Schooling in Capitalist America Twenty-Five Years Later

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1 Sociological Forum, Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2003 ( 2003) Review Essay: Schooling in Capitalist America Twenty-Five Years Later Samuel Bowles1 and Herbert Gintis1,2 We thank David Swartz (2003) for his insightful and balanced review Schooling in Capitalist America (Bowles and Gintis, 1976) and the edito Sociological Forum for inviting our response. Typically this is an opportun to correct the reviewer's errors, especially those that contributed to a than stellar evaluation of the work in question. But we find ourselves next to nothing to say on this score. Swartz has captured what we attempt and what we accomplished with extraordinary accuracy and nuance. wholeheartedly agree with his criticism of what he terms our empty, out there and struggle" political rhetoric. We concede that our macro-s research strategy did not allow us to shed much light inside the black of how what goes in the classroom accounts for the role of schooling in th reproduction of the social order. The critics of our work whom Swartz cit have admirably filled this gap. These shortcomings point to what we did not do in the book: concerni what we did do, we remain for the most part convinced of the truth of th propositions advanced concerning schooling and social structure. Am these is the claim that capitalism generates a high degree of inequality; th this inequality is transmitted across generations, giving rise to stark dispa ties in the opportunities of the children of the rich and the less well-off; IQ and other test scores account only for a small portion of this ineq ity; and that schooling reproduces rather than ameliorates that inequa Indeed, research by others in the years since publication of Schooling strengthened the empirical evidence underlying our analysis, in a num of cases strongly affirming the once-controversial claims made in that wo 1Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts and Santa Fe Institute. 2To whom correspondence should be addressed at 15 Forbes Avenue, Northam Massachusetts 01060; hgintis@attbi.com /03/ / Plenum Publishing Corporation

344 Recent research is surprising in one respect, however: while our claim that schooling increases subsequent earnings primarily by other means than enhancing cognitive performance has been strongly

2 344 Recent research is surprising in one respect, however: while our claim that schooling increases subsequent earnings primarily by other means than enhancing cognitive performance has been strongly affirmed, little progress has been made in identifying the noncognitive behavioral or other traits that account for the economic returns to schooling. Much of this research is presented or referred to in Bowles and Gintis, 2001, 2002a,b, and Bowles, Gintis, and Osborne, 2002, and One of the central conceptual points in the book is that individual preferences and values are socially constructed and evolve under the influence of the economic structures that govern people's lives. Our recent experimental research and modeling of cultural evolution (Bowles and Gintis 1998a; Henrich et al., 2001) as well as the work of others have affirmed, deepened, and filled out the views advanced in Schooling. Our only difference with Swartz's description of the book concerns his description of it as functionalist, which we take to be a mode of explanation in which the beneficial consequences that a set of social arrangements confer are said to constitute a sufficient explanation why those arrangements exist. Of course the question of who benefits is critical to any plausible explanation in the social sciences; the necessary attribute of a functionalist explanation is that it provides no causal mechanism to account for how the beneficial consequences perpetuate the arrangements from which they flow. We devoted three chapters of our book to a historical analysis of the emergence and evolution of what we termed the "correspondence principle" in schooling, including a chapter on contradictions in the process of expansion of higher education in the twentieth century. We did this precisely to illuminate the causal process by which the structure of schooling was determined. Thus our account was not functionalist. The charge of functionalism was leveled, we think, for a different reason: Schooling, it was said, did not give sufficient attention to class conflict over the structure of education. We gave it the attention that we concluded the historical record warranted. Our historical studies led us to believe that while class conflict at workplaces was essential to an understanding of the correspondence principle, employers and the well-to-do played the preeminent role in the political process by which schools emerged and evolved. It is possible of course that we may have underestimated the role of class conflict over school structure and funding. Had we studied Chicago rather than Massachusetts, for example, we might have come to a different conclusion. But we do not think it likely, given that at the time, like our critics, we were constantly on the lookout for evidence of class conflict. While class conflict provides an essential dynamic to which the evolution of schooling has responded, we did not then (nor do now) think that class conflict in the arena of educational politics per se, played a significant role in the shaping

345 of schooling, aside from a few localized cases. Workers and the poor were simply not well organized enough to contest the educational projects of their employers and "social betters.

