Volume 23, Number 6 · April 15, 1976
Sentimental Education
By Robert L. Heilbroner
Schooling in Capitalist America
by Samuel Bowles, by Herbert Gintis
Basic Books, 340 pp., $13.95
'The economy produces people,' write Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis early in this important, original, and I think seriously limited study of the role of schooling in a capitalist system. The sentence sums up both the principal strength and the main weakness of their criticism of education. The strength is that their book focuses on the schooling process from a perspective largely absent from books on education. In this perspective, education becomes the most important institutional means by which a society reproduces itself—the means by which it shapes protean humanity into the hunters or diggers, hewers of wood or drawers of water, acquiescent bureaucrats or complacent ruling classes who transmit an existing social order from one generation to the next.
Review, 1797 words
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