Some notes on SCHOOLING IN CAPITALIST AMERICA by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis.

"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. We have seen both liberal educational reform and the social theories on which reform is based flounder on an incomplete understanding of the economic system. We do not intend to repeat these mistakes. We must devote enough attention to the nature of U.S. economic institutions to securely base a realistic alternative educational theory."

(First sentences of chapter 3)

A central part of Bowles and Gintis (BG hereafter) is to note the difficulties that are part of American and capitalist life in general because of the conflicting systems of economy and government.

Government: We are basically democratic. People are involved in decision making, can participate and the ideology encourages this activity and celebrates it as a human right and privilege.

Economy: Dictatorial. Owners make decisions, workers obey. People are not allowed to participate in decision making. The ideology defends this use of private property and argues workers have no rights to such participation.

On BG's view this fact places a sort of schizophrenia in the heart of American life.

1. Some central claims BG try to defend:
   1. The quality of work life in Capitalist America is inimical to full human development. (Full human development means about the same as Freire describes--independence, responsibility and critical consciousness. Put in the language of above--full human development means the rights and responsible practice of democratic living.)
   2. Why is work alienated? (That means: Why do so many many people hate their work? Why would so many prefer not to work if possible?)

      Standard view: modern technology and the assembly lines and modern management strategies cause this.

      BG's view: This phenomenon is a product of class and power relations. The facts of class and power dictate who determines the quality of work.

   3. Would a radical change toward humane work conditions (democratic work conditions) for the masses require sacrificing material conveniences of modern life?

      Standard view: Yes.

      BG's view: No. [Special note: Bowles, along with economist David Gordon and one other fellow whose name slips my mind, wrote a book called: BEYOND THE WASTELAND. In this work rather than criticize capitalism, they argued that its modern undemocratic nature was quite wasteful on grounds of economic efficiency. They then demonstrated this and speculated on what would happen if merely the wastefulness of capitalism's non-democratic structures were altered. They claimed there would be economic plenty of unimagined degrees. Thus, this is the flesh of the argument that says democratic capitalism would not be back to the bad old days.]

   4. Why is there economic inequality?

      Standard view: merit--individual differences--skill and competencies cause this.

      BG's view: Economic inequality is a structural aspect of capitalist economy. That is, it is NECESSARY in order that the accumulation of capital in the hands of the wealthy occurs.

   5. What is the role of the schools in all of this?

      (This is a theme which runs through out these readings. Keep you eye on it. BG argue that this is indeed a book about schools, and understanding the economy is crucial to any serious understanding of why the schools are as the schools are. And, thereby, how one might effect any change. Though, back to the central theme of this course, such changes would have to be socially, economically and personally radical.)

      1. The power of capitalists requires a reserve army of skilled labor.
      2. Schools provide this reserve army.
      3. Schools are a central institution which legitimate the myth of a technocratic-meritocratic society.
      4. Schools accustom youth to social relationships of dominance and subordinacy which is their life in the economy.

Chapter 5 (SOME KEY QUOTES FROM THE TEXT TO REMIND YOU OF KEY THESES. Notes, these are NOT the arguments, but the conclusions. You will need to pay careful attention to the arguments which lead to these theses.

"The experience of schooling, and not merely the content of formal learning, is central to this process."

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"In short, and to return to a persistent theme of this book, the educational system's task of integrating young people into adult work roles constrains the types of personal development which it can foster in ways that are antithetical to the fulfillment of its personal developmental function. "

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"But the reproduction of consciousness cannot be insured by these direct mechanisms alone. The initiation of youth into the economic system is further facilitated by a series of institutions, including the family and the educational system, that are more immediately related to the formation of personality and consciousness. Education works primarily through the institutional relations to which students are subjected. Thus schooling fosters and rewards the development of certain capacities and the expression of certain needs, while thwarting and penalizing others. Through these institutional relationships, the educational system tailors the self-concepts, aspirations, and social class identifications of individuals to the requirements of the social division of labor."

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"Our critique of education and other aspects of human development in the United States fully recognizes the necessity of some form of socialization. The critical question is: What for? In the United States the human development experience is dominated by an undemocratic, irrational, and exploitative economic structure. Young people have no recourse from the requirements of the system but a life of poverty, dependence, and economic insecurity. Our critique, not surprisingly, centers on the structure of jobs. In the U.S. economy work has become a fact of life to which individuals must by and large submit and over which they have no control. Like the weather, work "happens" to people. A liberated, participatory, democratic, and creative alternative can hardly be imagined, much less experienced. Work under capitalism is an alienated activity."

