Schooling In Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life

359 Pages·2011·10.807 MB·English

by  Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis

Schooling
in Capitalist
America
t .
Educational Reform and the
Contradictions of Economic Life
Samuel Bowles
Herbert Gintis
and
with a new introduction
'Nearly forty years after
by the authors
its original publication,
Schooling in Capitalist
America remains one of
the most trenchant and
relevant explorations of the
class character of the American
educational system."
■ EEIK OLIN WRIGHT, president.
, American Sociological Association
t.
* *
«
First published in 1976 by Basic Books in New York
© Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis
Bertolt Brecht’s “A Worker Reads History,” from his volume Selected Poems, is reprinted by per
mission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., © 1947 by Bertolt Brecht and H. R. Hays.
Excerpt from William Butler Yeats’s Collected Poems is reprinted by permission of the Macmil­
lan Publishing Co., Inc. © 1924 by the Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed in 1952 by
Bertha Georgie Yeats. Also reprinted by permission of M. B. Yeats, Miss Anne Yeats, and the
Macmillan Company of London and Basingstoke.
Cat Stevens lyric from “Father and Son,” © 1970, Freshwater Music Ltd., controlled in the West
ern Hemisphere by Irving Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Used by permission.
This edition published in 2011 by
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CONTENTS
Preface to the 2011 Edition: Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited ix
Preface xiii
Part I
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF
LIBERAL EDUCATION REFORM
1. Beyond the Educational Frontier: The Great American Dream Freeze 3
2. Broken Promises: School Reform in Retrospect 18
Part II
EDUCATION AND THE STRUCTURE OF ECONOMIC LIFE
3. At the Root of the Problem: The Capitalist Economy 53
4. Education, Inequality, and the Meritocracy 102
5. Education and Personal Development: The Long Shadow of Work 125
Part III
THE DYNAMICS OF EDUCATIONAL CHANGE
6. The Origins of Mass Public Education 151
7. Corporate Capital and Progressive Education 180
8. The Transformation of Higher Education
and the Emerging White-Collar Proletariat 201
9. Capital Accumulation, Class Conflict, and Educational Change 224
Part IV
GETTING THERE
10. Educational Alternatives 245
11. Education, Socialism, and Revolution 264
Appendices 289
Notes 304
Index 333
To Hucky Corinnay and Eve

