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Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life
"This seminal work . . . establishes a persuasive new paradigm."Contemporary SociologyNo book since Schooling in Capitalist America has taken on the systemic forces hard at work undermining our education system. This classic reprint is an invaluable resource for radical educators.Samuel Bowles is research professor and director of the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute, and professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts.Herbert Gintis is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and emeritus professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts.
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First published January 1, 1970
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About the author
Samuel Bowles
81 books73 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.
Samuel Bowles is Research Professor and Director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute and Professor of Economics at the University of Siena. He is coauthor of Notes and Problems in Microeconomic Theory (North Holland Texts in Mathematical Economics) and Schooling in Capitalist America (Basic Books), and has published articles, most recently, in the American Economic Review, Nature, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Economic Journal, and the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
Samuel Bowles is Research Professor and Director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute and Professor of Economics at the University of Siena. He is coauthor of Notes and Problems in Microeconomic Theory (North Holland Texts in Mathematical Economics) and Schooling in Capitalist America (Basic Books), and has published articles, most recently, in the American Economic Review, Nature, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Economic Journal, and the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
October 11, 2015
I'm glad I read this, but I can't say I particularly enjoyed it. I am confounded as to why the authors chose to reprint this 1976 publication in 2011, yet neglected to update the material with contemporary data. Their main thesis is that the educational structure of American schooling is intentionally mirrored to the American capitalist economic system, matching student production to fill the requirements of the economic class structure. There is no denying that the last 35 years have seen an intensification of class hierarchy, as evidenced by the 1%. But issues of workforce equality, racial disparity, mass incarceration, social services, and educational trends have complicated the issue, and it feels almost irresponsible that the authors do not address that further than their short and breezy Introduction. The authors still stand by their assertion that the only solution is a cross-class total revolution to Marxist socialism, but they fail to provide practical advice on just how that's supposed to happen. They do warn it might be bloody. "Socialism" is such a loaded buzzword in today's political climate; I'd appreciate if the authors took the intellectual responsibility of applying their analysis to the contemporary nuances of today's world. This text is good at establishing baseline (but out-of-date) facts and raising interesting questions, but fails to provide legitimate answers or practical solutions.
December 14, 2022
"Boy, get running! It's the best years of your life they want to steal".---The Clash
What an explosion this book caused when it was first published in the Seventies. Whether you were in public school at the time (I was) or Catholic school (I was there too) this book documented what I and many others suspected in our hearts: That we were attending a government and/or Church-run brainwashing factory designed to turn us into robots for our future corporate masters. As one wag put it, "after Soviet agriculture, American education was the worst public policy disaster of the twentieth century." Samuel Bowles is writing for those of us who escaped the education-prison complex with our hearts and minds intact and managed to survive.
What an explosion this book caused when it was first published in the Seventies. Whether you were in public school at the time (I was) or Catholic school (I was there too) this book documented what I and many others suspected in our hearts: That we were attending a government and/or Church-run brainwashing factory designed to turn us into robots for our future corporate masters. As one wag put it, "after Soviet agriculture, American education was the worst public policy disaster of the twentieth century." Samuel Bowles is writing for those of us who escaped the education-prison complex with our hearts and minds intact and managed to survive.
November 23, 2024
The classic Marxist 70s look at education remains extremely relevant today, even some of the conclusions and predictions necessarily need to be revisited. While the following decades have sorely undermined the idea of the possibility of a "long march through the institutions" to socialism, the core critique of liberal education reform remains vital today. The authors' key insight, that the liberal search for the cure for inequality through education reform is impossible without a revolutionary transformation of the underlying social structure which is the source of that inequality, is every bit as relevant in pushing back at modern notions of charter schools or private vouchers or other similar ideas as panaceas to class oppression.
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April 1, 2017The classic Marxist sociology of education that defined and shaped all other modern analyses of education, labor, and class.
March 7, 2024
Preaching fire from the pulpit.
