Chapter 2 of The Critical Turn in Education1 shows how American Education became explicitly Marxist. By telling the story of Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Gottesman outlines how the framework for education shifted from an emphasis on equality of opportunity to equality of outcome.
Bowles and Gintis went from what would have been classified as American Progressive to not only Marxian analysis, but morals and standards as well. While the distinction between Marxist and Progressive today is blurry at best, in the 70s it represented a sea change it’s unlikely even Bowles and Gintis fully appreciated. While their classical Marxist views would eventually be dismissed by Critical Educators as “crudely mechanistic,” (much like Neo-Marxists would eventually deride the Soviets as “vulgar”) Bowles and Gintis were essential in turning the field of education into an environment where the ideas of Paulo Freire, Michael Apple, and Henry Giroux would thrive.
Summary: Political Economy and the Academic Left
The progression of Bowles and Gintis’s thought breaks down into roughly three stages: their early work as critics of educational policy, the turn to more radical ideas associated with the publication of Schooling in Capitalist America2, and consolidation of the Marxism they brought into schools of education. It could be argued that they had a fourth stage in which their views moderated back toward something resembling liberalism, but this did not impact the world of education the way their initial shift toward radical leftism did.
Early Work: From American Progressives to Marxists
Before they started collaborating, Bowles and Gintis both did a fair amount of building their bona fides both as Progressives and figures in education. Bowles, while working in the Economics department at Harvard, collaborated with Henry Levin to publish a critique of the 1966 report Equality of Educational Opportunity3, more commonly known as The Coleman Report. After a two-year study, James S. Coleman concluded the primary correlating factor in the educational achievement gap between whites and blacks was the social background of the students rather than economic concerns like school buildings, classroom materials, or quality of teachers. Bowles’s criticism of this report was centered on the idea that it had not properly considered the effects of resource allocation, or the structural relations associated with disparities of wealth. This emphasis on nebulous “structural relations” has since become a catch-all explanation used by the radical left. His early work was enough to get Bowles recruited into the newly formed Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) at Harvard. It was here he connected with Herbert Gintis.
After becoming enamored with Marx as an undergraduate at Harvard, Herbert Gintis also became involved with URPE and eventually took a position in the university’s Graduate School of Education (his Marxist politics made him almost unemployable anywhere else), where he worked on numerous projects that emphasized the role of economic inequality in disparate educational outcomes and played a prominent role in supporting radical leftist organizations and journals such as Socialist Revolution, and Telos.
From when Bowles and Gintis joined URPE in 1968 to when they left Harvard in 1973, it was clear that their politics had veered away from the typical American Progressive and towards Radical Marxist. Indeed, Bowles and Gintis were instrumental in bringing the ideas of the Frankfurt School to many Americans for the first time. When reading through Gottesman’s account of their intellectual biographies, it’s hard to get a sense of when these two went from being American Progressives to Marxists. My sense is that it boils down to how they conceptualized the idea of equality. As progressives, much of their early work tended to focus on the way in which the opportunities different groups of people had were unequal, and what social or political actions could be taken to address this disparity. In embracing Marx, they began to think of equality in terms of outcomes—more specifically, disparate outcomes between different classes of people were taken as proof that one class was oppressing the other. On this view, their goal became to use social and political action to eliminate inequalities in educational performance. It’s unclear if their views had shifted, or if they had just become more successful in finding an audience for what they always believed, but either way, with this shift, two thought leaders in American education were now operating on explicitly Marxist premises.
Schooling in Capitalist America
In 1973, both Bowles and Gintis moved to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where they were instrumental in building an extremely radical Department of Economics, and began working on their major contribution to Education: Schooling in Capitalist America. While Marxist critiques of American education were not exactly new at the time, Schooling was the first to hit the mainstream of educational thought, possibly because of the authors’ relative prominence in the field of education and on the American Left.
The central feature of their book was what they called the Correspondence Theory. This is not the same as the Correspondence Theory of Truth (the claim that a true statement must correspond to the facts of reality). Schooling’s Correspondence Theory broadly argues that the outcomes of schooling correspond to the social relations of the society at large. More concisely: education only reproduces the existing society (more on this in the Prescriptions section).
A key idea associated with their Correspondence Theory is the hidden curriculum in education. The hidden curriculum is a set of cultural norms and values that, while not explicit in the lessons, are inevitably imparted to the students as they go through the process of schooling. Variations on the idea and implications of the hidden curriculum continue to be an essential aspect of Critical Pedagogy to this day (again, more on this in the Prescriptions section).
