ABSTRACT
The contributions made to the social history of American education by concepts of social control and corporate capitalism should not mask the limitations of these approaches. While revisionist and Marxist studies have fundamentally increased the potential for a realistic social history of public schooling, they have also left behind some valuable methodological lessons of pluralist political science. The revisionist works foster historical social realism about the functions of public schooling while perpetuating reified notions of historical causation, and the most successful Marxist study of capitalism and education keeps alive outmoded ideas of economic determinism. 1 I have argued elsewhere that public school reform should be regarded as a complex, long-term process involving class and ethnic conflict, as well as compromise and accommodation, and that the successful pursuit of systems of public schooling by class conscious elite reformers required both the incorporation of working-class demands and the fragmentation of working-class and ethnic opposition. 2 This paper is devoted to an analysis of the role of another factor in the process of public school reform, ideology, and it will draw upon political sociology theory to argue for a modification of current revisionist and Marxist approaches. 3 The central purpose of such a modification is to take account of concepts of interest group role definition and the political importance of symbolic values in the growth of the power of the state. The aim of the paper is to present an approach that may explain the victory of elite-inspired reform movements without reifying the reformers into deterministic forces of social control or attributing to the public at large either a passivity or a propensity to activism unwarranted by the evidence. 4
