Both meritocratic and Deweyan educational theories misread how schools serve the economy
Evidence
No sophisticated educational theory has overlooked the fact that schools prepare youth for economic life. Approaches to educational reform have differed, however, in the way they view the demands which this role im poses on the schools. The failure of the technocratic-meritocratic view point, we have argued, lies in stressing the technical rather than the social relationships of production and in presenting the economic role of educa tion largely as the production of job skills. The weakness of John Dewey’s otherwise penetrating version, on the other hand, lies in its unrealistic faith in the increasingly democratic nature of work in the course of capitalist development. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 690
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the structure of critique in other chapters of this same book and similar revisionist education-historiography works (Katz, Spring). — connects to: Schooling replaced the frontier as capitalism’s safety valve for unequal opportunity — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 177; Schools’ main economic function is not cognitive skill production — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 996; Cognitive skills explain little of education’s link to economic success. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 556 (+1 more)
- ADDENDUM: Connects to the theme of schooling as socialization toward a social order rather than skills transmission, adjacent to the grafting/trees infrastructure piece’s metaphor of invisible shaping structures.
Broader Connections
- Schools’ main economic function is not cognitive skill production
#expands(0.85) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 996 - Cognitive skills explain little of education’s link to economic success.
#expands(0.80) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 556