ABSTRACT
The notion of education as a pathway to greater equality has obvious attractions. However, the contrary viewpoint – that education is an oppressive system which exists to reinforce inequality rather than promote social justice – has been expressed just as powerfully. This viewpoint has a complex history, drawing on Weberian and Marxist accounts of class and status and inspiring a diverse group of theoretical perspectives. The British political arithmetic tradition has always highlighted distributive injustice, particularly in education, and in the United States Randall Collins provided a penetrating neo-Weberian critique of liberal-industrial theories of educational stratification. Subsequently, the idea of schools as sites of social reproduction rather than transformation has become an important theme within the sociology of education, and theories of cultural reproduction associated with Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein have acquired a dominant position. Although both Bourdieu and Bernstein owe a great deal to Marx, their dominance is partly the result of the demise of an explicitly Marxist educational theory. The focus in this chapter is a discussion of the now-unfashionable neo-Marxist critiques of education which gathered momentum as part of a general resurgence of interest in Marxism during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The discussion draws on three currents in Marxist thought on education: the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser; the correspondence principle of Bowles and Gintis; and the resistance theory of Paul Willis. The chapter concludes by examining some reasons for the decline in Marxist educational theory and briefly discussing recent contributions to the field.
