Carlson 1987

Carlson, D. (1987). Teachers as political actors: From reproductive theory to the crisis of schooling. Harvard Educational Review, 57(3), 283-307.

• Article about critical theories of schooling
• In critical theory, most have seen teachers as witting or unwitting servants of the state, and thus capitalism (283)
• "...schooling must be heavily impositional...I mean that it must be imposed, in an authoritarin manner and against some resistance, upon students, whose schooling prepares them for the lower rungs of a high inequitable social and labor hierarchy..." (283)
• in this case school is not seen as a leveling instrument, but an instrument of reproductive labor, in that it produces workers and ingrains capitalistic social theory into students 
• BUT teachers are not unwitting, and their reproductive role makes their job much harder (284)
• thus they are bureaucratized and watched, to make sure they produce the right sort of product/student
•  efficiency thus heightens the contradictions experienced by teachers, who are caught between teaching knowledge and the demands of the state to produce worker bees
• Critical theories about schooling:
• de-schooling (285-287)
• liberate schools from the (capitalist) state, use vouchers! (286)
• but efficiency may be better for capital (287)
• structural functionalism and teaching
• middle classes, including teachers, help alienate workers (288)
• "Teachers supervise, discipline, and indoctrinate future workers in the service of capital. Structural-functionalists generally argue that because members of this class serve as agents of capitalists interests and do not directly add anything of value to what is produced by human labor, their work cannot be considered 'productive.'"
• but under socialism this job would become productive because their are contributing socially beneficial skills and knowledge
• also the middle classes are proletarianized (289)
• new techonologies deskill labor (290)
• their labor is intensified
• and finally they become eminently replaceable
• But teachers are not merely puppets of the state (291)
• any movement to reform schools, really, bmust begin with the "...recognition that the state, and state schools, are strongly, in not directly, determined by the reproductive needs of capital..." (291)
• Proletarianization suggests that workers increasingly identify with the political interests of the working class (292)
• teachers can make their own culture through everyday practices (293)
• and they can resist and capitulate to pressurs in paradoxical ways, not deterministic ones (293)
• history of teahers' unions in USA (295-304)
• Conclusions
• if teachers have to do the dirty work of clas formation, then their roles must be carefully circumscribed (304)
• reproductive work demands a great deal of top-down control (306)