Power and Ideology in Education

By Edited with Intro. Karabel, Jerome (A.H. Halsey)

Book Overview

The thirty-seven articles of this volume provide an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of educational institutions in modern society. Written by historians, anthropologists, sociologists,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B007ZJMPQG
• Release Date: January 1977
• Publisher: Oxford U.P.
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

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Power and Ideology in Education was first published in the same year as Bowles and Gintis' Schooling in Capitalist America and Willis' Learning to Labor. As such, it was part of a learned and exciting effort to place schooling in an inter-institutional context. Rather than focus on schooling as an autonomous institution charged with serving as an engine of thoroughgoing social reform, Karabel and Halsey's reader made clear that education was inextricably tied to other institutions, and that its potential for fostering social change had long been grossly exaggerated. Education was secondary to and served other, more powerful institutions, especially the economy. The relentless school-bashing that began in the mid-1970's had little or nothing to do with the quality of public education. Instead, changes in labor markets fostered by out-sourcing, down-sizing, internationalization, and ongoing technological developments sharply reduced the number of jobs that paid a family's living wage and offered a decent benefit package. With the exception of a few authors on the left, students of schooling determinedly failed to see this and blamed education for undercutting the gains working people had made since the end of World War II. This misguided human capital theoretic mindset has persisted until today, even espoused by Barack Obama. Karabel and Halsey's reader remains useful, but it is now badly dated. Halsey et al.'s 1997 reader is so topically diffuse and lacking in theoretical focus that it is not an ideal follow-up, but it's the best one available.