Marxist Precedent in Education
While Schooling was essential in mainstreaming Marxist analysis in education, the only radical educational thinker that Bowles and Gintis seriously engaged with was Ivan Illich, likely due to his position on hidden curriculum. Illich’s controversial work, Deschooling Society4, called for the dissolution of schools entirely because of the way the hidden curriculum led to “physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence.5” Bowles and Gintis maintained that hidden curriculum merely reproduced existing society’s values, thus it could be a benefit if those values were more properly aligned with Marxism.
By the mid-1980s Bowles and Gintis had published Democracy and Capitalism6 in which it seemed that their politics had shifted back towards something that was looking for a middle ground between socialism and American liberalism. This time, the field of education did not follow them. By this point, Michael Apple and Henry Giroux had become prominent, and though they tended to be more moderate in tone, their convictions reflect an ever-deeper commitment to Marxist principles (along with a good deal of Freirean Praxis).
Bowles and Gintis started a huge turn to the left in the 1970s, and while they may have moved back towards the center, the effect on education was like a ratchet: the shift to the left was permanent and any apparent movement towards more moderate positions was just consolidation for another turn to the left—a turn that would be initiated by characters like Apple and Giroux.
Prescriptions and Ideas for Education
Correspondence Theory
Bowles and Gintis developed the Correspondence Theory to argue for a connection between Marxist economic analysis and performance in schooling. Put simply, they argue that the outcomes of schooling will correspond to the socioeconomic status of the students in the school (though Gottesman’s summary doesn’t explain the causal mechanism by which this happened). This premise is generally accepted as gospel in discussions of education today.
The course of action they laid out was primarily political rather than educational, but it had a significant impact in how the debate over American education proceeded. In addition to generally advocating for a broader redistribution of wealth, Bowles and Gintis pushed for increased funding to public schools to compensate for the wealth disparities of the families attending those schools. The idea was that even if people weren’t wealthy, the schools their children attend would have access to increased levels of funding and thus improve the performance of the students. This assumption became so embedded over the last 40 years that few perspectives in the educational debate have really questioned it.
It should be acknowledged that the correlation between socioeconomic status and educational performance is certainly present. Because Bowles and Gintis insisted on looking at this correlation through a Marxist lens, they fixated on wealth disparities as being the only possible explanation for differences in educational performance. Unfortunately, this assumption has pushed our educational establishment to view exceptions to the correlation as noise rather than as something that can and should be emulated. Sure, Marva Collins may have founded and run the very successful Westside Preparatory School in the west side of Chicago with very little funding, but the fact that it was possible never changed the mainstream idea that if we want to improve education, we need to give it more funding.
Hidden Curriculum
While the idea that a hidden curriculum is not an educational prescription per se, the fact that Bowles and Gintis made it so central to their analysis has led to some bizarre decisions for educational curricula since the 1980s.
It was primarily through disagreement with Ivan Illich that Bowles and Gintis came to develop their own position on the hidden curriculum. Drawing on the Rousseauian idea of a noble savage who is corrupted by civilization, Illich’s position was that the implicit values introduced in the classroom were primarily a bad thing because it is those societal values that lead to all of society’s problems from pollution to political factions to substance abuse.
Bowles and Gintis basically agreed with Illich that the hidden curriculum is bad (because it reproduces capitalism). But they disagreed that schooling would necessarily have negative social consequences. Instead, they claimed that the hidden curriculum would merely reproduce the values of existing society. If society was unjust, the hidden curriculum would gradually make the students complicit in that injustice. However, if society could be changed to be Marxist, then a hidden curriculum would be instrumental in maintaining a “just” society.
It wouldn’t take their followers long to use the existence of the hidden curriculum to justify their attempts explicitly to reprogram the values of the students and get a head start on engineering a just society. Since the late 70s there has been a proliferation of different values-based educational programs, ostensibly with the purpose of educating students about difficult issues, but with the ultimate effect of making the students’ minds more receptive to particular kinds of values. Thomas Sowell’s 1992 book, Inside American Education7 covers a number of these programs in horrifying detail. Death Education, Nuclear Education, Drug Education, Sex Education, and Climate Education are just a few of the more explicit examples.
The thing that made these curricula different is that the primary focus is not on imparting knowledge, but on provoking certain kinds of emotions: dread over the prospect of dying, disgust over the use of nuclear weapons, fear of the consequences of using drugs or alcohol, disdain for particular attitudes towards sex, or anxiety over an impending climate catastrophe. By exposing students to highly emotional content where they did not have the requisite knowledge to understand the issue in its entirety, these curricula primed students to have their values reprogramed. Today we see a similar pattern with many of the prescriptions of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives: provoking fear of being perceived as racist, shame at being complicit in white oppression, and anger at being part of an oppressed group are modern attempts to install values into students before they have sufficient knowledge or experience to form them on their own. The common goal with these educational practices is to deliberately change the hidden curriculum into explicit moral instruction that will churn out students who have the “correct” perspective.
