Schooling in Capitalist America

In 1968, in the midst of national upheaval over social equity and educational authority, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis began work on what would later become Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. Economists and social theorists, Bowles and Gintis set out to understand the growing body of contradictory evidence regarding the efficacy of educational reform. By the time they completed their landmark work, they had become convinced that there was a much deeper contradiction in U.S. society: that between our egalitarian goal of democratic participation in schooling and the inequalities implied by the continued profitability of capitalist production. Challenging the liberal faith in the school as the great agent of equalization, Bowles and Gintis argued that the hidden curriculum of schooling was precisely the reproduction of inequality. Their analysis of the correspondence between curricular variation and social stratification alone constitutes a major contribution in the history of curriculum studies.

Contrary to a primary assumption of liberal reform, Bowles and Gintis argued that democratizing schools alone would not democratize society. To bring about any genuine change in the order of schools would require an accompanying change in the social relations and economic order of society at large. This is because schools not only impart knowledge and skills (the official curriculum) but at the same time acculturate students into the existing capitalist social order (the hidden curriculum). Schools prepare students for unequal social roles by developing their consciousness and capacities into more or less the forms expected by future employers.

For Bowles and Gintis, variation in school curricula correspond to stratification of social roles: Some schooling emphasizes rule-following and discourages creativity as would befit low-level jobs; some promotes dependability and moderate autonomy as befits mid-level jobs; and a small portion of higher education mirrors the need for high-level professionals to internalize the aims of an enterprise in a deep way. For this reason, Bowles and Gintis proposed that only in a socialist democracy could schools truly develop the full human capacities of all children, in preparation for a future in which students would take their place in a society of equals.

Retracing the history of U.S. schooling from the early 19th century through the present day, Bowles and Gintis demonstrated the incompatibility between the democratic mission of schools and the specific demands of capitalism. For example, they showed how even as workers were able to win more schooling, most of the curriculum was kept out of their reach, and how higher education, once [Page 761]a luxury for the few, became more accessible precisely as capitalist industry required more knowledge workers.

Bowles and Gintis also critiqued the liberal assumption that economic success in the United States is based on cognitive ability. To the contrary, they cited evidence demonstrating that economic success bears little relationship to conventional measures of cognitive ability such as IQ. Rather, the transmission of socioeconomic status from one generation to the next operates by noncognitive mechanisms.

Schooling in Capitalist America also addressed existing educational alternatives such as free schools, in which Bowles and Gintis found more of the same debilitating assumptions about the role of schools in economic life. The socialist alternative envisioned by these scholars imagines neither a coup nor a revolution led by an elite vanguard. In their vision, educational reform must be part of a broad popular movement to transform social relations of production outside and inside schools.

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