Karl Marx's Theoretical Analysis

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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 …show more content…

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

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