The Education System Keeps "Preparing" Us, Yet Fails to Orient Us in the Market

One of the main areas of concern in sociology is the distribution of wealth. Yet this problem seems significant and urgent only when discussed at the theoretical level. In reality, people often passively accept the outcomes of wealth distribution. They complain, but all they seem able to do is accept the so-called "structural conditions."

As a university graduate who began working in the post-pandemic era, my purpose in writing this article is to clarify a fact for my former self: employment means seeing clearly one's role in the market as labor. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century confirmed this fact for me at the theoretical level. As an educator, which is to say a former student, I have found that throughout the long school system, no one ever guided us, as students, to view from this angle a long-term condition that many of us will face, namely the condition of being employed. Our schools do bring up future employment and career planning, but these are one-directional career imaginings that proceed from one's own subjective perspective: what I want to do, what kind of person I want to become, what kind of life I want to live. Yet schools have never, from a more objective angle, pulled us back to this reality: we are only one among many factors in market competition, in most cases the factor of labor, while the market contains other very important factors, such as capital and social connections, as well as the power relations among these elements. Here I do not wish to elaborate too much on how the market operates; I only want to focus on discussing the consequences of the education system choosing to ignore students' latent identity as labor.

But I must first answer why the education system chooses to ignore this fact. The education system exists in order to enable people to master, to the greatest possible extent, the intellectual achievements humanity already has, and to cultivate so-called "accomplished people" who can adapt to real society. But even high-quality education is often merely striving to do the earlier part well, that is, to enrich ourselves as much as possible, rather than explaining the real world to us, that is, adapting to society.

If the education system were to define the goal of education as cultivating laborers, especially laborers who connect with the market, education would be actively pulling itself down from its pedestal, dissolving the mysterious distance that the academic world and the real world have long maintained. The products of the academic world are the main source of information on which we make political decicion, that is, a kind of "power" constructed on the basis of "knowledge." Political power sustains every order of existing society, including market order. Therefore, shaking this foundation neither meets the needs of building a civilized society nor serves the requirements of maintaining social order. As students, when we accumulate knowledge we are accumulating a certain kind of "professional power," and when we shape the ideal personality of society we are accumulating a kind of "moral power," that is, the ability to distinguish right from wrong. I am not anti-intellectual either, and I have no intention at all of criticizing this educational ideal that takes "knowledge" as "virtue." On the contrary, it is the most ideal expectation I have always held of the world.

But I want to discuss this: should we, in education, present and explain this world to children responsibly, and in what manner, and what kind of reality should be perceived, and whether the cruelty of reality should be told to us rather than personally experienced.

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the most influential conclusion Thomas Piketty reaches is that when the average annual rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of economic growth, the growth of inherited wealth will outpace the growth of output and income, which leads to a high concentration of social wealth and intensified inequality. The author believes that the main cause of unfair distribution of social wealth is the political system, that inequality is essentially a political problem, and that it requires political intervention.

The main way to alleviate this structural unfairness is through the diffusion of knowledge and skills. This is mainly reflected in international competition, for example, developing countries achieving rapid economic growth through advances in knowledge and technology. At the individual level, however, this effect is not so obvious, because knowledge and skills are acquired mainly through education, and access to educational resources is not equal. Yet this meritocracy-based education system remains the mainstream mechanism by which we compete fairly. While in school, we always feel that by receiving an education we are making ourselves more competitive laborers, and therefore we will have a chance to obtain better job opportunities. But we have no concrete perception of the market as a whole; we do not know where the factor of labor is positioned in the market. We merely regard ourselves as subjects with agency. We care about what knowledge and skills we have mastered, how we can bring our abilities and talents into play, what we believe in, and what we pursue. But we have not the slightest awareness of our "vulnerability" in the market's circumstances. That is to say, as Thomas Piketty points out, the refinement of "labor" itself does not raise the share of wealth distribution within the factor of human capital, and "non-human" capital (machines, factories, real estate, financial assets) is almost as indispensable in the twenty-first century as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and may even be more important. Therefore, there is no market mechanism by which one can automatically obtain a fair return merely by becoming better as an individual and contributing labor. The education system constantly refines labor but fail to let individuals see clearly the essential identity of labor in the market. This is a systemic dereliction of duty, or a deliberate whitewashing and concealment.

Even though I have already given my answer to the reasons above, I still feel that we will always need to face social reality, just as we face scientific facts. At the very least, seeing such reality clearly can help us make our most honest choices on the basis of facts, rather than going through a painful stage of demanding that reality satisfy our imagination. Only when we acknowledge reality can we see the real problems and make real changes, instead of letting the market mechanism entangle us like an invisible "ghost" while we attribute the difficulties of life entirely to our own choices. But that is not the case. As soon as we recognize the vulnerable position of participating in the market as labor, we can see the real cause, and we are then not experiencing unnecessary fear.