Jon Shelton, "The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy" (Cornell UP, 2023)

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May 18, 2025

Jon Shelton, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, tackles the misconceptions surrounding the belief that education alone can secure economic success. He discusses the historical context of public education’s role in fostering democracy and critiques the 'education myth' that has dominated political narratives since the 1960s. Shelton highlights how this myth has contributed to economic inequality and political polarization. He advocates for broader social reforms and a return to civic engagement in education, questioning the reliance on degrees as pathways to opportunity.

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INSIGHT

Education's Democratic Origins

Early advocates like Horace Mann promoted public education to build democratic citizenship, not primarily to create economic mobility.
The historical role of education in civic formation shows the current economic framing is constructed, not inevitable.

INSIGHT

Education One Part Of Social Democracy

Social democracy aimed to supply economic rights like jobs, unions, and social welfare within a capitalist framework.
Education was part of that package, but not the centerpiece of economic security policies like the Economic Bill of Rights.

INSIGHT

Human Capital Masks Structural Causes

Human capital theory framed education as an individual investment that raises wages, but it ignores structural power and discrimination.
Correlation between more schooling and rising incomes reflected unions and policy, not purely schooling causing prosperity.

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The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy (Cornell UP, 2023) questions the idea that education represents the best, if not the only, way for Americans to access economic opportunity. As Jon Shelton shows, linking education to economic well-being was not politically inevitable. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, public education was championed as a way to help citizens learn how to participate in a democracy. By the 1930s, public education, along with union rights and social security, formed an important component of a broad-based fight for social democracy.

Shelton demonstrates that beginning in the 1960s, the political power of the education myth choked off powerful social democratic alternatives like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin's Freedom Budget. The nation's political center was bereft of any realistic ideas to guarantee economic security and social dignity for the majority of Americans, particularly those without college degrees. Embraced first by Democrats like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, Republicans like George W. Bush also pushed the education myth. The result, over the past four decades, has been the emergence of a deeply inequitable economy and a drastically divided political system.

Jon Shelton is professor and chair of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. In addition to The Education Myth he is the author of Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order, which was the winner of the International Standing Conference of the History of Education’s First Book Award in 2018. Shelton has also published work in the Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and other publications. He served as the Vice-Chair of the city of Green Bay’s first ever Equal Rights Commission and sits on the Board of Directors for the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Wisconsin Labor History Society. He also serves as President for Higher Education of the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin.

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