ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author compares the American situation with what is known of the educational systems of colonial and underdeveloped areas, with an eye to tracing some of the more general dimensions of the relationship between schools and systems of social stratification. He considers the way school organizations, through their institutional structure, act on the stratification system. Societies vary in degree and kind of cultural heterogeneity, and in the way the school system takes account of the various cultures. Individual schools are linked, formally or otherwise, into systems, within whose boundaries teachers move from school to school in search of whatever satisfactions they happen to seek in their work. The independence of the schools from interference has an important, though by no means always the same, effect on the way the schools affect social mobility patterns. Education can provide a sizeable amount of opportunity for disadvantaged groups, if all groups have an equal chance to get an education.