Jargon & Crossover Terms
Structural Relations
This term does not fit into the motte and bailey format very well because “structural relations” is a term few outside of Woke circles will ever use in conversation. However, it’s apparent from this chapter that this idea goes far back into the Classical Marxist roots of Critical Social Justice.
As with most of their jargon, it’s often hard to nail down what they’re talking about when they bring up structural relations. A couple of examples from the writings of Bowles and Gintis give a sense of the “structure” and “relations” they’re referring to:
“We believe that changes in the structural relations themselves, as well as changes in the variables, will be required before we can approach equality of opportunity.”8
“The educational system helps integrate youth into the economic system, we believe, through a structural correspondence between its social relations and those of production.” 9
This attempt to appear sophisticated is just plain sophistry because, in the end, any reference to structural relations is just a form of determinism (economic for those like Bowles and Gintis; racial, gender, sexual, etc. for later iterations of the Woke) that they don’t have to justify. If someone points out an exception to their predictions, they can wave it away by saying “Ah, but the structural relations remain unchanged,” as if their determinist narrative is unquestionable, and exceptions to it can be safely ignored.
Furthermore, by couching it as “structural relations” they can offer a way out of their deterministic trap: give the Marxists more power. For Bowles and Gintis, that additional power amounted to perpetual and unquestioned funding for public education. Modern Critical Educators have more specific programs, credentialing processes, and commissars they want in education. What the early Marxists and today’s Critical Educators have in common is the conviction that their ideas are the only ones that can help us escape from the “structural relations” responsible for every ill in our society. The track record of American Education since Bowles and Gintis speaks for itself and offers a glimpse at the nature of the “success” we can expect as Critical Social Justice gains increasing sway over education.
Humanism
Motte: A philosophical stance that emphasizes human potential in all areas: Human reason as capable of understanding reality. Human lives as having moral significance. Protection of human rights as being the function of the State. Human beings as capable of creating and understanding beauty.
Bailey: The idea that human beings can only be fully valued in a utopia that is necessarily communist, combined with the conviction that the attainment of such a utopia is not a mystical fantasy, but something achievable by human beings.
Strategy: While it has come up previously, chapter 2 is particularly rich on the references to the fact that the Marxists in education were “humanists.” Like so many other terms, they want to cash in on the positive reputation of humanism and the gains it has produced in knowledge, prosperity, and freedom since The Enlightenment by saying, “only by accepting our Communist ideas can you have true humanism.” Furthermore, they want to present themselves as practical--humanists who don’t need faith in a miracle to believe in their utopia, they just need to be given enough power.
Seize the Motte and Bomb the Bailey: Genuine humanism has been responsible for the largest gains in human wellbeing since the discovery of agriculture, and even the disagreements it spawned have been immensely productive because there was a shared conviction in the value of individual human life and the human capacity to understand the world. That is, until humanists allowed Marxists to wear the label without contention (or at least not enough). The idea that an ideology wherein everyone needed to attain the same “class consciousness” could be called “humanist” should have been an affront to humanists from the day that Marx published the Communist Manifesto. That Marxists today still call themselves humanists despite Marxist regimes having drenched the world in blood goes beyond the pale. For anyone who has seen images of starving Ukrainians in the Holodomor, heard accounts of Chinese children beating their teachers to death during the Cultural Revolution, or become aware of the countless human skeletons in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the claim that “Marxists are humanists” is so vile and infuriating as to defy words. The fact that I could continue this list with scores of equally horrific examples only serves to underscore the point. If there is ever a term to be reclaimed from the Marxists, it is the term humanist.
(Note: While drafting this entry, I had a long conversation with a friend about the meaning of humanism. His contention is that humanism is a significantly more neutral term than what I indicate above. On this view, the purpose of humanism is to portray human beings as fundamental causal agents, as against puppets of supernatural or natural forces. In this sense, it denotes only human beings’ ability to be efficacious, rather than necessarily ascribing moral significance to them (neither pro-human, nor anti-human). Looking at the term this way, it could be argued that Marxists of all stripes have a claim to be humanists since it is indeed human beings who create their “utopia” rather than God or nature. Even so, I think the motte and bailey model still holds up, because Marxists do, when convenient, use the humanist label to imply that their ideas accurately reflect human nature and truly have the good of human beings as their fundamental goal. Essentially, they want to be seen as pro-human while the implementation of their ideas has been universally anti-human).
Equality
Motte: The Enlightenment value that stood as a sort of shorthand for two related, but distinct phenomena: treatment under the law would be the same for everybody, and that all human beings should have the same opportunities.
