The dissertation develops and demonstrates a new Marxist approach to analyzing interactions between education and class. This new approach, overdeterminist class theory, uses an antiessentialist logic and a surplus-labor concept of class. It is thus distinguished from other political economy approaches to education. Chapter 1 is an introduction. Chapter 2 critically reviews the relevant literature, which includes Dewey, Bowles and Gintis, and Althusser. Chapter 3 demonstrates the new approach by analyzing several illustrative cases. In addition, it indicates the importance of the concept subsumed class process for analyzing the interactions between class and the nonclass process of education. An important point of this chapter is that the securing of educational conditions of class engenders new contradictions as it alleviates others. Chapter 4 analyzes the recent U.S. education crisis in terms of the complex relationships between the capitalist class process and education. The analysis supports several conclusions. First, the rhetoric of the mainstream discourse tends to reduce education's social importance to its structural role in enhancing economic competitiveness. Second, the education crisis resulted from the historically complex interaction between education and the capitalist class process. Third, the education crisis has motivated the emergence of many innovative relationships between education and class, and these new relationships in turn engender new contradictions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8905 |
| Date | 01 January 1994 |
| Creators | Aoki, Masato |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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