Public Education: The Making and Unmaking of Middle Class Subjectivities

• In Event: Theorizing Capitalist Crisis & Middle-Class Politics

Abstract

Unlike workers and capitalists, the middle classes do not have stable social locations that can generate unifying economic interests. In Marx and Engels’s works, middle classes like “petite bourgeoisie” and “labor aristocracy” have usually been framed as subordinate to others. Gramsci emphasized a separation between organic intellectuals and classes, highlighting the structural role of an educated middle segment with immense ideological influence, that nevertheless primarily served to articulate the interests of others. Erik Olin Wright identified middle classes as “contradictory” locations, whose stability is often contingent on the wider conflicts between capital and organized labor. How did middle class consciousness become hegemonic in the middle of the 20th century despite these contradictions?
This paper argues that public education became the foundational mechanism for middle-class social cohesion at the turn of the last century. Public schools systematized the production of organic intellectuals, skilled workers, and ‘virtuous’ citizens, while diffusing forms of democratic republican middle class consciousness that centered on meritocratic principles. The decay of public schools amid economic crises and neoliberal restructuring contributed to erosions of the hegemonic middle class subjectivities across advanced capitalist economies. By providing a deep intellectual and political economic history of public education and focusing on the United States as an exemplary case of international trends, I show how middle class consciousness became dominant across classes and how neoliberalism undermined its structural foundations.

Author

• Hakan Yilmaz, CUNY-Graduate Center