While originally published in the '70's, this trenchant critique of liberal educational reform and the ultimate social role of education in a capitalist economy is still relevant. In fact, I'd argue that the trends in education they analyze, along with the scant (but not trivial) predictions they make about the direction of education in the US over the next several decades, have only intensified/came true. It was honestly crazy just how many points this book brought up that I personally have felt or wrestled with in the last few years in my experience as a college educator. The fundamental thesis of the book is solid: schooling as a social institution in the US does not function primarily as an avenue for personal development of the individual, but as a legitimizing force for the current state of affairs and way to reproduce the necessary conditions for capitalist production. They back this thesis up with a detailed analysis using contemporary data, along with a historical study tracing the main developments in education reform in the US from the past 150+ years. Based on their thesis, their recommendation for the future of education in the US is of course for a radical transformation in the mode of production and associated social forces- specifically, for socialism. It is a recommendation I wholeheartedly agree with, and find to be even more necessary nowadays. My favorite book on education I think I've ever read- I want to buy every teacher in my life a copy.
While originally published in the '70's, this trenchant critique of liberal educational reform and the ultimate social role of education in a capitalist economy is still relevant. In fact, I'd argue that the trends in education they analyze, along with the scant (but not trivial) predictions they make about the direction of education in the US over the next several decades, have only intensified/came true. It was honestly crazy just how many points this book brought up that I personally have felt or wrestled with in the last few years in my experience as a college educator. The fundamental thesis of the book is solid: schooling as a social institution in the US does not function primarily as an avenue for personal development of the individual, but as a legitimizing force for the current state of affairs and way to reproduce the necessary conditions for capitalist production. They back this thesis up with a detailed analysis using contemporary data, along with a historical study tracing the main developments in education reform in the US from the past 150+ years. Based on their thesis, their recommendation for the future of education in the US is of course for a radical transformation in the mode of production and associated social forces- specifically, for socialism. It is a recommendation I wholeheartedly agree with, and find to be even more necessary nowadays. My favorite book on education I think I've ever read- I want to buy every teacher in my life a copy.
August 27, 2019
Writen in the mid-70s, it goes without saying that the book is not ‘up to date’: the empirical data is mostly from the 60s; and the authors are responding to concrete conditions of American society prior to the economic crises and the neoliberal economic and cultural reaction of the late 70s-80s-present.
Nevertheless, Bowles and Gintin (who are now apparently supporters of vouchers and the charter school movement) provide a stronger, and far more radical analytical framework for exploring the economic and ideological functions of American schooling than much subsequent post-Marxist, cultural Marxist, and progressive discourses in education sociology and radical pedagogy. The book presents a sustained critique of the political economy of schooling, and offers a sober confrontation with the constraints that capital accumulation places on reformist visions of social change. There is a ‘thinking big’ about the limits and possibilities for revolutionary change, considerations that often get side-lined by activist desires, voluntarist impatience, and the ‘monday morning’ / ‘here and now’ pressures of classroom practice.
The book is also not nearly as economist, determinist, and lacking in dialectics as it’s cultural Marxist and postmodern critics have claimed. Quite the opposite. The authors’ ‘correspondence theory’ between the superstructure of schooling and the economic base of capital accumulation, rather than mechanically tethering schooling’s function to the narrow reproduction of skills for the labor market, sees schooling as a site of intense class struggle, a critical field of agency in which various class forces vie for political hegemony over education and their fight for their vision of society at large.
The book is not without short comings however: among the most significant is the lack of discussion of the imperialist nature of American capitalism and the implications this has on the political economy of schooling. Questions of how race and gender intersect with, give expression to, and are often the form in which different modalities of the class struggle take place are also left undeveloped.
