ABSTRACT
What role the American school should play in society is a question as old as the institution itself. For former President Woodrow Wilson, the purpose of the school was to divide the population into different social segments. In his words: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of person, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks” (cited in Lapham 2012). Indeed, despite being perceived as a pathway for upward social mobility, public schooling continually reproduces the very social and economic inequalities it purportedly targets by channeling students through academic “tracks” (e.g. Bowles and Gintis 1976; Giroux 1981; Berliner and Biddle 1995; Mitchell 2003; Apple 2004; Lipman 2004; Kozol 2005).
