ABSTRACT
The historical struggle over the purposes of schooling can be seen in terms of two tensions. The first is between the goals of emancipation and domination. Since the Chartists in this country in the nineteenth century and more recently in the case of Bantu education in South Africa, dominant and subordinate classes have attempted to use schools to realise their widely different purposes. In the 1970s, negative views of views of schooling came largely from the left and were given considerable support by researchers in the authors own field-the sociology of education. The idea that the primary role of schools in capitalist societies was to teach the working class their place was widely accepted within the sociology of education. The few working-class students that did progress to university were seen as legitimating the fundamental inequalities of the education system as a whole.
