The Philosophy of Mathematics Education
The educational encounter. Education prepares students to be workers through a correspondence between the social relations of production and the social relations of education. Like the division of labor in the capitalist enterprise, the educational system is a finely graded hierarchy of authority and control in which competition rather than cooperation governs the relations between participants. The hierarchical order of the school system admirably geared towards preparing students for their future positions in the hierarchy of production, limits the development of those capacities involving the exercise of reciprocal and mutual democratic participation and reinforces social inequality by legitimating the assignment of students to inherently unequal ‘slots’ in the social hierarchy.