ABSTRACT
Although idealism, and its later philosophical counterparts like liberal rationalism, retained dominance and maintained a form of hegemonic control of educational discourse and practice, not everybody, of course, saw things from that particular viewpoint. In the 1960s numerous challenges were made to the idea that 'education was the essence of schooling', and the claim was commonly made that schooling really assisted centrally in reproducing the existing relations of production and consequently reproduced class relations and class distinctions. Early work by educational theorists taking up these new insights was overenthusiastic and crude Reproduction theory and correspondence theory, however, notwithstanding certain crudities, embarrassing errors and oversimplifications, had more than a mere historical importance and were not without intrinsic and abiding merit. The current waves of economic rationalism, technocratic rationalism and other branches of New Right policy discourse have answers to this question, and these shall be considered later.
