The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling - Softcover

Do you want your children to succeed? Do you want to reduce poverty and to create a good society? Do you want the U.S. to be competitive internationally, and to meet the challenges of the Knowledge Revolution? Then education must be the answer. Or is it? This critical history of the Education Gospel reveals the allure-and the fallacy-of the longstanding American faith that more schooling for more people, to develop occupational skills, is the solution to virtually all social and economic problems. Grubb and Lazerson show how all levels of education were transformed over the twentieth century into preparation for vocations and professions. As a result high schools, colleges, universities, short-term job training, and other forms of "life-long learning" expanded enormously. But Grubb and Lazerson argue that the promises of the Education Gospel and the changes of the Knowledge Revolution are exaggerated. The abilities developed in schooling and the competencies required at work are often mismatched. At least a third of all Americans are already over-educated for the jobs they hold, and little more than 30 percent of jobs in the coming decade will require some college- hardly justifying College for All. The drive for personal advancement and workforce preparation has also squeezed out civic education-not to mention learning for its own sake. Worst of all, Grubb and Lazerson show, the vocational focus of schooling has reinforced social inequality. The challenges over the next century are to create forms of education incorporating both occupational and civic goals, and to reverse the preoccupation with narrow work skills, empty credentialism, and schooling as the only source of salvation. W. Norton Grubb is the David Gardner Chair of Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley. Marvin Lazerson is the Howard P. and Judith R. Berkowitz Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.