ABSTRACT
It should be getting clearer by now that one of the ways schools are used for hegemonic purposes is in their teaching of cultural and economic values and dispositions that are supposedly ‘shared by all,’ while at the same time ‘guaranteeing’ that only a specified number of students are selected for higher levels of education because of their ‘ability’ to contribute to the maximization of the production of the technical knowledge also needed by the economy. This focus on valuative consensus in the everyday regularities of school life and the concomitant teaching of economic dispositions to children, did not spring up overnight, however. It has had a long history in American education. Both this chapter and the next will focus on that problem. First, we shall examine in considerably more detail than in Chapter 3 how it came about historically through the school’s response to ideological and economic conflicts among classes at a time of rapid change from an economy based on agricultural capital to one rooted in industrial capital in the beginnings of this century. As we shall see, schools were not necessarily built to enhance or preserve the cultural capital of classes or communities other than the most powerful segments of the population. The hegemonic role of the intellectual, of the professional educator, in this development is quite clear.
