Schooling for Capitalism: Conflict and Critical Theories in Education
Schooling for Capitalism: Conflict and Critical Theories of School Socialization
Bowles and Gintis: Schooling and the Reproduction of Labor
Bowles and Gintis argued that schools are involved in socialization because it helps produce the right kind of workers for capitalist companies. The American education system, in fact, helped to shape whole personalities. They argued that the structure of schooling is based on a ‘correspondence principle’: the structure of school life corresponds to the structure of working life, and this has to be accepted as inevitable.
Their theory challenged the widespread idea that education could be ‘a great leveller’, treating people equally and enabling everyone to achieve. They proposed that education under capitalism was, in fact, a great divider.
This theory represents a kind of ‘conflict functionalism’. It is based on the idea of society as riven with conflict, but the education system within this society also performs certain functions for the system as a whole. The thesis is also rather too generalized and was not borne of empirical research within schools themselves. Later researchers found a diversity of practice within schools, and in many cases, it may be possible for school heads and teachers to generate an ethos that encourages working-class pupils to be more ambitious than the theory allows for. It is the case that in many capitalist countries today, employers complain that schools are failing to produce workers with the skills they need.
The Hidden Curriculum
In focusing on the structure of schooling, Bowles and Gintis showed that a hidden curriculum exists within education systems.
Gatto’s Perspective
Gatto, a retired schoolteacher with 30 years’ experience, reached a similar conclusion from a non-Marxist perspective, arguing that the hidden curriculum in the USA teaches seven basic lessons:
- Students are taught to be both emotionally and intellectually dependent on authority figures, in the form of teachers who tell them what to think and how to feel.
- They also learn that their own self-esteem is provisional.
- The final lesson is that being under constant surveillance is normal.
Gatto concludes that the compulsory state school system in the USA delivers ‘compulsory subordination for all’ and is ‘structurally unreformable’. He argues for home education where children themselves can take control of their own learning, using parents and other adults as ‘facilitators’.
Illich’s Critique of Schooling
Illich is noted for his staunch opposition to the culture of industrial capitalism. In the sphere of health, traditional remedies and practices are lost as bureaucratic health systems push people to rely on doctors. This pattern is repeated in all areas of life, including education.
Illich argued that the very notion of compulsory schooling should be questioned. He stressed the connection between the development of education and the requirements of the economy for discipline and hierarchy. He argued that schools have developed to cope with four basic tasks.
Much is learned in school that has nothing to do with the formal content of lessons. Schools tend to inculcate what Illich called ‘passive consumption’ (an uncritical acceptance of the existing social order). These lessons are not explicitly taught but are implicit in school procedures and organization.
Deschooling Society
Illich advocated what he called the deschooling of society. Illich did not mean by this that all forms of education organization should be abolished. Learners should not have to submit to a standard curriculum, and they should have personal choice over what they study.
Illich suggested several types of educational framework. Material resources would be available to any student, and they would be provided with vouchers, allowing them to use educational services as and when they wished.
Illich’s ideas from the 1970s became interesting again with the rise of new communications technologies and ideas of ‘lifelong learning’ throughout the life-course.
Education and Cultural Reproduction
Education and inequality are clearly related. Paul Willis looks at the effects of cultural values in shaping pupil attitudes to education and work, while Pierre Bourdieu examines the relationship between the cultures of school and home. These studies are concerned with cultural reproduction: the generational transmission of cultural values, norms, and experience and the mechanisms and processes through which this is achieved.
Learning to Labor by Failing in School
A second classic study in the sociology of education is the discussion of cultural reproduction provided in the report of a fieldwork study carried out by Paul Willis.
Willis’s Research Problem
The research problem Willis set out to investigate was how cultural reproduction occurs. It is thought that young people from lower-class or ethnic minority backgrounds simply come to see that they ‘are not clever enough’ to expect to get highly paid or high-status jobs. The experience of academic failure teaches them to recognize their intellectual limitations.
Challenging Traditional Interpretations
This interpretation does not conform at all to the reality of people’s lives and experiences. If any young people leave school thinking, ‘I’m so stupid that it’s fair and proper for me to be stacking boxes in a factory all day’, the ‘street wisdom’ of those from poor neighborhoods may be of little or no relevance to academic success.
The Lads’ Counter-School Culture
Willis focused on a particular group of boys in the school who called themselves ‘the lads’. They were white, and they thought the school also contained many young people from West Indian and Asian backgrounds. They saw the school as an alien environment but one they could manipulate to their own ends.