From Correspondence to Contradiction and Change:

Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited, Swartz

Cristina Velazquez
Schooling in Capitalist America, originally by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, was
published 26 years ago with the purpose of having a major impact on education theory and
research in the United States. It was revisited by David Swartz with an effort to show how
schooling was a product of its time. During the sixties, schooling revealed the spirit and
concerns of the student movement and the havoc that surrounded the U.S. The article states
that Schooling as a product of its time and an enduring influence for theory and research.
The article offers a historical context that begins with the Human Capital Theory (Schultz,
1961) which portrayed education as a capital investment. In the 1960s, America rediscovered
poverty, racial inequality, and gender discrimination. The Coleman report documented the
economic differences between black and white schools. But the report concluded that school
facilities seemed to have relatively little effect on student achievement and that the problems
appeared to stem more from family background than from lack of school resources. This
means that the economic status of parentsrather than effort at school or educational
achievementis the best predictor of their childrens future economic status. Bowles and
Gintis argued that the capitalist class structure shaped the educational system in decisive
ways.
Swartz reviews that the Marxists begin their analysis with social class in a capitalist
economy instead of the Weberian status group. With Capitalism, the driving motive is profit.
The economic base (the way production is organized in the economy) determines the
institutions of the superstructure (political and cultural institutions and normsin this case,
schools). Under capitalism, schools work to reproduce hierarchal division of labor which
contributes to the maintenance of social class structure. By offering a framework that

From Correspondence to Contradiction and Change:

Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited, Swartz
Cristina Velazquez
included links between the class structure, economy, education, Bowles and Gintis, reflected
on Marxism and rejected structural-functionalism.
Education had dual objectives that include: equality of opportunity and social control.
Schooling has been at once something done to the poor and for the poor. The unequal
contest between social control and social justice is evident in the total functioning of U.S.
education. Who are we kidding? It contradicts the experiences of the vast majority of us
when we go to school. The paper details the Correspondence Theory as the reproduction of
social relations of production. Students produce work for rewards like grades equivalent to
the way workers labor only for a paycheck. Here, the worker has no real control over the
merchandise, product, or creation they make and become alienated from its real value.
Students dont work for the inherent value of knowledge, but rather do the work they are
told to in order to earn a grade, and eventually a diploma. There is a lack of democracy and
intellectual control over the content of our studies thats similar to workers lack of control
over what they produce.
Schools from the 1960s to today create behavioral modification, routinization and
standardization, and many students just end up essentially unskilled, in dead-end jobs. The
paper allows the reader to analyze the cold hard facts. Subsequently, we have a better
understanding of what goes on in the classroom, and of how distinctive or tailored levels of
instruction affect students of different class backgrounds. Schooling was widely criticized for
focusing too much on the political economy of schooling. Without Bowles and Gintis, our
current knowledge about the economic, cultural, and political dimensions of schooling might
not have been possible.