ABSTRACT

The key assumptions and core arguments of the world society perspective have evolved over time, but the starting point was an empirical puzzle: the rise and triumph of mass schooling. Much of the earlier literature on this point assumed that mass schooling arose and expanded to meet the functional needs of an increasingly industrialised

and urbanised social order (Dreeben 1968). The alternative Marxist perspective was also functionalist in tone, but here schooling functioned to reproduce the class-stratified society, not the seamless web often associated with the social order functionalists. Industrialisation and urbanisation were also triggers in this perspective; yet, they were viewed as creating not anomie but alienation, that is, not normlessness but counter-norms. The older normative order was indeed being undercut, but not by disoriented masses, rather by increasingly hostile workers. The rise of mass schooling would solve this problem by inculcating norms that would tranquilise the workers of the future, thereby co-opting a potential source of social conflict. Within this perspective it is the functional needs of the dominant class, not those of society as a whole, that mass schooling arises to meet (Bowles and Gintis 1976).