ABSTRACT
Twenty-five years after the publication of Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis’ seminal text, I would like to pay tribute to the importance of Schooling in Capitalist America (1976) as one of the most significant and groundbreaking texts within the sociology of education in the post-war period. My first encounter with it was in 1976, the year the book was published, when I joined the Schooling and Society team at the Open University in England. My colleagues, Roger Dale and Geoff Esland, who had discovered the book on their travels in the US, arranged for it to be published in the UK. Our careers were shaped by the exposure of Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis’ arguments, along with other neo-Marxist theories of education, to critical debate. Because we used the book as compulsory reading for the 2,000 teachers who took the course each year, we were pilloried in the press and even in Parliament for Marxist bias. We had apparently perverted the liberal project of education, exposing its economic determinants in a cynical and pessimistic way.