Nevertheless, Bowles and Gintin (who are now apparently supporters of vouchers and the charter school movement) provide a stronger, and far more radical analytical framework for exploring the economic and ideological functions of American schooling than much subsequent post-Marxist, cultural Marxist, and progressive discourses in education sociology and radical pedagogy. The book presents a sustained critique of the political economy of schooling, and offers a sober confrontation with the constraints that capital accumulation places on reformist visions of social change. There is a ‘thinking big’ about the limits and possibilities for revolutionary change, considerations that often get side-lined by activist desires, voluntarist impatience, and the ‘monday morning’ / ‘here and now’ pressures of classroom practice.
The book is also not nearly as economist, determinist, and lacking in dialectics as it’s cultural Marxist and postmodern critics have claimed. Quite the opposite. The authors’ ‘correspondence theory’ between the superstructure of schooling and the economic base of capital accumulation, rather than mechanically tethering schooling’s function to the narrow reproduction of skills for the labor market, sees schooling as a site of intense class struggle, a critical field of agency in which various class forces vie for political hegemony over education and their fight for their vision of society at large.
The book is not without short comings however: among the most significant is the lack of discussion of the imperialist nature of American capitalism and the implications this has on the political economy of schooling. Questions of how race and gender intersect with, give expression to, and are often the form in which different modalities of the class struggle take place are also left undeveloped.
February 21, 2020
I literally won’t shut up about this book. Makes really strong arguments for political revolution/structural change as the only way to ensure inequity isn’t reproduced in the schooling system.
Important caveat: neither writer is a classroom teacher.
Important caveat: neither writer is a classroom teacher.
September 23, 2021
Cannot say it is an enjoyable read, but it is certainly a valuable one.
February 21, 2026
1. Educational reforms have proposed an end run on economic strife by offering all children an equal opportunity to make it
2. 1950s: the once relatively homogeneous apperance of the system of higher education was rapidly giving way to a hierarchy of colleges, dominated at the top by the elite Ivy League schools and decending through a fine graduation of private schools, state universities and community colleges.
3. By the 1970s, a broad spectrum of social-science opinion was ready to accept the view put forward by Jencks in their highly publicized study, Inequality: that a more egalitarian school system would do little to create a more equal distributuon of income or opportunity
4. Free schools have fared better than egalitarian school reform.
5. The pattern of social relationships fostered in schools is irrational or accident. Rather, the structure of the educational experience is admirably suited to nurturing attitudes and behavior consonant with participation in the labor force. Like the egalitarian reformers, the free-school movement seems to have run afoul of social logic rather than reaction, apathy, inertia or deficiencies of human nature.
6. Research Question: how can we best understand the evidently critical relationship between education and the capitalist economy?
7. The motivating force in the capitalist economy is the employer's quest for profit.
8. The central problem of the employer is to erect a set of social relations and organizational forms, both within the enterprise, and if possible, in society at large, that will channel these aims into the production and expropriation of surplus value. Thus as a social process, capitalist production is inherently antagonistic and always potentially explosive.
9. Education in the USA plays a dual role in the social process whereby surplus value, i.e: profit, is created and expropriated. On the one hand, by imparting technical and social skills and appropriate motivation, education increases the productive capacity of workers. On the other hand, education helps defuse and depoliticize the potentially explosive class relations of production process. Thus serves to perpetuate the social, political and economic conditions through which a portion of the product of labor is expropriated in the form of profits.
10. An educational system can be egalitarian and liberating only when it prepares youth for fully democratic participation in social life and an equal claim to the fruits of economic activity.
11. US education is highly unequal, the chances of attaining much or little schooling being substantially dependent on one's race and parents' economic level.
12. The halting contribution of U.S education to equality and full human development appears intimately related to the nature of the economic structures into which the schools must integrate each new generation of youth.
13. Our critique of the capitalist economy is simple enough: the people production process - in the workplace and in schools - is dominated by the imperatives of profit and domination rather than by human need.
14. The connection between work and social life is a central question in sociology.
2. 1950s: the once relatively homogeneous apperance of the system of higher education was rapidly giving way to a hierarchy of colleges, dominated at the top by the elite Ivy League schools and decending through a fine graduation of private schools, state universities and community colleges.
