ABSTRACT
If underemployment of peoples' knowledge and skills in the legal labor market economy of advanced capitalist societies is as extensive as prior analyses suggest, recommendations that stress the need for more and better education miss the point. The optimal solution to the education-jobs gap lies in reconnecting schooling and jobs with those dimensions of work and learning that they have been separated from with the spread of industrial capitalism. This chapter mainly focuses on the gap of the underemployment of organized schooling in paid work, which could not be sustained under the pressure of all other reciprocal interactions of work and learning. The three economic alternatives, shareholder and stakeholder versions of capitalism and economic democracy, represent distinguishable current tendencies in the relations between ownership of the major means of reproduction of material life and direct control of reproduction processes themselves.
