US educational reform responded to the social unrest of new wage laborers

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

Categorization

• SEED: Promising essay angle: reframing US education history as a containment system for class unrest rather than an engine of opportunity.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 617
• XREF: connects to: Capitalist-class objectives, not reformer ideals, have actually shaped US schooling — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 569; Capitalist expansion requires wage workers separated from their own means of production — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 611; US schooling founders aimed at social control amid capitalist inequality, not equality — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 363 (+4 more)