The Human Capital Calculus: A Threat to Democratic Schooling

• In Event: Education for Human Possibility or Human Capital?

Abstract

This paper constructs a historical and theoretical framework for examining the emerging paradigm of education to produce human capital, that is, to train youth for their places in the global labor market.

A human capital model of education splits the public and the private in profound ways. In the early 20th century, another era of high immigration and corporatization, the social efficiency movement reshaped schooling in the US by calculating which youth to educate based on the labor needs of industry. Separating “raw material” (the youth) based on the “science” of early intelligence testing resulted in differentiated curricula in highly tracked schools. The academic subjects were vocationalized, while the cost of job training was shifted from factory to taxpayer (Callahan, 1962; Kliebard, 1986, 2004; Wrigley, 1982). The racial, cultural and linguistic stratification of students from that era persists and is now exacerbated by policies of standardized accountability which render students as “assets” to be educated or “liabilities” to be triaged out of schools based on their value as test-score producers for school ratings (McNeil et al, 2008).

In the context of today’s global marketplace, the human capital model, like the factory school, objectifies the learner while appearing to be a benign solution to joblessness and growing poverty (Center for Houston’s Future, 2012). But the human capital paradigm emerging in corporate and policy discourse in answer to educating those previously excluded or marginalized is a hegemonic model for training rather than an education to fully develop the capacities of the individual or to prepare the individual for full civic participation.

This historical analysis is grounded in studies of the growing gap between rich and poor in America and of the structural factors, including education policies, creating and exacerbating extreme poverty (Stiglitz, 2012; Krugman, 2012; P. Edelman, 2012; Kids Count, 2011). It also draws on research on the growing globalization of labor and the corporatization of traditionally public institutions (Klein, 2008; Stiglitz, 2012; Lipman, 2002). In light of the history of curricular stratification in the US based on economic interest, and in contrast to our idealized tradition of a public education that fosters the development of both the individual and our democracy (Dewey, 1916), the paper will suggest the implications a human capital model has for the content of schooling, for the conceptualization of the children and their communities in the shaping of educational institutions, and for the criteria to which publicly funded education should be held.

If the education of our populace is essential for democracy, then we bear a collective obligation to educate every child. If the purpose of education is to produce human capital for the global marketplace, then that social obligation does not hold. Rather, the decision of which children to educate, and to what level, becomes a matter of economic calculations, the calculus of investment efficiencies, thus justifying a rupture in the social contract to educate every child and subverting the possibility of holding onto a shared commitment to education in the public interest.

Author

• Linda McSpadden McNeil, Rice University