Reproduction Theory

Reproduction theory was developed by Herbert Gintis in 1972 in his critique of Ivan Illich and was expanded by Gintis and Samuel Bowles in their seminal text Schooling in Capitalist America published in 1976. Although reproduction theory (also called correspondence theory) now applies to the social and cultural fields, Bowles and Gintis first approached this theory through the lenses of capitalism and the economy. Their work exerted great impact on the field of curriculum studies and provided curriculum theorists with a foundation from which to critique and analyze schools and cultural reproduction. These ideas also reach further back, pulling from the theories of Karl Marx in The German Ideology. In what follows, this entry defines reproduction theory in its earliest form, highlights the important contributions of this theory to the field of education, notes the criticisms of reproduction theory, and discusses how the theory has changed since Bowles and Gintis's seminal text.

As Bowles and Gintis illustrated, reproduction theory provided a foundational model illustrating the direct relationship or correspondence between the ways in which the U.S. hierarchical class system functions and the ways in which U.S. school systems operate. In other words, the school corresponds to the capitalist system and then works to help reproduce the current economic system. Bowles and Gintis viewed schools as microcosms of the capitalist system. Thus, schools are institutions that reproduce hierarchical divisions of labor, meaning that there are a majority of docile, passive, economically disadvantaged workers and a smaller, elite group with the control of supervisors. Educational institutions act as microcosms of the larger economic system in that they reproduce hierarchical relationships within the walls of the schoolincluding the relationships between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and students, and so forthand schools reproduce unequal relationships outside of their walls by preparing the majority of children from low socioeconomic backgrounds for occupations in the same economic strata as their parents, thus maintaining the hierarchical economic cycle and capitalist system. In addition to maintaining unequal relationships, the school system perpetuates the current class system through its daily practices and procedures such as tracking, sorting, and testing and through the use of overt and covert curricula including both content and pedagogy. The classes a child takes, the content of books and lessons, and access to materials and knowledge, then, differ depending on a child's current economic status and projected economic track.

Although scholars and critics have expanded and transformed Bowles and Gintis's initial definition and development of reproduction and correspondence theory, the theories that emerged in Schooling in Capitalist America were significant because they illustrated that U.S. education is linked directly to capitalism and to the economic functions and goals of the nation. Bowles and Gintis highlighted the importance of class, particularly its correspondence with education in terms of reproduction of the current economic system, in a way that theorists before them had failed to do and thus moved educational theory away from former, limited functionalist standpoints. In addition, Bowles and Gintis proved that education is not an impartial or unbiased field. Rather, education is, in part, the result of biases and power struggles. They brought to light the inequalities in capitalism and in education. With their seminal text, then, Bowles and Gintis catalyzed an important and much needed theoretical dialogue about the relationship between economics and education and opened the door for a new generation of theorists, both those who expanded the work of Bowles and Gintis and those who argued against the reproduction and correspondence theory.

...