3. By the 1970s, a broad spectrum of social-science opinion was ready to accept the view put forward by Jencks in their highly publicized study, Inequality: that a more egalitarian school system would do little to create a more equal distributuon of income or opportunity
4. Free schools have fared better than egalitarian school reform.
5. The pattern of social relationships fostered in schools is irrational or accident. Rather, the structure of the educational experience is admirably suited to nurturing attitudes and behavior consonant with participation in the labor force. Like the egalitarian reformers, the free-school movement seems to have run afoul of social logic rather than reaction, apathy, inertia or deficiencies of human nature.
6. Research Question: how can we best understand the evidently critical relationship between education and the capitalist economy?
7. The motivating force in the capitalist economy is the employer's quest for profit.
8. The central problem of the employer is to erect a set of social relations and organizational forms, both within the enterprise, and if possible, in society at large, that will channel these aims into the production and expropriation of surplus value. Thus as a social process, capitalist production is inherently antagonistic and always potentially explosive.
9. Education in the USA plays a dual role in the social process whereby surplus value, i.e: profit, is created and expropriated. On the one hand, by imparting technical and social skills and appropriate motivation, education increases the productive capacity of workers. On the other hand, education helps defuse and depoliticize the potentially explosive class relations of production process. Thus serves to perpetuate the social, political and economic conditions through which a portion of the product of labor is expropriated in the form of profits.
10. An educational system can be egalitarian and liberating only when it prepares youth for fully democratic participation in social life and an equal claim to the fruits of economic activity.
11. US education is highly unequal, the chances of attaining much or little schooling being substantially dependent on one's race and parents' economic level.
12. The halting contribution of U.S education to equality and full human development appears intimately related to the nature of the economic structures into which the schools must integrate each new generation of youth.
13. Our critique of the capitalist economy is simple enough: the people production process - in the workplace and in schools - is dominated by the imperatives of profit and domination rather than by human need.
14. The connection between work and social life is a central question in sociology.
December 29, 2024
This book was very interesting to me. I had my suspicions of education as a facilitator of capitalism in certain respects but this book gave me more concrete information to craft an argument on. I was really compelled by how the authors talked about the idea of education as a kind of remedy to social and economic problems, and how that has deflected attention from real solutions to inequalities that contradict the capitalist agenda.
How exactly does education play into economic life in America? The authors argue that it facilitates the transition of students into workers, creates a surplus of skilled labor AKA a “reserve army of workers” which employers can leverage to hire and fire people as they please, internalizes top down relationships of authority and control, and imparts skills that increase workers’ productive capacity. Among other things.
Also interesting is the book’s focus on the contradictory nature of this dynamic. The same way education facilitates the economic system, it also gives birth to powerful radical movements that critique it.
One of the core aspects of this book is that education cannot and will not solve the problems created by capitalism. Not when it’s seen as the only way to do so. For capitalists, education is seen as “a means of alleviating social distress without redistributing wealth and power or altering the broad outlines of the economic system” (28). Only when aligned with other aspects of social life can a true revolution happen, Bowles and Gintis argue. However, I’m not quite sure that they lay out those alternatives as clearly as they mean to.
Definitely worth a read! Very informative.
How exactly does education play into economic life in America? The authors argue that it facilitates the transition of students into workers, creates a surplus of skilled labor AKA a “reserve army of workers” which employers can leverage to hire and fire people as they please, internalizes top down relationships of authority and control, and imparts skills that increase workers’ productive capacity. Among other things.
Also interesting is the book’s focus on the contradictory nature of this dynamic. The same way education facilitates the economic system, it also gives birth to powerful radical movements that critique it.
