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.