Bailey: A state of equal outcomes. This term has gradually been replaced by “equity” (see my first entry for analysis of the term equity). As the idea of guaranteeing equal outcomes has gained more and more prominence the term equity has become not only more commonly used, but a more common position to take among the left.
Strategy: This chapter makes clear that the idea has been to use unequal outcomes as evidence, even proof, that opportunity was unequal. It’s this connection, that oftentimes goes unquestioned, that has gradually allowed the idea of equality to be replaced with equity in our modern discourse. The strategy has been enormously successful as even someone like Condoleezza Rice (hardly woke) conflates the two ideas today10.
Seize the Motte and Bomb the Bailey: It’s important to have the proper perspective on equality as a political or legal principle versus equality as a moral ideal. The only role that the equality under the law has in ensuring equality of opportunity is to ensure that there are not unfair laws constraining the actions of some groups or individuals as compared to others. As a moral value, equality is something much more like “fairness” or a sense of fair play. It’s the idea that the rules are the same for everybody no matter where they start from. A culture that values merit can only discover the truly meritorious by offering all comers an equal opportunity to demonstrate their ability. It is open to debate whether disparate outcomes reflect unequal opportunities, but the idea of redistributing shares to guarantee equal outcomes is an affront to the idea of fairness.
Questions
In passing, Gottesman mentions an association that Bowles and Gintis had with the journal Monthly Review. The inaugural piece of this journal was written by Albert Einstein, entitled, Why Socialism?11 Learning that Einstein was an advocate of socialism did raise some questions: what was the crux of Einstein’s argument for socialism? And, given he supported socialism, why did he vote with his feet by going to the capitalist West as opposed to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics when he fled the Nazi regime? I would guess that Einstein had the brains to know that the socialists in the USSR would have been willing to send him back to Germany as nothing more than an object lesson for their own people (as happened with many German Marxists), but I suppose I will never really know why Einstein chose to go to capitalist America when his ideal form of government was ascendant in a much closer nation. Of course, none of that answers the question of why Einstein advocated for socialism. I read the essay to get a sense of Einstein’s argument.
Essentially, Einstein believed that the technological progress of human civilization makes every human individual utterly dependent on society. Given that this is the case, meaning in life is to be found through devoting oneself to society, while the competition rampant in capitalism will cripple an individual’s ability to be happy. He was also very bullish on central planners’ ability to plan an economy effectively, and he believed that the purpose of education was,
“[I]n addition to promoting his own innate abilities, [education] would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.”
In short, he advocated for explicit moral instruction that taught students to subordinate their own interests for those of society. While he doesn’t explicitly state it, he seems to view fears of governmental or societal oppression as paranoid—I found this odd considering his country of origin. Completely absent from his piece was any discussion about how society became as technologically advanced as it is. Why it happened in countries that were significantly more capitalist, and the role that freedom of production played in this process. It’s my sense that Einstein viewed scientific and technological progress as an inevitability (this is a view that I encountered among many scientists and science students during my education) rather than as something that is made possible by an environment of freedom, and something that actually regresses under political oppression.
The book mentions a 1971 essay written by Samuel Bowles called “Cuban Education and the Revolutionary Ideology12.” I would very much like to dive into this to see what Bowles would have to say about the educational system in a regime that would become so bad that people started trying to cross hundreds of miles of sea to Florida clinging to floating piles of garbage.
At one point, Gottesman indicates that socialists in the early twentieth century attempted to create alternative schooling options in America to “build an anti-capitalist culture13.” Knowing more about the specifics of these attempts, what they tried, who inspired them, and how it worked out is something to look at in the future.
Conclusion
One of the most essential things I learned from this chapter was the way in which Bowles and Gintis caused a lurch to the (Marxist) left in education, but that this lurch ended up being just the beginning of a decades-long leftward push in education that ultimately left Bowles and Gintis looking fairly moderate. Please let me know what you think of that development and if there are pieces of the story that you think I’m missing.
Gottesman, Isaac H. The critical turn in education: from Marxist critique to poststructuralist feminism to critical theories of race. p. 14 New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.
Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. 1976. Schooling in capitalist America: educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York: Basic Books.
United States. 1965. The Negro family: the case for national action. [Washington]: [For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off.].
Illich, Ivan. 1983. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper Colophon.
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TCTiE p. 46
Sowell, Thomas. 1992. Inside American education: the decline, the deception, the dogmas. New York: Free Press.
TCTiE p. 35
TCTiE p. 42
Einstein, Albert. 1972. Why socialism? Vancouver, B.C.: Spartacus Books.
Samuel Bowles; Cuban Education and the Revolutionary Ideology. Harvard Educational Review 1 December 1971; 41 (4): 472–500. doi: https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.41.4.a154342585h3226l
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