ABSTRACT
Traditional views of education and society emphasize the role that education plays in altering individual characteristics and the position of that individual in the economy, social structure, and polity. The general configurations of a Marxian approach to social change now have to be translated into a Marxian analysis of the educational system. This chapter situates the analysis in the context of the discussion on theories of the State, a discussion which has been central to new developments in Marxian thought. The importance of the State as an apparatus of hegemony for Gramsci is therefore still rooted in the class structure, a class structure defined by and tied to the relations in production. Gramsci defined two types of intellectuals: 'traditional' professional intellectuals whose position in the 'interstices' of society has a certain trans-class aura about it; and 'organic' intellectuals – any person who is possessor of a particular technical capacity. Traditional intellectuals function to build the hegemony of the dominant class.
