The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning by Aronowitz, Stanley (March 1, 2001) Paperback

by Stanley Aronowitz

Americans can't get a good education for love or money, argues Stanley Aronowitz in this groundbreaking look at the structure and curriculum of higher education. Moving beyond the canon wars begun in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Aronowitz offers a vision for true higher learning that places a well-rounded education back at the center of the university's mission. "Aronowitz should be commended for the high seriousness of his endeavor, which sidesteps the comparatively petty canon wars to What is the true purpose of higher education and how can we restructure our universities to achieve it?" —Publishers Weekly "One of the most important books written on higher education in the last fifty years." —Henry A. Giroux, author of The Mouse That Disney and the End of Innocence "Bold, brassy, and provocative." —Michelle Fine, coauthor of The Unknown Lives of Poor and Working-Class Young Adults

Genres: Education, Sociology, Nonfiction

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Stanley Aronowitz (1933–2021) was a professor of sociology, cultural studies, and urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was also a veteran political activist and cultural critic, an advocate for organized labor and a member of the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society.

In 2012, Aronowitz was awarded the Center for Study of Working Class Life's Lifetime Achievement Award at Stony Brook University.

Reviews

[Colleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up The Knowledge Factory after having a fire ignited in me through Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society. Aronowitz's book, while informative, left me unconvinced and uninspired by his vision of what learning/education at the collegiate level should look like.

What is most disappointing about this is Aronowitz spends such a vast amount of time in the book adroitly describing the historical and sociological factors that have influenced the creation of the current knowledge "factory" which is closely linked to corporate imperatives, which stratifies academic workers into those who produce "research" (closely tied to funding from private for-profit entities) and the "teachers" overwhelmed by industrial-style teaching loads. He does a great job of showing how the creation of narrow curricula since World War II has been tailored with the needs of providing "work ready" students, and how layers of administration and bureaucracy have seized control of the university and put it in the hands of capitalists (the only ones who can give the university money in an age of defunding of school). I found though that his history bounced too much back and forth among the decades, and gets lost in the weeds at times.

Yet, the conclusion was the most disappointing element of the book for me. "What is to be done" is a remarkably unsatisfying chapter than doesn't address ANY of the structural impediments he notes in earlier chapters. He insists on a rigorous (okay, nothing wrong with that) education that combines economic, philosophical, historical and scientific histories through the reading of, for the most part, the Western Canon. The last chapter thus becomes a long bibliographic entry of his favorite books of Western Civilization. He "centers" and privileges the reading of Western authors, philosophers, and scientists--so much so that other cultures are frequently injected only THROUGH a white author ,even as he proclaims one must critique them by also reading the works of some "subaltern" groups. He suggests a 6-course sequence of studies but nothing about how this would happen within the socio-historical reality in which we find ourselves.

If I am going to have to dream about abolishing the knowledge factory, I think I've sided with anarchists like Illich.

[Aidan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably his most sage book I’ve read so far, as far as predicting where an industry would go. The industry he tackles in this book is university teaching. Many of the horrible working conditions of adjuncts in the US University system today, which has become so corporatized, could have come off the labor news from yesterday.