ABSTRACT
For many of us in the Western world, the 1960s were a time of questioning. During this decade many young men and women took a hard look at the world about them, and they did not like all that they saw. Among many other things, they looked with disfavour on what they believed to be impersonal, oppressive and omnipotent institutions. Educational institutions did not escape this scrutiny. Students targeted many university campuses across the USA and Canada, staging protests and in some cases occupying administrative offices. But the assaults on educational institutions at this time cannot all be traced to unruly students. In fact considerable damage to the image of schools was produced, ironically enough, within the institution itself, in the form of a court-commissioned empirical study. Subsequently known as the Coleman Report (Coleman et al. 1966), its findings surprised many. What the researchers concluded from this wide-ranging survey was that the school itself had only a minimal impact on student achievement. The data told them that schools seemed relatively powerless to counteract the powerful social conditioning that young men and women were subject to 'outside of' educational institutions. Among other things, Coleman et al. (1966) contended that the socioeconomic situation of students proved to be a better predictor of educational achievement than any in-school 'variables'. The assaults on our educational institutions did not stop here, however. In the next decade, Bowles and Gintis (1976) assembled an impressive array of empirical studies that more-or-less supported the Coleman findings. They concluded that instead of providing equal opportunities for all students, regardless of background, schools merely reproduced the unequal relations that already existed in the wider society.
