I haven’t done anything with the wiki software this weekend; actually, I spent a lot of my time putting together a cat tree for the girls to climb out of 2 x 4s and 1 x 12s. Broke two drill bits; wore out a saw blade. Maybe I’ll post pictures.
Anyway: Feenberg cites the observation from Bowles and Gintis (201k PDF link; well worth reading) that education has been “reorganized to provide capitalist industrialism with the type of workers it required” and couples the observation to Harry Braverman’s work in order to conclude that “the problems [that economic concerns shape education] are not confined to the workplace but shape cultural and social life as a whole” (22). Braverman’s focus, as I understand it (I hesitate to add yet another book to my reading list), was what he called the “deskilling” of labor, by which capitalist firms “simplify tasks into mechanical routines that can be quickly learned” (42). My contention is that this happens not only in capitalist firms, but in the university, and in fact is inherent in the frequent demand from students that they be taught “marketable” skills. So one question might be: when we do things with technology, with computers — what is it that isn’t marketable?
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