of state administrator. Relative privileges of wealth, education and property ownership generally go alongside an individual’s person’s role in such a division. As such the reproduction of the division of labour is the reproduction of social inequality.
When at high school it was clear that a division of labour was enforced and that people were educated to expect this to be the case. Throughout school, those who performed at best intellectual subjects were those who, almost exclusively, came from wealthier families and had had a larger input of culture in their early life. It was these people who were encouraged by the school system to apply for college. When undertaking these applications myself, I found myself being told that going to college was a way to ensure that I would receive a highly paid job in an area which would be far away from manual labour. These areas included law, medicine or even academia. In contrast, students from poorer background would often be encouraged to engage in so-called practical studies such as wood-work or home economics. Although at the time it appeared that the education genuinely had the interests of these students at heart and that it simply served to guide them into occupations in which they would be most likely to find employment later in life, it is clear that the division of subjects in high school clearly mirrored the division of labour in society and that, therefore, it served to reproduce social inequality.
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"Education in a Capitalist Society".
During my time at college I have found that social inequality was reproduced on an intellectual level to an extent that far surpasses high school. This is clear if I consider a class that I took in my Freshman year relating to the history of economics. In this class we studied extracts from Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ in order to understand the genesis of the capitalist economy in America. In particular, we studied the so-called ‘historical’ sections of the book that deal with the birth of division of labour and with what is termed originary or primitive accumulation. Smith teaches that the division of labour came about as a result of the simple fact that certain individuals were prone to preferring manual work while others were prone to preferring intellectual work and organisation. For him, there is no violence of exploitation involved in the division of labour, rather it simply reflects the natural state of social relations. This view is refuted both by critics such as Karl Marx and also by our contemporary and historical reality. In both cases it is clear that the maintenance of the division of labour, and therefore of social inequality, is an inherently violent process that requires not only large amount of ideological input from the education system but also unmediated violence by institutions such as the police and the judiciary. When studying Smith uncritically as a freshman, I was intended to simply accept his ideas regarding the natural state of the division of labour. Such an acceptance serves to actively reproduce the conditions that it falsely describes.
