Socialist Revolution: Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and the Emergence of Marxist Thought in the Field of Education

Abstract

Upon its publication in 1976, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’ Schooling in Capitalist America was the most sophisticated and nuanced Marxian social and political analysis of schooling in the United States. Thirty-five years after its publication, Schooling continues to have a strong impact on thinking about education. Despite its unquestionable influence, it has received strikingly little historical attention. This historical article revisits the scholarship of Bowles and Gintis and the milieu in which Schooling was conceived. Specifically, it contextualizes the production and reception of Schooling to better understand the emergence of Marxist thought in the field of education in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. It also seeks to understand how the emergence of Marxist thought in the field was connected to the rise of an Academic Left—an intellectual shift in the academy toward Marxist social and political theory as a framework to theorize democratic socialist movement-building against capitalism and concomitant state sponsored oppression in the 1960s and 1970s. This history suggests that as we engage in historical and contemporary work on radical ideas in the field of education, we need to push ourselves continually to think about the intersection of education with other fields and disciplines. The article also pushes back against a widespread depiction of Schooling as crudely mechanistic.

Notes

1. Schooling continues to be referenced as a significant text in most scholarly analysis of the relationship between socio-economic status and education. Although Google Scholar is certainly not an ideal measure of scholarly impact, an October 2011 search for “Schooling in Capitalist America” with search parameters “articles excluding patents” returns an impressive number of results—2,120 entries since 2001. Examples of courses around the country using portions or all of Schooling in 2011 include: Education 207x/History 258D at Stanford University (Winter 2011; taught by David Labaree); Education 601 at State University of New York at Binghamton (Spring 2011; taught by Jim Carpenter); EAF 228.011 at Illinois State University (Spring 2011; taught by Matt Fuller); EDCI 790 at Unviersity of Maryland, College Park (Spring 2011; taught by Linda Valli); EDHI 9060 at University of Georgia (Spring 2011; taught by Sheila Slaughter); Sociology 113 at University of California at Berkeley (Fall 2011; taught by Samuel R. Lucas); and, Soc-140a at Brandeis University (Spring 2011; taught by Rachel Rockenmacher).

2. For further discussion, see Brosio (1992) and McGrew (2011). In addition to a critique of being mechanistic, some scholars have noted that Bowles and Gintis do not engage the role of gender in capitalist reproduction, e.g., Arnot (1982) and Weiler (1988), and do not attend to a sophisticated analysis of race, e.g., Leonardo (2009). Despite these critiques, which are compelling, feminist and critical race critiques of Marxist thought in education have largely been aimed at cultural Marxist scholars aligned with critical pedagogy. A sample of such critiques can be found in Luke and Gore (1992) and Leonardo (2005). Additionally, there are many critiques of Bowles and Gintis’ account of the history of public education, e.g., Beadie (2010) and Kaestle and Vinovskis (1980). By far, however, the bulk of critiques against Schooling are grounded in an idea that there is no room for human agency in their correspondence principle. This historical article pushes back against this narrow, mechanist critique of their scholarship by grounding Schooling in its intellectual and political milieu.

3. Independent, discipline specific radical academic journals also appeared at this time, including Telos (philosophy) in 1968, Antipode (geography) in 1969, Politics and Society (political science) in 1970, and New German Critique (German studies) in 1974. For a history of the underground press in the 1960s (mostly nonacademic but New Left affiliated), see McMillian (2011).

4. Much of the biographical information in this article comes from previously published oral histories (Bowles 1997; Gintis 1997; Levin 1997). For a compelling article on the importance of autobiographical accounts (as well as a discussion of some of its limitations) that is specific to the history of radical economics in the 1960s and ‘70s and the history of URPE, see Mata and Lee (2007). For additional biographical information, see Bowles and Gintis’ self-written entries in Arestis and Sawyer (2000).

5. Bowles also published a short article advocating redistribution of power and resources in schools and in the society writ-large in a 1968 HER special issue on The Coleman Report.

6. Bowles and Gintis never immersed themselves in the MR circle; however, they published an essay in MR in 1975.

7. In addition to MR and Studies, other journals influential on the return to Marxist thought in intellectual circles in the United States in the early/mid-1960s included New Politics and the British journal New Left Review. For further discussion, see Buhle (1991).

8. The secondary authors are Marshall Smith, Henry Acland, Mary Jo Bane, David Cohen, Herbert Gintis, Barbara Heyns, and Stephan Michelson. Jencks is clear in the preface that, although drawn on group research, Inequality is a presentation of his own analysis.

9. Jencks primarily viewed family background as social class. Although outside the scope of this article, there is a conversation to be had about the perspective of Coleman, Jencks, and Bowles and Gintis on race, desegregation, and the period's debates about IQ.

10. Studies was the first journal of the period in the United States to fully engage the critical Marxist tradition. On revolutionary Marxist-Leninist tendencies of the period in the United States, see Elbaum (2002). Also see Buhle (1991).

11. Cohen and Lazerson (1972) and Joel Spring (1972) also published articles about education in SR.

12. One only needs to look at the publication of Arthur Jensen's (1969) infamously troubling IQ analysis to push back against any arguments about HER being radical.

13. The only Marxian analyses to precede Gintis in HER are Bowles (1971) and Freire (1970a, 1970b).

14. Not even Counts, hailed by many as the standard-bearer of radical thought in the field, ever fully engaged Marx or Marxist theory. The earliest scholar in the field who deeply engaged Marxist thought is probably Theodore Brameld, who from the 1930s on positioned himself as a reconstructionist and not as a Marxist (e.g., Brameld 1965). For further discussion on Brameld see Hartman (2008).

15. Although many claim that Katz and other revisionist historians were Marxist, this claim tends to rest on naming a similar disdain for capitalism as opposed to identifying in Katz et al. an explicit Marxist theoretical grounding. For further discussion, see Carnoy (1984).

16. Notably, Marx's own writings are quite scant on educational inquiry, and although many in the revolutionary Marxist tradition wrote about education, this analysis tended to be reserved for discussions of movement building and the formation of class-consciousness as opposed to analyzing schooling institutionally as part of a web of social-relations. A distinction can thus be drawn between a Marxian analysis of schooling that seeks to understand where schooling fits in a base/superstructure paradigm, and socialist pedagogy, which focuses on the teaching and learning relationships involved in movement building and constructing socialist consciousness. Marxists tended not to write about schools, with the most notable exception being the work of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s and ‘30s, which did not become noticed in the field of education in the United States until the late 1970s. For a discussion of socialist pedagogy in the 1970s, see Norton and Ollman (1978).

17. For a discussion of the reception of Freire's scholarship in the United States in the 1970s and ‘80s, see Gottesman (2010).

18. For a discussion of how their ideas about capitalism shifted from Schooling to Democracy and Capitalism, see their individual entries in Arestis and Sawyer (2000) and Brosio (1992). For a retrospective discussion of Schooling—written in response to Swartz (2003)—see Bowles and Gintis (2003) and the introduction to the Haymarket reissue of Schooling (Bowles and Gintis 2011).

19. For further discussion of how educational scholars attempted to move past, instead of build off of Schooling see Apple (1988), Cole (1988), and Swartz (2003). For a critique of reductive readings of Schooling, see Brosio (1992, 1994), and McGrew (2011).