Early education reformers aimed to defuse class conflict without redistributing wealth

Evidence

This process has been far from placid. Rather, it has involved extended struggles with sections of U.S. labor trying to counter and temper the effects of their reduction to the status of wage labor. That these radical thrusts have been deflected, by and large, into manageable wage or status demands bespeaks the power of the economic system to legitimize its changing structure, but in no way suggests that the perpetuation of the capitalist system was ever a foregone conclusion. Indeed, we shall argue in later chapters that the shifting patterns of educational reform throughout U.S. history have been, in part, responses to the threat of social unrest accompanying the integration of new groups into the wage-labor system. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 617 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• recurring: this claim recurs 3 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Elites moralize contentment to those they exploit.; Capitalism, not technology, limits what schools can reform. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 289; US schooling founders aimed at social control amid capitalist inequality, not equality — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 363 (+7 more)

Related

• US educational reform responded to the social unrest of new wage laborers (similarity 0.90)
• Capitalist-class objectives, not reformer ideals, have actually shaped US schooling (similarity 0.87)
• Early American education reformers aimed to pacify the poor rather than end poverty (similarity 0.87)
• Early 20th-century educators explicitly saw schools as training children to accept inequality (similarity 0.84)
• US schooling founders aimed at social control amid capitalist inequality, not equality (similarity 0.84)
• Capitalism, not technology, limits what schools can reform. (similarity 0.82)
• Profit imperatives, not human capacities, shape American schooling (similarity 0.80)
• Education simultaneously raises worker productivity and defuses class conflict to preserve profits (similarity 0.79)
• Education’s centrality in American reform reflects accommodation to capitalism, not ideology (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• US educational reform responded to the social unrest of new wage laborers #expands (0.92) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 617
• Differentiated schooling reproduces rather than abolishes class divisions #corroborates (0.88)
• Vocational schooling advocated as democratic actually crystallises class differences #complicates (0.85)
• Capitalist-class objectives, not reformer ideals, have actually shaped US schooling #complicates (0.80) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 569