3 345 of schooling, aside from a few localized cases. Workers and the poor were simply not well organized enough to contest the educational projects of their employers and "social betters." If anything, we now think (as Swartz notes) that classes played too large a role in our theory of educational politics. In any case, whether we got the causal story right or not is a matter of fact that is not germane to the methodological question of whether the analysis is functionalist. Our principal difference with Swartz arises concerning his thoughtful analysis of how our social analysis has changed in the quarter-century since its publication. One change pointed to by Swartz is not really a change. Since the late 1960s, we have been interested in school choice as a possible way to empower means of empowerment of parents, but concerned that it could foster more racially homogeneous and socially unequal schooling. In the spirit of the much more developed ideas of Jencks (1970), we have recently (Bowles and Gintis, 1998b; Gintis, 1995) outlined a proposal that would enhance choice among exclusively publicly funded schools in a way that might capture some of the positive effects while avoiding the tendencies of most voucher plans to foster inequality. Swartz's statement that we now "reject the Marxist project that informed Schooling," is not quite right. At the time we wrote Schooling, we sometimes, but never exclusively, wrote within the Marxian paradigm, developing critiques of the labor theory of value, the Marxian theory of crisis, and the like, and intending our work to be read by those conversant with the Marxian literature. At the time, our expectation that democratic socialism would improve the human condition after the demise of capitalism was not informed by much critical thinking, to put it mildly. But in eschewing the Marxian paradigm as an exclusive intellectual frame of reference and abandoning a naive vision of socialism as our political lodestar, we have not rejected the Marxian view of capitalism as a system of political domination and economic privilege, evolving in important part under the pressures of class conflict. Though incomplete and flawed in a number of well-known ways, this perspective remains as important in our thinking today as it was then. As with Marxism, we were then and remain now no less deeply engaged in liberalism. In Schooling we provided a Marxian analysis of capitalism as an obstacle to making good the promise of liberal educational reform. This did not lead us to reject the liberal objectives of John Dewey and others, but to propose alternatives to capitalism. Our later analysis of the historical dynamics of liberal democratic capitalist societies in Democracy and Capitalism concluded that Marx had accurately captured the centrality of conflict in the process, while liberalism had a better grasp of what people were fighting for (for freedom, for rights, not for the working class). Our more recent work

346 embraces institutions favored by liberals-private property and marketswhile advocating policies that would radically redistribute wealth and power, objectives commonly associated with the Marxian

4 346 embraces institutions favored by liberals-private property and marketswhile advocating policies that would radically redistribute wealth and power, objectives commonly associated with the Marxian tradition. We are no less committed today than we were when we conceived of and wrote Schooling to the vision of making a more just, more democratic society in which all have the material and social prerequisites for developing their personal capacities to the fullest. On current reflection, we believe Schooling devoted insufficient attention to how economic systems other than capitalism might better facilitate achieving the good society. We took it as obvious that a system of democratic and employee-owned enterprises, coordinated by both market and state, was both politically and economically viable as an alternative to capitalism. We remain convinced of the attractiveness of such a system, but are less sanguine about its feasibility and more convinced that reforms of capitalism may be the most likely way to pursue the objectives that we embraced at the outset. While Schooling fully endorsed the idea that radicals must also be reformers, we provided little guidance to policymakers, teachers, or students seeking practical, positive steps to bring about long-term, progressive social change. Much of our work in the intervening years has been devoted to proposing and evaluating politically attractive and economically feasible programs for a higher degree of democracy and equality in social life. Socialism, radical democracy, social democracy, and other egalitarian movements have flourished where they successfully crafted the demands of distributive justice into an economic strategy capable of addressing the problem of scarcity and thereby promising to improve living standards not only for the poor but also on the average. Land redistribution, social insurance, egalitarian wage policies, central planning, and human investment expenditures have all been attractive when they promised to link the redistribution of economic reward to enhancing the performance of the economic system as a whole. At the time we wrote Schooling, socialism, conceived of as the abolition of private enterprise in favor of state and worker control of production and distribution, appeared as a plausible alternative to capitalism, and hence was another model successfully combining egalitarian and efficiency objectives. As late as 1980 the major critique of socialism was political and philosophical; only a small number of antisocialists stressed its specifically economic weaknesses. Current opinion is now, of course, quite otherwise, and our own research as well as the historical record convinces us that the current conventional wisdom concerning the infeasibility of socialism as conceived above is correct. In reaction to this new situation, many egalitarians have abandoned the search for alternative institutions in favor of advocating immediate

