Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality

Marsh’s forceful, erudite treatment lays bare the fact that the U.S. seems largely unwilling to change underlying social structures that sustain poverty and inequitable life chances….the drumbeat of his important message needs to be amplified in a nation widely deaf to it. Highly Recommended.

—CHOICE

This well-researched and well-argued book chillingly illustrates the toxic effects of growing inequality in contemporary U.S. society by revealing how educational opportunity and the myth of meritocracy carries more of people’s hopes and dreams than its shoulders can bear. Class Dismissed is a powerful treatise towards explaining the hidden and not-so-hidden costs of economic inequality and why abolishing poverty would be the best thing we can do to increase equality of educational opportunity…. John Marsh makes a bold and courageous case for a politics of economic justice.

—Peter McLaren, author, Capitalists and Conquerors; professor, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California,

Los Angeles

At a moment when the increasing inequality of American life is almost universally blamed on the failures of our schools, nothing could be more timely than this powerful demonstration that bad education has not produced the growing gap between the rich and the poor and that better education will not reduce it. If you really want less poverty, Marsh argues, don’t give poor people more advanced degrees, give them more money—and help them join unions.

—Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English, University of Illinois, Chicago

John Marsh asks some uncomfortable but necessary questions about the current drive for mass college education. In a clear, persuasive, and troubling account, he shows that education is not the cure-all, as it is advertised by many across political lines. A must-read for those thinking about higher education.

—Jeffrey J. Williams, co-editor, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism; professor of literary and cultural studies, Carnegie Mellon University