Between Capitalism and Democracy: Educational Policy and the Crisis of the Welfare State

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This volume of radical studies in the sociology and politics of education specifically addresses educational policies and the crisis of the welfare state and opens up new areas in the critical social analysis of education. Shapiro explores the interconnection between educational policy and the structure of economic, political and cultural life in the United States, arguing that in spite of its practical and ideological autonomy, the educational region is not immune to the kinds of disruption and dislocation found elsewhere in society. Minority discrimination, urban decay and the uneven results of the labour market as well as other conditions force new issues and questions onto the idealogical policy agenda. However, in his assessment of the state of public discourse, Shapiro discovers an absence, with one important exception, of reference to critical themes in mainstream political debate. He delineates the displacememnt into the eductional area of crises that confront the lumpen class in America and that are experienced as economic deprivation, political disempowerment and cultural disintegration and then speculates as to why a political agenda that speaks to the interrelatedness of the social crisis and the educational crisis remains unconstructed.

Author Bio

SVI SHAPIRO teaches the social foundations of education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has published widely on questions of education, ideology, and the state in capitalist society. With David Purpel he edited Schools and Meaning: Essays on the Moral Nature of Schooling (1985).