If you are saying “NOTHING except for education will dramatically cut poverty”, when the reality is that factors in CONCERT WITH education absolutely have an effect on poverty, you are an enemy of the poor. You are contributing to a discursive world where people ignore the easiest, most proven ways to cut poverty. You are a quintessential bullshitter that obfuscates the racial dynamic of white privilege (see: admission rates at elite universities) more than nebulous clouds in Seattle. We can’t solve this high-brow achievement schism without considering hunger, imprisonment, segregationist housing policy, inimical employment barriers, denuded arts programs, complex and discouraging avenues for healthcare —systemic education, by itself, is vacuous platitude that doesn’t satiate empty stomachs. Education’s long-term viability, as a technocracy, is part and parcel to the longevity of the aforementioned social milieus.

You need distributive institutions that actually generate a specific distributive result, and education is certainly not sufficient for ensuring that happens. A more educated populace will probably be more productive, but that too — as we have seen for the last four decades — is not sufficient for ensuring the gains of such productivity increases flow to the non-rich (see: black-white employment gaps OR 2-year versus 4-year college matriculation trends, incarceration rates). Education is transformative, although in ways that can be as prohibitive to furthering social justice as advancing it... Sufficient for surmounting monumental hurdles germane to endemic poverty, it is NOT—particularly in a racialized economy.

I can’t tell if education reformers are delusional, riddled with ideology, or just trying to make their projects seem grander than they are. Perhaps all of the above. But when they say you can solve poverty ONLY with education (while lining their own pockets with through faddishly designed and incorporated PRODUCTS of digital textbooks, online classes, test prep programs), they are WRONG. If they don’t stop saying it, they should rightly be understood as antagonistic to the interests of poor people.

‪#‎thingsstudentsteachme‬

[May 11, 2014]