Bowles And Gintis Revisited

Correspondence And Contradiction In Educational Theory

Mike Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136612459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 1988. We live in reactionary times, at the time of writing the hard right is established in the UK and America. At the same time Britain has given birth to a number of progressive forces — the left-wing borough councils, the anti-nuclear movement including its impact at Greenham Common, an established women's movement, the miners' strike, the uprisings in the inner cities and the anti-racist struggle, while in America we have seen the advance of the Rainbow coalition and other progressive movements. Whatever the way forward, for the left, there is a fundamental need for a re-evaluation of basic Marxist scholarship but in the light of the significance of these historical and current realities. This book aims to play some small part in that process. The central focus is, of course, education but the issues raised range far wider.

Part I

The Context of the Debate

1 Correspondence Theory in Education: Impact, Critique and Re-evaluation

Mike Cole

Traditional sociology of education owes much to Durkheim and to functionalism. It was centrally concerned with accounting for the selection and allocation of individuals and, in the case of Britain, social classes to their future roles in society. Its underlying assumption is a broad acceptance of, and commitment to, the values of capitalist society. Individual failure is explained by problems with socialization. Social class differential in educational achievement is attributed to an unequal distribution of resources rather than to structural inequalities in the system. As such, it was an inherently conservative tradition.

In the early 1970s many radical sociologists of education became seduced by the New Sociology of Education (NSE). Its promise was to reveal the political character of educational knowledge which was conceived as a construct of ‘underlying meanings’. The task of NSE was to explore the construction of these meanings. Methodologically ethnographic, its concern was with individual social actors rather than with social structures.

The construction of meanings was to be sought in classroom interaction. It was indeed a radical departure from traditional concerns. However, as Robert Moore points out in this volume, it represented radicalism within the discipline, rather than political radicalism. It was not so much that NSE rejected political radicalism; rather it was unable to make the connections upon which a politically radical analysis depended. In this sense it was fundamentally flawed. While it recognized the centrality of notions of power and control, it was unable to make the link between the micro (the school and the classroom — whence meanings — including power relations — were thought to be constructed, defined and redefined) and the macro (the capitalist economy — where economic power, control and ownership ultimately resided). For many then, the publication of Samuel Bowles and Herb Gintis’ Schooling in Capitalist America (SCA) in 1976 was seen as a breakthrough — at last a resolution to the shortcomings of NSE — in particular its inability to link micro to macro. NSE's commitment to the centrality of notions of ‘control’ and ‘power’ rendered many of its protagonists sympathetic to the ‘political economy’ approach of Bowles and Gintis. To the discipline as a whole, political radicalism became central.

Although, as Michael Apple points out in this volume, Bowles and Gintis didn't start left criticisms of schooling, their achievement was to focus attention directly, in a structural fashion, on the capitalist economy per se. ‘In so doing, they provided a more coherent lens with which to view the schooling process’.

The key concept in SCA is ‘the correspondence principle’ — the reproduction of the social relations of production is facilitated through a structural correspondence between the social relations of the educational system and those of production (see the Prologue). ‘Correspondence’ provided both the key to the problem of the interpretation of classroom interaction for the New Sociologists of Education and a point of reference for Marxist appraisal and critique. The appeal of SCA for socialists was fundamental and compelling:

A revolutionary transformation of social life will not simply happen through piecemeal change. Rather, we believe it will occur only as the result of a prolonged struggle based on hope and a total vision of a qualitatively new society, waged by those social classes and groups who stand to benefit from the new era. This book is to be a step in that long march, (p. 17).

However, the vision of a socialist society and the correspondence principle were seen by many as contradictory. As I argued in The Sociological Review (August 1983 and reproduced in this volume as chapter 3) whereas and Gintis Bowles suggest that the ‘correspondence principle’ implies the need for democratic socialism, an unquestioning acceptance of its applicability can produce a reactionary rather than progressive response:

Some of my student teachers have even looked upon the principle as reassuring in its promise of stability and the maintenance of the status quo, while others, with a more radical mind, have despaired at the seeming lack of space for individual and collective action.