PREFACE TO THE 2 0 1 1 EDITI ON
Schooling in
Capitalist America
Revisited
The project that eventually resulted in Schooling in Capitalist America (1976)
began in 1968, stimulated by the then raging academic debates and social conflicts
about the structure and purposes of education. Our first collaboration resulted
from a request by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. for a series of background
papers in preparation for the Poor People’s March just prior to his death. At the
same time one of us drafted a memo on educational policy at the request of Sen­
ator Robert Kennedy, then a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination to
run for president. Jonathan Kozol’s explosive Death at an Early Agey a teacher’s
front-line report on the failure of city schools, had been published a year earlier.
The ideas that eight years later appeared in Schooling did not originate in the li­
brary or the seminar room, they came from our encounters with the reality of
U.S. education in the church basement classrooms of school boycotts and in con­
versations with teachers and educational policy makers.
Like many others, we were then, and remain, hopeful that education can con­
tribute not only to a more productive economy but to a flourishing life for all
people and to the more equal sharing of its benefits. Our distress at how woefully
the U.S. educational system was then failing these enlightened objectives sparked
our initial collaboration; its continuing failure has prompted our recent return
to the subject.
The three basic propositions of the book concern human development, inequal­
ity, and the process of social change.
Concerning human development we showed that while cognitive skills are im­
portant in the economy, the most important contribution of schooling to individ­
ual’s economic success lay elsewhere. We advanced the position that schools prepare
people for adult work roles, by socializing people to function well (and without
complaint) in the hierarchical structure of the modern corporation or public office.
ix
SCHOOLING IN CAPITALIST AMERICA
Schools accomplish this by what we called the correspondence principle, namely
by structuring social interactions and individual rewards to replicate the environ­
ment of the workplace. We thus focused attention not on the explicit curriculum
but on the socialization implied by the structure of schooling. Our econometric
investigations demonstrated that little of the contribution of schooling to later eco­
nomic success is not explained by the cognitive skills learned in school.
Second, we showed that parental class and other aspects of economic status are
passed on to children in part by means of unequal educational opportunity, but
that the economic advantages of the descendants of the well-to-do go consider­
ably beyond the superior education they receive. We used the then available sta­
tistical data to demonstrate that the United States fell far short of the goal of equal
economic opportunity and that genetic inheritance of cognitive skill— as meas­
ured on standard tests— explains at most a very small part of the high degree of
intergenerational persistence of affluence and poverty within families.
Finally, our historical studies of the origins of primary schooling and the de­
velopment of the high school suggested that the evolution of the modern school
system is accounted for not by the gradual perfection of a democratic or peda­
gogical ideal but by a series of class and other conflicts arising through the trans­
formation of the social organization of work and its rewards. In this process the
interests of the owners of the leading businesses tended to predominate but were
rarely uncontested. We later (in Democracy and Capitalism') developed the idea
that schools and the public sector generally are loci of conflicts stemming from
the contradictory rules of the marketplace and the democratic polity.
How do we now view this work? For most of the intervening third of a century
we have researched and taught subjects quite removed from the questions we ad­
dressed in Schooling. In recent years, however, we have returned to writing about
school reform, how economic institutions shape the process of human develop­
ment, and the importance of schooling, cognitive skill, and personality as deter­
minants of economic success and their role in the intergenerational perpetuation
of inequality.
In light of the outpouring of quantitative research on schooling and inequality
in the intervening years, the statistical claims of the book have held up remarkably
well. In particular, recent research by us and others taking advantage of advances
in econometrics and using far better data than was available in the early seventies
has entirely vindicated our major results. Among these are our estimates of high
levels of intergenerational persistence of economic status, the unimportance of
the heritability of IQ in this process, and the fact that the contribution of school­
ing to cognitive development plays but a modest part in explaining why those
* Bowles and Gintis (1986).
Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited
with more schooling have higher earnings. Indeed most recent estimates of the
intergenerational transmission of economic inequality indicate that we probably
underestimated its extent, rather than the opposite, as some of our critics con­
tended/ Our view that in explaining economic inequality differences in cognitive
and other skills are less important than differences in personality and affective
aspects of behavior has been strongly affirmed by the recent work of the Univer­
sity of Chicago Nobel Laureate James Heckman and others.1
Recent research— our own and others’ reported in our recent A Cooperative
Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution— has also affirmed an aspect of our
work that some considered to be utopian at the time of its publication. This is
our conviction that many, probably most people are deeply committed to treating
others fairly— now documented by the new field of behavioral economics in lit­
erally hundreds of experiments in over fifty different cultures1— and that partly
for this reason inequality, far from greasing the wheels of economic progress is
more often sand in the gears/
On current reflection, the main shortcomings of the book reflect the times in
which we wrote. The long 1960s economic boom and the antimaterialist counter-
cultural currents that it fostered perhaps led us to underemphasize the value of
schooling in contributing to productive employment. But the more important
shortcoming, we think is programmatic. We avoided for the most part the ques­
tion of what schools should be, focusing instead on what schools actually are and
do. Nor did we devote much attention to how economic systems other than cap­
italism might better facilitate achieving the enlightened objectives of schooling.
We took it as obvious that a system of democratically run and employee-owned
enterprises coordinated by both competitive markets and governmental policies
was both politically and economically viable as an alternative to capitalism. We
remain convinced of the attractiveness of such a system, but are less sanguine
about its feasibility, and more convinced that reforms of capitalism may be the
most likely way to pursue the objectives that we embraced at the outset. While
the book endorses the idea that radicals— even revolutionaries— must also be re­
formers, we provided little guidance to either policy makers, teachers, or students
seeking practical positive steps to bring about long-term improvements in edu-
* The evidence is surveyed in Bowles and Gintis (2002) and Bowles, Gintis, and Groves
(2005).
f See Bowles, Gintis, and Osborne (2001) and Heckman, et al. (2010) and the empirical
studies cited there.
$ Bowles and Gintis (2011) and Gintis, et al. (2005) are introductions to this new literature.
§ Bowles (2012); Bowles and Jayadev (2007); and Bowles and Gintis (1998).
SCHOOLING IN CAPITALIST AMERICA
cational structure and practice.
Partly because we are now reasonably certain that we had the facts right, we re­
main committed to our overall approach to schooling— embedding the analysis
of education in the evolving structure of the economy and the polity, and giving
attention to the noncognitive as well as conventional effects of education. Today,
no less than during the stormy days when Schooling was written, schools express
the conflicts and limitations as well as the hopes of a divided and unequal society;
and they continue to be both testing grounds and battlegrounds for building a
more just and freer life for all.
Santa Fe, New Mexico
and Budapest
July 2011
Bowles, Samuel. 2012. The New Economics of Inequality and Redistribution. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 1986. Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community,
and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought. New York: Basic Books.
-----------. 1998. Recasting Egalitarianism: New Rules for Markets, States, and Communities.
London: Verso.
-----------. 2002.“The Inheritance of Inequality.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 16, no. 3,3-30.
-----------. 2011. A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Bowles, Samuel, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne Groves, eds. 2005. Unequal Chances:
Family Background and Economic Success. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press and Russell Sage Foundation.
Bowles, Samuel, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne. 2001. “The Determinants of Earnings:
A Behavioral Approach.” Journal of Economic Literature, XXXIX (December):
1137-76.
Bowles, Samuel and Arjun Jayadev. 2007. “Garrison America.” The Economists' Voice 4, no.
2, Article 3.
Gintis, Herbert, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, eds. 2005. Moral Sentiments
and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life. Cam­
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Heckman, James, J. E. Humphries, P. LaFontaine, and N. Mader. 2010. Hard Evidence on Soft
Skills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.