Marxist Perspective on Education

The Reproduction of Class Inequality

The process of reproducing class inequality works like this: Middle-class parents use their cultural and material capital to ensure that their children get into the best schools and then go on to achieve highly in those schools.

This can happen through giving children one-on-one instruction with tutors, paying for private school tuition, or, in extreme cases, making donations directly to elite schools that they want their children to attend.

All of this capital meandering means wealthier students tend to get the best education and then go on to get jobs in the middle class.

Meanwhile, working-class children, who are more likely to get a poor education, are funneled into working-class jobs.

The Legitimization of Class Inequality

Marxists argue that, while in reality money determines the quality of one”s education, schools spread a “myth of meritocracy” to convince students that they all have an equal chance of success and that one”s grade simply depends on their effort and ability.

Thus, if a student fails, it is their fault.

This has the net effect of controlling the working classes. Believing that they had a fair chance, the proletariat became less likely to rebel and attempt to change society through a Marxist revolutionary movement (Thompson, 2016).

Bowes and Gintis explain this concept through the idea that students in the capitalist education system are alienated by their labor. Students have a lack of control over their education and their course content.

School motivates, instead, by creating a system of grades and other external rewards. This creates often destructive competition among students who compete to achieve the best grades in what is seen, at least superficially, as a meritocratic system.

Reproduction and legitimization of social inequality – Althusser

Althusser saw himself as building on the conditions that Marx theorized necessary for capitalist production through emphasizing the role of ideology in the social relationships that permeate people’s lives.

He believed that all institutions, schools included, drilled the values of capitalism into pupils, perpetuating the economic system. In this way, he considered education to be part of the “ideological state apparatus.”

Althusser says this influence perpetrates education in multiple ways. This ideological state apparatus, according to Althusser, worked by injecting students with ideas that keep people unaware of their exploitation and make them easy to control.

Secondly, he believed that this injection of ideas produces complaints and an unquestioning workforce, passively accepting their roles (Ferguson, 2018).

Althusser’s successor, Pierre Bordieu (1971) also believed that the education system and other cultural institutions and practices indirectly benefited the bourgeoisie — the capital class — through passing down “cultural capital.”

Cultural capital is the accumulation of knowledge, behaviors, and skills that someone can use to demonstrate their competence and social status, allowing them to wield influence.

Working in The Interests of Capitalist Employers

Finally, Bowes and Gintis (1976) suggested that there is a correspondence between the values taught by schools and the ways in which the workplace operates.

They suggest that these values are taught through a so-called hidden curriculum, which consists of the things that students learn through the experience of attending school rather than the main curriculum thoughts at the school.

Some parallels between the values taught at school and those used to exploit workers in the workplace include:

• The passive subservience of pupils to teachers, which corresponds to the passive subservience of workers to managers;

• An acceptance of hierarchy – the authority of teachers and administrators over students — corresponding to the authority of managers over employees;

• Motivation by external rewards (such as grades over learning), which corresponds to workers being motivated by wages rather than the job of a job.

Correspondence Principle

The Key concept in Bowes and Gintis’ Schooling in Capitalist America (1976) is that the reproduction of the social relations of production is facilitated and illustrated by the similarities between how social relations in education and in production work.

In order to reproduce the social relations of production, the education system must try to teach people to be properly subordinate and render them sufficiently confused that they are unable to gather together and take control of their material existence — such as through seizing the means of production.

Specifically, Bowes and Gintis (1976) argued, the education system helps develop everything from a student”s personal demeanor to their modes of self-presentation, self-image, and social-class identifications which are crucial to being seen as competent and hirable to future employers.

In particular, the social relations of education — the relationships between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and students, and students and their work — replicate a hierarchical division of labor. This means that there is a clear hierarchy of power from administrators to teachers to students.

The Myth of Meritocracy

One such aspect of the capitalist education system, according to Bowes and Gintis, is the “myth of meritocracy“.

While Marxists argue that class background and money determine how good of an education people get, the myth of meritocracy posits that everyone has an equal chance at success. Grades depend on effort and ability, and people’s failures are wholly their fault.

This casts a perception of a fair education system when, in reality, the system — and who succeeds or fails in it — is deeply rooted in class (Thompson, 2016).