The threat of education

Education has always provided the tools to identify, disrupt, and even to dismantle the market forces of capitalism and commodification. It does so by making the "invisible" hand of the market visible, and then by providing a forum (apparatus) in which individuals can discuss and examine (Humanities) the effect of the now-visible market.

The threat of education to market interests has grown in direct relationship to the prosperity of the country. That is, as economic scarcity became less real at the collective level, the need to reify the struggle that fuels market competition grew; if individuals reject the capitalist engine that they propel, the ship will stop moving. [But it likely won't sink]

Brown 1954 presented an especially difficult decision for post-war market culture: it was rooted in equality of educational resources for all, at a time when economic prosperity was so robust that the lie of scarcity was almost a neon sign. In the two decades since the Great Depression, the United States had turned a cultural corner as well as an economic one, and equality of all was clearly about to catch up with equality of prosperity.

In many ways, the students who walked out of an underfunded school in Virginia in protest did so in a great acknowledgement that they possessed and were being denied the apparatus of prosperity. Barbara Johns and the students who followed her led to Brown, and set off the sensibility of equality that would lead to Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, and the formation of the NAACP.

Public institutions and public goods are central to the measure of equality in our culture and in our struggle to complete the promise of democracy. Schools and libraries, in particular, have been essential in measuring the distance we yet have to go, and in nurturing the sensibility required for completing the assignment laid down in the declaration of independence.

[Tougaloo Nine]