Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited

The project that eventually resulted in the publication of Schooling in Capitalist America (1976) began in 1968, stimulated by the then raging academic debates and social conflicts about the structure and purposes of education. We were then, and remain, hopeful that education can contribute to a more productive economy and a more equitable sharing of its benefits and burdens, as well as a society in which all are maximally free to pursue their own ends unimpeded by prejudice, lack of opportunity for learning, or material want. Our distress at how woefully the U.S. educational system was then failing these objectives sparked our initial collaboration. Its continuing failure has prompted our recent return to the subject. The three basic propositions of the book deal with human development, inequality, and social change. Concerning human development, we showed that while cognitive skills are important in the economy and in predicting individual economic success, the contribution of schooling to individual economic success could only partly be explained by the cognitive development fostered in schools. We advanced the position that schools prepare people for adult work rules, by socializing people to function well, and without complaint, in the hierarchical structure of the modern corporation. Schools accomplish this by what we called the correspondence principle, namely, by structuring social interactions and individual rewards to replicate the environment of the workplace. We thus focused attention not on the explicit curriculum but on the socialization implied by the structure of schooling. Our econometric ∗Author affiliations: Samuel Bowles, Santa Fe Institute and University of Massachusetts, [email protected], http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/ ̃bowles; Herbert Gintis, University of Massachusetts and Santa Fe Institue, [email protected], http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/ g̃intis. We would like to thank We would like to thank Aaron Pallas, as well as those who commented on our work at recent meetings commemorating the 25th anniversary of its publication under the auspices of the American Educational Research Association in Seattle in March 2001, and the Eastern Sociological Association in Philadelphia in March 2001. We would also like to thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for financial support. This paper is dedicated to the memory of our editor at Basic Books, Martin Kessler, who encouraged and guided us through the making of Schooling in Capitalist America.