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"To reproduce the social relations of production, the educational system must try to teach people to be property subordinate and render them sufficiently fragmented in consciousness to preclude their getting together to shape their own material existence. The forms of consciousness and behavior fostered by the educational system must themselves be alienated, in the sense that they conform neither to the dictates of technology in the struggle with nature, nor to the inherent developmental capacities of individuals, but rather to the needs of the capitalist class. It is the prerogatives of capital and the imperatives of profit, not human capacities and technical realities, which render U.S. schooling what it is. This is our charge."

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"But the correspondence of schooling with the social relations of production goes beyond this aggregate level. Different levels of education feed workers into different levels within the occupational structure and, correspondingly, tend toward an internal organization comparable to levels in the hierarchical division of labor. As we have seen, the lowest levels in the hierarchy of the enterprise emphasize rule-following, middle levels, dependability, and the capacity to operate without direct and continuous supervision while the higher levels stress the internalization of the norms of the enterprise. Similarly, in education, lower levels (junior and senior high school) tend to severely limit and channel the activities of students. Somewhat higher up the educational ladder, teacher and community colleges allow for more independent activity and less overall supervision. At the top, the elite four-year colleges emphasize social relationships conformable with the higher levels in the production hierarchy. Thus schools continually maintain their hold on students. As they "master" one type of behavioral regulation, they are either allowed to progress to the next or are channeled into the corresponding level in the hierarchy of production. Even within a single school, the social relationships of different tracks tend to conform to different behavioral norms. Thus in high school, vocational and general tracks emphasize rule-following and close supervision, while the college track tends toward a more open atmosphere emphasizing the internalization of norms."

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Binestock: Her general conclusion is quite simple:

"The major variations of college experiences are linked to basic psychological differences in work perception and aspiration among the major social class (occupational) groups who are its major consumers. Each social class is different in its beliefs as to which technical and interpersonal skills, character traits, and work values are most valuable for economic survival (stability) or to gain economic advantage (mobility). Each class (with subvariations based on religion and level of urbanness) has its own economic consciousness, based on its own work experiences and its own ideas (correct or not) of the expectations appropriate to positions on the economic ladder above their own. . . . Colleges compete over the various social class markets by specializing their offerings. Each different type of undergraduate college survives by providing circumscribed sets of "soft" and "hard" skill training that generally corresponds both to the expectations of a particular social class group of customers and to specific needs for sets of "soft" and "hard" skills at particular layers of the industrial system."

"Binstock isolated several organizational traits consistently related to the various educational institutions she studied. First, she distinguished between behavioral control which involves rules over the student's behavior rather than intentions and stresses external compliance rather than internalized norms, and motivational control which emphasizes unspecified, variable, and highly flexible task-orientation, and seeks to promote value systems that stress ambiguity and innovation over certainty, tradition, and conformity. Second, Binstock isolated a leader-versus-follower orientation with some schools stressing the future subordinate positions of its charges and teaching docility, and others stressing the need to develop "leadership" self-concepts."

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"Binstock found that institutions that enroll working-class students and are geared to staff lower-level jobs in the production hierarchy emphasize followership and behavioral control, while the more elite schools that tend to staff the higher-level jobs emphasize leadership and motivational control. Her conclusion is:

Although constantly in the process of reformation, the college industry remains a ranked hierarchy of goals and practices, responding to social class pressures, with graded access to the technical equipment, organizational skills, emotional perspectives and class (work) values needed for each stratified level of the industrial systems."

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"The evidence for the correspondence between the social relations of production and education, however, goes well beyond this structural level and also sheds light on the commonality of motivational patterns fostered by these two spheres of social life. Juxtaposing the recent research of Gene Smith, Richard Edwards, Peter Meyer, and ourselves, the same types of behavior can be shown to be rewarded in both education and work. In an attempt to quantify aspects of personality and motivation, Gene Smith has employed a relatively sensitive testing procedure, which he has shown in a series of well-executed studies" to be an excellent predictor of educational success (grade-point average). Noting that personality inventories traditionally suffer because of their abstraction from real life environments and their use of a single evaluative instrument. Smith turned to student-peer ratings of forty-two common personality traits, based on each student's observation of the actual classroom behavior of his or her classmates. A statistical technique called factor analysis then allowed for the identification of five general traits-agreeableness, extroversion, work orientation, emotionality and helpfulness-that proved stable across different samples. Of these five traits, only the work-orientation factor, which Smith calls "strength of character"-including such traits as ". . . not a quitter, conscientious, responsible, insistently orderly, not prone to daydreaming, determined, persevering . . ."-was related to school success. Smith then proceeded to show that, in several samples, this work-orientation trait was three times more successful in predicting post-high-school academic performance than any combination of thirteen cognitive variables, including SAT verbal, SAT mathematical, and school class rank."

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