Education as a Nonclass Process

According to Resnick and Wolff, “In most capitalist societies the state provides a set of conditions of existence for industrial capitalists and typically receives in return subsumed class payments. For example, certain high-tech industrial capitalists may require productive laborers with extensive university training in various skills. Those skills constitute conditions of existence for the appropriation of surplus value in the production of high-tech commodities such as computers. The state can build and operate schools that accomplish the requisite training. The state thereby performs a nonclass process — the cultural process of imparting knowledge — which secures a condition of existence for the capitalist fundamental class process in computer production. The state obtains in return a distributed share of the surplus appropriated by industrial capitalists”: taxes (201). Several interesting things to note here: education is constructed as skill-based and vocational, serving only to give people the knowledge they need to produce computers. Knowledge is “imparted” a la Freire’s banking model. And the educational structure seems to be explicitly planned for the purpose of reproducing class hierarchies. Resnick and Wolff’s ideas about education seem to me so monolithic and one-sided as to be almost cartoonish, and their example fails to consider the fact that not all higher education is state-sponsored. Still, their naming of education as a nonclass process — one that involves no production or distribution of surplus value — usefully clarifies matters for me. Is it accurate, though? What are the ways in which surplus value might be produced and distributed in education?