ABSTRACT
My generation came of age in the rebellious 1960s, and that may be one reason that as academics many of us were attracted to a theory that challenged what we had been taught about U.S. society. Rather than focusing on meritocracy, democracy, and patriotism, as our school books had taught us, we focused on what seemed to us structural inequalities—and what we saw as systematic means by which whole groups and cultures (e.g., workers, African Americans, women) were excluded from the American Dream. Radical economists Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, in a book reviewed in the New York Times in 1976 —Schooling in Capitalist America— were the first neo-Marxists to receive wide attention in education circles. The authors argued that the experiences of students, and the skills they develop in school in different social class contexts 20(e.g., working-class or wealthy communities), exhibited striking correspondences to the experiences and skills that would characterize their likely occupational positions later. The authors wanted to demonstrate that the major role of the education system was not primarily meritocratic, to propel individuals and groups upward as a matter of course, but was, rather, to reproduce an amenable and differentiated work force. Social class (although race and gender later proved to be also important) determined one's future economic role. The social class of one's parents and neighborhood generally determined the kind of schooling one received, and the skills and dispositions learned there predisposed you to a similarly structured economic position in the labor force. In this view, the experience of schooling was as important as, if not more important than, the content of the curriculum to the process by which schools prepare future labor force participants.
