The Myth of the Saving Power of Education

In the United States, young people are bombarded with messages that they must go to college in order to secure their place in the middle class. Those who are most disadvantaged in society are the most frequent recipients of this rhetoric because people believe that education is the one ticket that can save them from poverty. Like the belief that there is only one avenue for salvation from hell to heaven, the notion of salvific education presents a single answer to the problem of inequality--if you want to be saved from poverty and oppression, you must go to college. In this book, Hannah Adams Ingram interrogates the presumed promise of education and argues that the myth itself perpetuates, rather than alleviates, social inequality. The Myth of the Saving Power of Education asks educators to reclaim the liberative potential of education and asks Christians to repent of judging individual worth based on the same merits as the secular market system.