Karl Marx's Theoretical Analysis

In Das Kapital, Karl Marx explains alienation, or Entfremdung, a tool of cultural hegemony: the idea that capitalism has caused workers to be alienated from the product of their work, the act of working, their “species-essence” or Gattungswesen, and other workers. America’s public education system was built around the Prussian Industrial-Model, a way of mass producing a docile proletariat labor force through public education, and as such it should not be surprising that capitalist alienation is experienced in schools. Whether through memorization or testing, American schools are teaching the wrong thing: capitalist cultural hegemony.

Students are unable to see themselves in the product of their work. Students’ labor is used to study, work on

projects, and write essays, among other tasks. Rather than taking the information that they have been taught and using it to produce a piece truly reflective of all that they know and their ability to think, students are producing bubbled-in sheets as a result of their labor. The meaning of a student's labor is then further obscured from her by reducing it to a letter grade or a percentage. Instead of teaching children how to apply knowledge, schools are teaching children that their labor’s only practical purpose is to be quantified. Here is where the commodification of a student’s labor is best seen. With the factory system, labor has become a product to be bought and sold at the lowest possible cost to the capitalists. In schools, labor has been standardized so that teachers and schools become responsible for teaching students the most basic knowledge in the most efficient way possible. Teachers become the functional capitalist, one responsible for managing the means of production, and are thusly punished when the school is not churning out standardized students. This then lends itself to the capitalization of the act of learning.
For students, the act of producing translates to the act of learning. America’s public education has made it so that learning is little more than memorization. Information is memorized rather than mastered because mastery is not efficient. The word “analysis” has lost nearly all meaning. Rather than having students analyze information, far too often, students are taught to memorize the analysis deemed most correct. For example, in history, students are not analyzing events, rather they are memorizing the given analysis for said event. Flashcards are proliferated and encouraged in schools. The very concept of flashcards exemplifies the factory system’s encroachment into education; read the front, say the answer, flip, next card, read the front, say the answer, flip, next card, repeat ad nauseum. This mechanization of learning is leading to the mechanization of students themselves.
Workers become alienated from themselves as producers- from their Gattungswesen (which roughly translates to “species essence”).

Gattungswesen is traditionally thought of as being based in social interactions. Marx was a dialectical materialist that famously believed that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. This led to his belief that Gattungswesen is based in labor and production. However, a person’s labor is only relevant to him when the work is purposeful. By not being able to connect to their work or see its purpose, laborers are severed from their Gattungswesen, the core of their humanity. In schools, any question as to how the curriculum is relevant to the “real world” is quickly shut down, most infamously in math. Often times, the curriculum is specialized to a degree where any relevance to the student as a person is lost. If a student is interested in one area of a class and would like to learn more about it, teachers simply can not allow for more time than originally allotted for a specific topic. With class sizes so large and syllabi so structured, a student’s education is so generalized that he is often unable to find his niche, his passion, what it is that he wants to do with his life. A student’s inability to connect to his work leads to school being reduced to a

competition.
Students are alienated from each other as fellow scholars. Because of the commodification of students’ labor, through standardization or, more specifically, assigning letter grades or percentages, students are easily comparable. Increasingly, higher education is becoming the only option for students to succeed, thusly making getting into college inherently more competitive (Altbach). With this, class rank and taking as many advanced courses as humanly possible, has become more important than ever. As such, “low-achieving” students are frequently left behind in large classes that focus even more heavily on memorization rather than analysis. Generally, all of this in combination has led to lower level classes (and, by extension, those who are enrolled in them) being stigmatized. Rather than working to make lower level classes less neglected, students have, for the most part, fed into the rugged individualism of capitalism.
The extent to which America’s public education system is a tool of capitalist cultural hegemony is truly alarming. Not only are schools dehumanizing children, they are also instilling a toxic sense of rugged individualism that effectively teaches children their place in the class system on the first day of school. Despite the standardized curriculum and specialized syllabi, capitalist cultural hegemony is the one thing that schools are truly teaching.