Class Dismissed - why we can't learn or teach our way out of inequality (Counterfire)

2011-11-14 · first published in marxsite · 103 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

Only a fragment of this survives. It may have been a short link-and-comment post, which marxsite ran many of, or the opening of a longer piece cut off by the capture — from what remains there is no way to tell which.

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Higher education is often presented as a road to opportunity and the route to a more prosperous or equal society. But would more graduates bring greater equality? Class Dismissed, John Marsh, 255p, Monthly Review 2011 John Marsh, now an assistant professor of English at Penn State University, opens Class Dismissed by narrating how several years ago he initiated an outreach programme through his then university – the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – to provide evening classes for people in a deprived neighbourhood. The majority dropped out, mainly due to economic pressures such as being overworked, but he and a few colleagues persevered.

The capture this was recovered from