One of the core aspects of this book is that education cannot and will not solve the problems created by capitalism. Not when it’s seen as the only way to do so. For capitalists, education is seen as “a means of alleviating social distress without redistributing wealth and power or altering the broad outlines of the economic system” (28). Only when aligned with other aspects of social life can a true revolution happen, Bowles and Gintis argue. However, I’m not quite sure that they lay out those alternatives as clearly as they mean to.
Definitely worth a read! Very informative.
March 13, 2022
It was a long, hard read, but an important one. While this book was written in 70s, all the issues mentioned in the book are still prevalent today. I recommend this to anyone who is interested in education and its reform
December 2, 2017
An important book. Not a perfect one; but an important one.
December 2, 2022
Most helpful yet — 😚🎢🧚♀️
October 12, 2013
This book is a Marxist critique of the American education system, published in 1976 by two Harvard-educated economists.
One key observation is that an education system cannot by itself rectify a problematic economic system. It does seem to be an American article of faith that education is the solution to all social ills, that inequality and unemployment and economic stagnation can be rectified if people simply apply themselves to their studies (see virtually every American President's speeches on education). This may be true for an individual person but is unlikely to be true for the population as a whole. It was somewhat embarrassing to experience this as a novel insight.
Bowles and Gintis attack the idea that economic success is strongly determined by cognitive skills; they point to studies indicating that socioeconomic status is a much more important predictor of income than IQ is. They also argue that the education system is a tool for reproducing the "social relations of production." It was at this point the critique of our education system seemed to start to lose its sting but that is probably just me.
Marxist critiques strike me as very eye-opening because they highlight the importance of social class and economic relations, which generally have a way of rendering themselves invisible; but then they also seem rather reductionist because there's more to life than power relations and their reproduction.
The tone of the book's opening is interesting. "By the late 1950s, the educational frontier was pressing its limits. Already a third of the age group was entering college; over the next decade, the fraction would rise to almost half. College graduates were driving cabs; others were collecting unemployment checks. Some were on welfare. The once relatively homogeneous appearance of the system of higher education was rapidly giving way to a hierarchy of colleges, dominated at the top by the elite Ivy League schools and descending through a fine gradation of private schools, state universities, and community colleges... [t]he fading of the American Dream, hardly confined to education, has been a persistent theme of recent years." And to think that basically everyone working today was either in school or not even born back then, and everyone thinks that things have really gone downhill in recent times...
One key observation is that an education system cannot by itself rectify a problematic economic system. It does seem to be an American article of faith that education is the solution to all social ills, that inequality and unemployment and economic stagnation can be rectified if people simply apply themselves to their studies (see virtually every American President's speeches on education). This may be true for an individual person but is unlikely to be true for the population as a whole. It was somewhat embarrassing to experience this as a novel insight.
Bowles and Gintis attack the idea that economic success is strongly determined by cognitive skills; they point to studies indicating that socioeconomic status is a much more important predictor of income than IQ is. They also argue that the education system is a tool for reproducing the "social relations of production." It was at this point the critique of our education system seemed to start to lose its sting but that is probably just me.
Marxist critiques strike me as very eye-opening because they highlight the importance of social class and economic relations, which generally have a way of rendering themselves invisible; but then they also seem rather reductionist because there's more to life than power relations and their reproduction.
The tone of the book's opening is interesting. "By the late 1950s, the educational frontier was pressing its limits. Already a third of the age group was entering college; over the next decade, the fraction would rise to almost half. College graduates were driving cabs; others were collecting unemployment checks. Some were on welfare. The once relatively homogeneous appearance of the system of higher education was rapidly giving way to a hierarchy of colleges, dominated at the top by the elite Ivy League schools and descending through a fine gradation of private schools, state universities, and community colleges... [t]he fading of the American Dream, hardly confined to education, has been a persistent theme of recent years." And to think that basically everyone working today was either in school or not even born back then, and everyone thinks that things have really gone downhill in recent times...
