ABSTRACT
Many economists and not a few sociologists and historians of education have a peculiar way of looking at schools. They envision the institution of schooling as something like a black box. One measures input before students enter schools and then measures output along the way or when ‘adults’ enter the labor force. What actually goes on within the black box-what is taught, the concrete experience of children and teachersis less important in this view than the more global and macro-economic considerations of rate of return on investment, or, more radically, the reproduction of the division of labor. While these are important considerations, perhaps especially that dealing, as I noted in Chapter 1, with the role of the school as a reproductive force in an unequal society, by the very nature of a vision of school as a black box, they cannot demonstrate how these effects are built within schools. Therefore, these individuals are less precise than they could be in explaining part of the role of cultural institutions in the reproduction they want to describe. Yet, as I shall argue here, such cultural explanations need to be got at; but it requires a different but often complementary orientation than the ones these and other scholars employ.
