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Standing on the Shoulders of Bowles and Gintis: Class Formation and Capitalist Schools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Michael W. Apple
Michael W. Apple*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Extract

In The German Ideology, Marx articulates one of his most famous claims. Paraphrased, it reads in essence that “the ruling class will give its ideas the form of universality and represent them as the only rational universally valid ones.” While there have been interpreters of this point who have chosen to see this process as a conscious conspiracy, for Marx it was considerably more complicated. For him, out of the constitutive conflicts and contradictions of capitalism there were certain specific tendencies that were generated. Among these tendencies was the “natural” production of principles, ideas, and categories that support the unequal class relations of that social formation. These ideas were under constant threat, however. They needed constant attention because hegemonic control was not guaranteed. Because of the class conflicts also generated out of, and causing, changes in that mode of production, there always exists the possibility of different ideological tendencies which could subvert the dominant ones.

Type
Retrospective
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , Summer 1988 , pp. 231 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 See Apple, Michael W., Ideology and Curriculum (Boston, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York, 1976).Google Scholar

3 A summary of this work can be found in Henry Giroux, “Theories of Reproduction and Resistance in the New Sociology of Education: A Critical Analysis,” Harvard Educational Review 53(Aug. 1983): 257–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Whitty, Geoff, Sociology and School Knowledge (London, 1985), 25.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 26.Google Scholar

6 For a detailed discussion of these points, see Michael W. Apple, Education and Power (Boston, 1982); and Apple, Michael W., ed., Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education: Essays on Class, Ideology, and the State (Boston, 1982).Google Scholar

7 Whitty, , Sociology and School Knowledge, 29.Google Scholar

8 See Apple, Education and Power, for further discussion.Google Scholar

9 Carnoy, Martin and Levin, Henry, Schooling and Work in the Democratic State (Stanford, Calif., 1985), 47.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 50.Google Scholar

11 Apple, , Education and Power.Google Scholar

12 The list of material here is becoming rather extensive. For representative examples, but ones with varying levels of success in illuminating these conflicts and pressures, see Julia Wrigley, Class Politics and Public Schools: Chicago, 1900–1950 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1972); Hogan, David, Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Philadelphia, 1985); William Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements during the Progressive Era (Boston, 1986); and Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York, 1985).Google Scholar

13 See David Hogan's outstanding essay on the issues surrounding this, “Education and Class Formation,” in Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education, ed. Apple, 32-78.Google Scholar

14 The best recent treatment of the emerging literature on class structure is Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London, 1985). See also Olin Wright, Erik, Class, Crisis, and the State (London, 1978).Google Scholar

15 Wright, , Classes, 41. See also Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes, and Control: Towards a Theory of Educational Transmissions, vol. 3 (Boston, 1977).Google Scholar

16 For a thorough review of these emerging theories of the state, see Martin Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (Princeton, N.J., 1984).Google Scholar

17 Willis, Paul, Learning to Labor (New York, 1981), for all its faults, remains the best example of this kind of work.Google Scholar

18 What is implied by the concept of “determine” is, of course, subject to considerable debate. For an overview of part of this debate, see Jorge Larrain, Marxism and Ideology (London, 1983); and Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985).Google Scholar

19 Wright, , Classes, 9–11.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., 14.Google Scholar

21 The clearest statement of this tendency is found in Hogan, “Education and Class Formation.”Google Scholar

22 Wright, , Classes, 91.Google Scholar

23 Much of what follows draws upon a more extensive discussion in Michael W. Apple, Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education (New York, 1986); and Apple, Michael W., “Facing the Complexity of Power,” in Bowles and Gintis Revisited, ed. Mike Cole (Philadelphia, 1988).Google Scholar

24 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

25 Vogel, Lise, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, N.J., 1983).Google Scholar

26 Kessler-Harris, Alice, Out to Work: A History of Wage–Earning Women in the United States (New York, 1982), 148.Google Scholar

27 This is treated in more detail in William R. Leach, “Transformations in the Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890–1925,” Journal of American History 71(Sept. 1984): 319–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Barrett, Michele, Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (London, 1980). See also the exceptional discussion in Roman, Leslie, “Labor, Intimacy, and Class” (unpublished manuscript, Louisiana State University, School of Education, 1987). These points are of major importance. Too often, Marxist investigations focus all too heavily on production as paid work. They privilege the labor process outside the home to the extent that the relationship between schooling and patriarchal relations is made epiphenomenal. Recent feminist arguments, then, about the “productivist” bias in some Marxist work need to be taken very seriously.Google Scholar

29 Hartmann, Heidi, “The Unhappy Marriage between Marxism and Feminism,” in Education and the State, vol. 2, eds. Dale, Roger, Esland, Geoff, Fergusson, Ross, and Macdonald, Madeleine (Lewes, Eng., 1981), 191.Google Scholar

30 For some of the debate over these issues, see Barrett, Women's Oppression Today; Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women; Apple, Education and Power; and Apple, Teachers and Texts. Google Scholar

31 See, for example, Myra Strober and David Tyack, “Why Do Women Teach and Men Manage?” Signs 5(Spring 1980): 494–503; and Polly Welts Kaufman, Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven, Conn., 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 Among these are Apple, Teachers and Texts; Marta Danylewycz and Alison Prentice, “Teachers, Gender, and Bureaucratizing School Systems in Nineteenth-Century Montreal and Toronto,” History of Education Quarterly 24(Spring 1984): 75–100; Barry H. Bergen, “Only a Schoolmaster: Gender, Class, and the Effort to Professionalize Elementary Teaching in England, 1870–1910,” History of Education Quarterly 22(Spring 1982): 1-21; Dina Copelman, “The Politics of Professionalism: Women Teachers, 1904–1914” and “We Do Not Want to Turn Men and Women into Mere Toiling Machines: Teachers, Teaching, and the Taught” (unpublished manuscripts, University of Missouri, Columbia, 1985); and Frances Widdowson, Going Up to the Next Class: Women and Elementary Teacher Training, 1840–1914 (London, 1983).Google Scholar

33 I have stressed the interaction of gender and class here. Yet, a more thorough understanding of the historical relations among race, gender, and class is essential to any complete analysis of the role and effects of teaching. See the interesting work of Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980). On the more general issue also see her Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985); and Verena Martinez Alier, Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (New York, 1974).Google Scholar

34 See Herbert Gintis and Samuel Bowles, “Contradiction and Reproduction in Education,” in Schooling, Ideology, and the Curriculum, eds. Len Barton, Roland Meighan, and Stephen Walker (Lewes, Eng., 1980), 51–65; Herbert Gintis, “Communication and Politics,” Socialist Review 10 (Mar.-June 1980): 189-232; and Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

35 See Apple, “Facing the Complexity of Power.”Google Scholar