Primary Education In The United States

Education in the United States has a long past. For the purpose of this essay, primary education, and its history will be further analyzed from the perspective of Marx’s. First, though, a brief history of the implementation of primary education will be reviewed. Starting in the late 1700s, which was during the beginning of industrialization in the U.S. Thomas Jefferson began to push for education for all citizens, saying “general education will enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom” (Kurlaender 2015). It is important to note that at this time settlers had not started moving westward and most of the citizens were living on the east coast. Jefferson felt that the knowledge that the citizens gained from

Marx’s main reasoning for this is that he believed that the ownership of the means of production created two classes (bourgeoisie & proletariat), and the bourgeoisie exploited these proletariats. (Finnigan, 10/20/15). In Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx writes, “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed…” (Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Pfaff, and Virk 2012: 156) This quote from Marx can be applied to the early years of education. Starting in the 1700s education had the main goal of helping, men, pursue the goal of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. As Jefferson stated, be it rich or poor that was the goal of all education (Carpenter 2013). Jefferson then proposes the two track system which obviously attempts to clear the poor from the education system at an early stage of education. If Marx were to assess this he would say that the oppressors at this time where the wealthy who were in charge of education during the time period and teachers who had the ability to choose who would move on to the next part of schooling. While the students from the poor families may have been equally as smart, those in charge of education choose not to send students on, or through challenging tasks weeded them out of the system. Marx would have seen these students has the oppressed. From a viewpoint of Marx, these students would be seen as being oppressed because the wealthy are who had control of education, just like the wealthy or bourgeois is who had ownership of the means of production. It would be difficult to assess education through the means of Smith. In terms of production Smith believed that the countries that were wealthy had good means of division of labor. Division of labor increased productivity and was a positive outcome (Finigann