ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the most important consequence of focusing on state provision of education is that it enables to see that the basic problems facing education systems in capitalist countries derive from the problems of the capitalist State. It suggests that three broad core problems can be isolated, support of the capital accumulation process, guaranteeing a context for its continued expansion, the legitimation of the capitalist mode of production, including the State's own part in it. The contradictions involved in tackling the core problems of the State are seen as intrinsic and incapable of permanent solution. In the historical course of the class struggle, the state apparatuses came to crystallize determinate social relations and thus assume a material existence, efficiency and inertia which are to a certain extent independent of current state policies and class relations. The chapter examines some basic characteristics of education systems as state apparatuses, and their implications for educational policy and practice.