This is not to suggest that at the time of writing SCA, Bowles and Gintis did not favour democratic socialism. On the contrary, their commitment to a socialist transformation led by a mass based party is unambiguous:

We support the development of a revolutionary socialist movement in the United States. However arduous the path to success, a socialist alternative can provide the sole access to a future of real progress in terms of justice, personal liberation, and social welfare . . . The development and articulation of the vision of a socialist alternative . . . requires a mass based party . . . committed to a revolutionary transformation of the US economy (pp. 282 and 288)

The problem lies more with their (then Marxist commitment but) essentially functionalist account of the schooling/economy relationship. This necessarily entailed a passive view of humankind, a view epitomized by their assertion that schools are destined to resign youth to their fate (p. 266).

Understandably, this spawned a series of writers who set out to stress student and teacher resistance.¹ As Dennis Carlson puts it in this volume:

. . . teachers have too often been treated in a deterministic fashion in the dominant structural-functional theory of schooling, leading to an overly-pessimistic appraisal of their real or potential role in the ongoing conflict between the two great camps in capitalist society: capital and labour. Structural-functionalism has presumed, simplistically, that questions as to the political role of various strata of workers in the labor force can be answered primarily through an analysis of their ‘objective’ class location and function. In contrast, I have argued that while this is a needed line of analysis, it is less important strategically than an assessment of the cultural conditions and circumstances which encourage teachers to define their interests in an expansive rather than restrictive way: that is, as part of a majority movement for social change that seriously challenges existing structures, ideologies, and practices.

If the correspondence principle does not automatically herald the need for the transition to socialism, what is its potential in interpreting the present and the past? Much has been written on the extent to which it is useful or correct to posit a current direct structural correspondence between schooling and capitalism. Many have argued that such a claim is too crude. Some have suggested relative autonomy between base (the capitalist economy) and superstructure (in this case — the schooling system) where the base determines in the last instance but this in itself presents problems as to when the last instance arrives. Still others have moved outside the realms of Marxism and have suggested total autonomy between base and superstructure. In addition to providing an extensive review of the sociology of education since NSE, Robert Moore, in this volume, proposes an alternative solution to this dilemma.

He suggests that

Once the theoretical separation (both conceptual and ontological) is made between the social relations of production and the system of social relationships within the process of immediate production (or simply ‘the occupational system’), then both the educational and occupational systems can be approached as distinctive sites of production (under the social relations of production) with their own intrinsic principles and possibilities.

The social relations of production under capitalism are the prior conditions for the process of capitalist production as a whole and construct wage labour as a social category. The social relationships in production refer specifically to the immediate production of goods. Education can be seen as a ‘site’ in its own right — but based in the social relations of knowledge production. He develops this thesis using Bernstein's Class, Codes and Control arguments.

As far as its use in interpreting the past is concerned, specifically the genesis of the common school movement, this is a problem addressed by Peter MacDonald in this volume. Again, the spectre of Bowles and Gintis’ Marxist commitment and a non-Marxist account is raised. As MacDonald puts it, although operating within Marxist theory at the theoretical level, at the empirical level, Bowles and Gintis rely, albeit knowingly, on a revisionist theory of periodization. Revisionism, he stresses, centralizes industrialization, urbanization and poverty rather than the (Marxist) concepts of capitalism and class conflict. Revisionist theory, he goes on, is not only a questionable procedure but, with a dispute over appropriate periodization raging within revisionism, the evidence itself is rendered problematic and the procedure appears even more questionable.

Analyzing the common school movement in the concrete comparative context of nineteenth century Ontario, New England and England, he continues that it is only through an analysis of periodization, centred around changes in the organization of the labour process (based on Marx's Capital), that we are able to satisfactorily assess revisionist history and hence Bowles and Gintis’ empirical case. He suggests that

a reasonable rating of the three systems of education in terms of developmental level would be Ontario, Massachusetts, and England in descending order. But when the extent to which each society is urban-industrial capitalist is assessed, the opposite order appears to be the case. In other words, the least advanced society possessed the most advanced form of education. The fact that the most industrialized, urbanized, capitalistic society was characterized by the most ‘archaic’ system of education points to the difficulties faced by the interpretations produced by the correspondence principle.

Educational formation was relatively autonomous of production relations both in upper Canada and Massachusetts, he concludes, and Marxist theory must take this into account.