August 14, 2010
Possibly the best critique of capitalist economics I have ever read. If you think that economics doesn't contribute to social reproduction, then you REALLY need to read this. Everything from uneven distribution, to the origin of standardized testing in the U.S. (dhun, dhun, dhun Carnegie foundation ... to test to see which workers were most "fit" for them), systems of domination enforced by capitalist economies, to powerful suggestions for political forces to change the education system!
Particularly pertinent as Race to the Top (RTTT) comes on to the stage of American education policy.
Makes clear that education was and is a secondary institution, the nature of which is determined by more powerful social agencies, especially the economy. Bowles and Ginitis' position is sometimes rendered as follows: whatever educators' intentions, schooling reproduces and legitimates an inequitable social class structure from one generation to another.
Particularly pertinent as Race to the Top (RTTT) comes on to the stage of American education policy.
Makes clear that education was and is a secondary institution, the nature of which is determined by more powerful social agencies, especially the economy. Bowles and Ginitis' position is sometimes rendered as follows: whatever educators' intentions, schooling reproduces and legitimates an inequitable social class structure from one generation to another.
August 24, 2015
4.25. a classic text in critical theory and education, one i'm glad i've read even though some of it is a bit dated. a detailed explanation of their major theory, the correspondence principle, where essentially the structure and social relations of schooling mirror the structure and social relations of the economy and in doing so replicate the social inequalities inherent in the economic system. bowles and gintis also make the crucially important argument (then and now) that we will never decrease existing social inequalities by focusing our reform on the education system, instead, we have to strive toward economic democracy (and revolutionize education as well). my one methodological critique is that they don't provide a clear rationale for the studies they pick to support their theories. still, a widely-cited, important work that i'm glad to have wrapped my head around.
September 30, 2009
Pretty much, this says the interconnectedness between the economic sphere and the American education system is the reason for flaws in both. Apparently, IQ and race are not determinants of one's potential economic success in the long run. Rather, where you end up in the social hierarchy is completely dependent on where you started. Pretty much, you're screwed where you are.
Their proposal for fixing the system?
Socialism, as the antithesis to Capitalism.
This book was pretty depressing considering all the work I've done in my respective AmeriCorps program for the past two years. And what's even worse, is all the points and issues brought to light in this book, haven't changed 30 years later.
Their proposal for fixing the system?
Socialism, as the antithesis to Capitalism.
This book was pretty depressing considering all the work I've done in my respective AmeriCorps program for the past two years. And what's even worse, is all the points and issues brought to light in this book, haven't changed 30 years later.
May 14, 2011
A bit dated, but still worth a look. This is a critique of education in capitalist America. One indicator of how provocative this book is: They report a finding that the best predictor of academic poerformance is docility, following rules, getting along with others--not inquisitiveness, ability, etc. One can raise questions about this volume, but it is worth reading, because it forces one to think through the nature and purposes of our educational system.
April 17, 2008
The interesting thing about pointing out the pitfalls of the currently capitalist America is that it does not make the countering Marxist ideals legitimate. One can criticize capitalism easily on many levels, yet socialism does not become a better solution in doing so.
Want to read
April 24, 2010Recommended by Seth Godin in
Linchpin
.
November 21, 2022
Lived up to its reputation as a seminal read as the authors thoroughly match the US education system to capitalism and its needs, although written in a rather dry, academic style, still found it an interesting and important read and one to return to for sure
August 13, 2008
brilliant..
November 28, 2012
Read in graduate school...one of my first real experiences with fierce attacks of capitalism.
March 8, 2013
A classic Marxist critique of education in the U.S.
October 3, 2020
A classic for a reason. One of the best distillations of 20th century critical educational theory from a Marxist tradition.
February 5, 2012
A must-read for radical educators and activists.
April 7, 2017
I found the chapter on higher ed provocative and fascinating and it made the rest of the book worth reading. The chapters on the history of schooling and education reform are also pretty useful and well worth reading. The conclusion is a bit mired in democratic socialist programmatism in ways I did not find particularly useful.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews