ABSTRACT
This chapter presents education as learned effectiveness with four alternatives: education as credential, as reproducer of inequality, as false satisfier, and as spurious correlate. The four critical and disparaging views of education share one element in common that distinguishes them from the human-capital view. The credentialist view maintains that education produces an artificial effect. Credentialists support their view by arguing that the skills used on most jobs are learned on the job and not taught in school. Marxist and neo-Marxist scholars often emphasize education's relatively explicit tracking according to social class. Implicit tracking occurs when high-status individuals and their cultural agents in the academic world select and promote students based on interests and activities cultivated in the family and consistent with those of high-status adults in general. The views of education as mere credential, reproducer of inequality and spurious correlate often seem preposterous. Education helps individuals to become active agents in their own lives.
