Chapter 3: Class Consciousness And Teacher Education: The Socialist Challenge and The Historical Context¹

In this chapter, I situate one of the most significant current trends in teacher education, the absence of class consciousness, within the normalizing impulse of capitalism, which Deb Kelsh and Dave Hill (2006) brilliantly problematize in “The Culturalization of Class and the Occluding of Class Consciousness: The Knowledge Industry in/of Education.” In the process, I trace this tendency to distort the class-based nature of social existence to the birth of large-scale industrial capitalism and the reorganization of Western-based societies, and eventually the whole planet, into the unimaginably rich and the equally unthinkably poor and exploited, and the subsequent need to manufacture consent to this barbaric project and process. Robinson (2008) characterizes this period of the development of global capitalism as the third period, which began in the 1870s and is marked by the corporate form of capitalism and class struggle, and the subsequent emergence of widespread class-consciousness. As a result, this period is also the beginning of large-scale, compulsory common schooling, which the capitalist class eventually came to understand to be a necessary cost of production needed for social control.