Class Degrees : Smart Work, Managed Choice, and the Transformation of Higher Education / Evan Watkins.
2009
LC1043
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Online Access
Details
Title
Class Degrees : Smart Work, Managed Choice, and the Transformation of Higher Education / Evan Watkins.
Author
Watkins, Evan, author.
ISBN
9780823237470
Published
New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2009]
Copyright
©2009
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (128 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers
10.1515/9780823237470 doi
Call Number
LC1043
Dewey Decimal Classification
371.4/25
Summary
A current truism holds that the undergraduate degree today is equivalent to the high-school diploma of yesterday. But undergraduates at a research university would probably not recognize themselves in the historical mirror of high-school vocational education. Students in a vast range of institutions are encouraged to look up the educational social scale, whereas earlier vocational education was designed to "cool out" expectations of social advancement by training a working class prepared for massive industrialization.In Class Degrees, Evan Watkins argues that reforms in vocational education in the 1980s and 1990s can explain a great deal about the changing directions of class formation in the United States, as well as how postsecondary educational institutions are changing. Responding to a demand for flexibility in job skills and reflecting a consequent aspiration to choice and perpetual job mobility, those reforms aimed to eliminate the separate academic status of vocational education. They transformed it from a "cooling out" to a "heating up" of class expectations. The result has been a culture of hyperindividualism. The hyperindividual lives in a world permeated with against-all-odds plots, from "beat the odds" of long supermarket checkout lines by using self-checkout and buying FasTrak transponders to beat the odds of traffic jams, to the endless superheroes on film and TV who daily save various sorts of planets and things against all odds.Of course, a few people can beat the odds only if most other people do not. As choice begins to replace the selling of individual labor at the core of contemporary class formation, the result is a sort of waste labor left behind by the competitive process. Provocatively, Watkins argues that, in the twenty-first century, academic work in the humanities is assuming the management function of reclaiming this waste labor as a motor force for the future.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
In
Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
Fordham University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
Fordham University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
Available in Other Form
print 9780823229826
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Online Access
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Online Resources > Ebooks
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Table of Contents
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. We're Going to the Show
Chapter 2. New Selves / Old Selves, Class Dreams / Class Nightmares
Chapter 3. School to Work to School to Work to . . .
Chapter 4. How the Inequality Connection Was Timed Out
Chapter 5. Class Processes 101: The Purpose of Competition
Chapter 6. Competition, Choice, and the Management of Class Doubling
References
Index
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. We're Going to the Show
Chapter 2. New Selves / Old Selves, Class Dreams / Class Nightmares
Chapter 3. School to Work to School to Work to . . .
Chapter 4. How the Inequality Connection Was Timed Out
Chapter 5. Class Processes 101: The Purpose of Competition
Chapter 6. Competition, Choice, and the Management of Class Doubling
References
Index