5 347 policies that redistribute income and wealth in favor of the less well off. For instance, they seek to push globalization in more worker-friendly and green directions, they support living-wage campaigns, and they fight for more progressive taxation or for better schooling for the poor, not as part of a vision of a sustainable alternative economic system, but as immediate measures to shift the balance of wealth in favor of the less well off. We support these initiatives, but we have taken a different path, involving a search for alternative institutions that will make the economic system work better for most of its participants, while at the same time improving the economic and political position of the less advantaged in society. It is in this sense that we have been involved in "recasting" egalitarianism (Bowles and Gintis, 1998b). Whether the alternative system we are describing is called capitalist does not matter much to us: it would make extensive use of private property and of markets, while fundamentally changing the workings of some major markets, including the labor market, often taken to be the defining characteristic of capitalism. The main message of our more recent work on this topic is this: Private property and markets are indispensable components of good economic governance, but their contribution to efficiency, democracy, human dignity, and fairness depends on the distribution of wealth. Egalitarian wealth distributions can harness markets and private property to these time-honored ends of democratic and egalitarian social movements. A school system that teaches all children well without labeling the white, or the rich, or the male, or the American as more deserving of subsequent economic privilege is an essential component of such an egalitarian wealth redistribution, now even more than when Schooling was written. REFERENCES Bowles, Samuel evolution of pro-social norms." Evolution and Human Behavior 19: "Endogenous preferences: The cultural consequences of markets and 25. other economic institutions." Journal of Economic Literature 36:75- for Markets, States and Communities. 1998b Recasting Egalitarianism: New Rules 111. London: Verso. Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis 2001 "The inheritance of economic status: Education, class and genet Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Ba- Baltes (eds.), International Encycloics." In Marcus Feldman and Paul sic Books. pedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences: Genetics, Behavior and Society. New York: Oxford University Press Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought. New York: Basic Books. 1998a "The moral economy of communities: Structured populations and the 2002a "The inheritance of inequality." Journal of Economic Perspectives 16:3-30.

348 2002b "Schooling in capitalist America revisited." Sociology of Education 75:1-18.

6 b "Schooling in capitalist America revisited." Sociology of Education 75:1-18. Bowles, Samuel, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne 2002 "The determinants of individual earn- Russell Sage Foundation. Gintis, Herbert 1995 "The Political Economy of School Choice." Teachers College Record 96:3. Henrich, Joe, S. Bowles, Robert Boyd, Colin F Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, and Richard McElreath 2001 "In search of Homo economicus: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies." American Economic Review 91(2):73- ings: Skills, preferences, and schooling." Journal of Economic Literature : Jencks, C. Bowles, Samuel, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa 1970 Education Vouchers: A Report to the Osborne (eds.) U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity Unequal Chances: Family Background Unpublished Report, Cambridge, MA. and Economic Success. New York: Swartz, D. L From correspondence to contradiction and change: Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited. Sociological Forum 18:

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