Schools replicate workplace dominance hierarchies to produce a docile labor force.
Evidence
Reference to the educational system’s legitimation function does not take us far toward enlightenment. For the formal, objective, and cogni tively oriented aspects of schooling capture only a fragment of the day-today social relationships of the educational encounter. To approach an answer, we must consider schools in the light of the social relationships of economic life. In this chapter, we suggest that major aspects of educational organization replicate the relationships of dominance and subordinancy in the economic sphere. The correspondence between the social relation of schooling and work accounts for the ability of the educational system to pro duce an amenable and fragmented labor force. The experience of school ing, and not merely the content of formal learning, is central to this process. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 1120
Categorization
- XREF: The core correspondence principle; connects to the broader theme that institutions train dispositions, echoing the ‘gestures of the body’ material in the knowledge base about discipline. — connects to: Education simultaneously raises worker productivity and defuses class conflict to preserve profits — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 226; Hegemony can be achieved through dominance over the work process. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1810; Schooling can breed workers unwilling to accept workplace subordination (+2 more)
- DEFINE: Effectively introduces the correspondence principle: school organization mirrors the social relations of economic production.
Broader Connections
- Hegemony can be achieved through dominance over the work process.
#expands(0.85) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1810 - Education simultaneously raises worker productivity and defuses class conflict to preserve profits
#corroborates(0.82) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 226 - Schooling can breed workers unwilling to accept workplace subordination
#contradicts(0.80) - Schools both reproduce inequality and generate resistance to it
#contradicts(0.75) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 236 - Ordinary workers rationalize elite rule as superior education and wider vision
#expands(0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2248