Another major response to Bowles and Gintis has centred around their omissions — quite simply their relative neglect of gender and ‘race’.²

Bowles and Gintis argue that ‘like the education system, the family plays a major role in preparing the young for economic and social roles’. ‘Thus’, they claim, ‘the family's impact on the reproduction of the sexual division of labour, for example, is distinctly greater than that of the educational system’. As AnnMarie Wolpe puts it, in this volume

According to Bowles and Gintis both boys and girls are affected by the ideological inputs they receive but differentially: ideological formations are derived from the family situation for girls but boys from their schooling . . . More specifically the ideologies which have specific reference to work and the development of specific characteristics of future workers which are all attributed to schools must, therefore, affect males. Girls’ ideas have, according to their analyses, been formed in the family. Schooling cannot be as important for women because of the greater power of the family structure and its teaching on sex-roles... In one fell swoop they eradicate any importance of education in girls’ lives. . . They do not offer an account of why this should be so, why girls are relatively unaffected by their schooling. Why should girls escape the ideological pressures which, according to Bowles and Gintis, constitute the main effect of schooling on pupils? Such a claim is obviously difficult to sustain.

Their relative neglect of ‘race’ is equally problematic. As Gloria Joseph argues in this volume:

The American dream has never worked for Blacks, and that is a truism that must be remembered whenever analysis and discussion concerning the future of the nation's population are in progress. To say [as Bowles and Gintis do] that’. . . the creation of an equal and liberating school system requires a revolutionary transformation of economic life’, is to disregard the dynamics of the racial dimension. The absence of a sharp focus on racism inhibits the social change desired. I am in agreement with the statement that the role of the educational system in America today is to produce a work force willing and able to staff occupational positions in the capitalist system. However, this statement is basically applicable to the white population in America. There exists a significantly large body of Blacks and Latinos who are not in the economic work force at all. A most radical approach to dealing with the problem of radical educational change would be to focus on the Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans — the domestic Third World people — as the vanguard. Historically in this country those fighting racism have been in the vanguard of social movements. The struggle for racial equality, which serves as a generational linkage, provides the nation with a focus that is the antithesis of the avaricious, necrophilic, aggressive, materialistic, selfish attitudes that characterize the dominant Western perspective.

My own work in England³ has argued for the crucial necessity of an anti-racist, as opposed to a multicultural, approach to education both in terms of structure and content — since racism is reproduced through both. Briefly, I have suggested that all institutions draw up and implement an anti-racist policy which works and that the content of teaching reflects the interests of the Black community. Similar arguments would, of course, apply to an anti-sexist approach. Gloria Joseph in this volume has advocated a

Black feminist pedagogy as a philosophy of liberation for humankind . . . designed to enable students through the social, economic, cultural, moral and religious history of Third World people to reexamine and see the world through a perspective that would instill a revolutionary conscious liberation ideology.

while Michael Apple, also in this volume, has argued the case for a parallelist position which ‘should not automatically assume the primacy of class relations over those of gender and race’.

As he puts it:

These latter two dynamics, and the complex and immensely contradictory interconnections among all three, must be given equal weight in the analysis of any concrete situation. Of course, we may find that class has primacy in a situation, but it would have to be proven, not assumed at the outset.

So far, my attention has been directed at the impact, critique and evalution of Schooling in Capitalist America, in particular the efficacy of the correspondence principle and the book's relative neglect of gender and ‘race’.

The first two chapters of Part 3 of this volume address themselves specifically to the relevance and impact of the writing of Bowles and Gintis to the revolutionary transition to socialism. According to John Freeman-Moir, Alan Scott and Hugh Lauder, while most criticisms of SCA have been directed at the explanatory structure of the correspondence principle, rather than at the issues raised regarding the socialist struggle, the two points are not unconnected (as my earlier arguments would suggest also). However they go on to argue that Bowles and Gintis are prominent exponents in the USA of anti-revolutionary ‘socialism’. They certainly have moved towards a pluralist theory of the state. As I argue in chapter 3, ‘the tendency in SCA towards a worrying ‘faith’ in the liberal democratic state has become [in ‘Contradiction and reproduction in educational theory’ — reproduced as chapter 2] a fully fledged ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Why Revisit Bowles and Gintis?
• Prologue: The Correspondence Principle
• Part I The Context of the Debate
• Part II A Re-evaluation of Reproduction Theory in Education
• Part III The Politics of Bowles and Gintis
• Part IV Bowles and Gintis Reply to Their Critics
• List of Contributors
• Index