Marxist Theory of Education

11 Key excerpts on "Marxist Theory of Education"

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  Social Haunting, Education, and the Working Class

  A Critical Marxist Ethnography in a Former Mining Community

  • Kat Simpson(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Education and Marxism

  Research on the relationship between education, inequality, and social class is extensive and draws on various theoretical perspectives and traditions. Marxist and neo-Marxist analyses attend to how various structures and processes of schooling reflect and reproduce class-based inequalities and serve the needs of capital (see, for example, Althusser, 1971 ; Anyon, 2011; Bowles and Gintis, 2011 ; Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, 1920 ; Gramsci, 1971 ). The chapter begins by outlining how class is understood in this book. My argument is that it is too facile to simply argue that social class is a straightforward classification of two groups of people into pre-ordained categories or boxes based on their occupation or income, and that a neo-Marxist analysis of class offers a perspective that reflects more effectively life in contemporary capitalist society. I then turn to how education and training are, at all levels, implicated in the social reproduction of labour power, and consideration is given to the effects of various policy developments and neoliberal discourses shaping experiences and processes of schooling for the working class. The chapter concludes by arguing that whilst Marxist theories are in many ways useful, they sometimes underestimate the potential of human agency. A neo-Marxist analysis of education, combined with the notion of social haunting, is advocated to enable an understanding of the “history of the present” that better connects with the past towards ways of thinking that stretches “beyond the limits of what is already understandable” (Gordon, 2008 , p. 195).

  Marxist Analysis of Social Class

  Education, social class, and inequality remain important in contemporary post-industrial societies. Social class is recognised as both reflecting and causing social, economic, and cultural differences in wealth, status, education, and lifestyle. Within education, social class “lies at the heart of persistent inequality”, continuing to structure “resources, experiences and subjectivities” (Thompson, 2019 , p. 2). Access, opportunity, participation, and experience continue to be strongly associated with and reflective of class origin (Reay, 2017 ). Class-based differences within and throughout education operate in various ways: through differentiated formal and hidden curricula, where working-class pupils are often exposed to rote forms of learning and stricter regimes of control (Anyon, 2011 ; Bowles and Gintis, 2011 ); grouping processes and teacher expectations, where working-class pupils are typically placed in ‘bottom sets’ with limited movement upwards and holding, overall, a low-status in the classroom (Reay, 2017 ; Sharp and Green 1975 ); through class sizes, where middle-class children tend to be taught in smaller class sizes and have access to more and better educational resources (Braconier, 2012 ; Reay, 2017 ); and class-based disparities across and within higher education – access and participation at different universities (low or high status), choice of subjects to study, retainment rates, and different degree outcomes and employment destinations, for example. Vocational and work-based learning continue, generally, to be taken up by working-class students and are often regarded as having less value than traditional ‘academic qualifications’ (Ainley, 2016 ; Reay, 2017 ). Although larger proportions of the population now attend university, working-class students generally attend lower-status institutions (with the highest drop-out rates), and study less prestigious, more vocational-based, subjects (Reay, 2017 ; Simmons and Smyth, 2018 ). It is worth considering that, despite expansion of participation in HE, those from working-class backgrounds account only for one in twenty students attending elite Russell Group Universities in the UK (Jerrim, 2013 ). Social class remains, as Reay (2006)

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  Marxisms and Education

  • Noah De Lissovoy(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Of course, this book is not an impartial or arbitrary selection of texts, but rather a very particular one, and the potential conversation between these chapters is also partly a result of this. In the first place, it should be noted that as with the other titles in the Education and Social Theory series, all of the chapters that have been included in this book originally appeared in Taylor & Francis journals. Furthermore, this collection aims to focus on current debates and conversations, while also giving a sense of their recent evolution, and so I limited my selection to articles from the last fifteen years. The objective is to present different interventions in terms of orientation and concerns, but with nevertheless enough in common to open the space for the outlines of a collective project. This is of course a subjective selection, and other valuable collections would be possible starting from similar criteria.

  This introduction first briefly situates Marxist educational scholarship in historical context. The second section considers contemporary practical and theoretical challenges, and the third outlines key questions that scholars in the field should confront. I conclude by laying out the central arguments of the chapters and their organization in the book and by outlining a sense of Marxist theory that I believe is suggested by their juxtaposition.

  Beyond familiar histories

  The conventional history traces the emergence of contemporary Marxist educational theory in analyses of schooling as an instrument of social reproduction—as well as in the challenge to these accounts by resistance and agency-oriented approaches. Thus, to the extent that Marxism is presented at all to teachers in training and to future researchers, it is often introduced through the work of Bowles and Gintis, whose Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life

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  A Sociology of Educating

  • Roland Meighan, Clive Harber(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  London: Macmillan. Sarup, M. (1978) Marxism and Education. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. A most helpful overview of how Marxist ideas have been developed within the field of education. Young, M. and Whitty, G. (1977) Society, State and Schooling. Lewes: Palmer Press. An illustration of how Marxist ideas are applied in the field of education. Signposts 1. Materialist analysis It is important that one recognizes that different Marxist critiques of schooling and educating emphasize different aspects of what we have generally described as 'materialist' analysis. Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, stress the importance of the hidden curriculum of schooling in the reproduction of the social relations of production. Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour, Farnborough: Saxon House, explores how 'the lads', a group of working-class boys in a secondary school, respond to the ideologies of schooling. And in the book produced by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1979), Unpopular Education, London: Hutchinson, you can find a superb discussion of how the state is implicated in the manipulation of educational enterprises. Pierre Bourdieu's work has emphasized the importance that education plays in the reproduction of 'cultural capital' as well as economic capital, and the role of social class actors themselves in reproducing their own circumstances. Bourdieu's emphasis is on the 'habitas' or status qualities and their associated ways of behaving that are derived from education rather than the economic and technical skills that have been acquired. These habits then influence the way people understand and interact with social structures, particularly in relation to social contacts and perceived opportunities. Bourdieu, P. (1983) The forms of capital' in Halsey, A.M., Lauder, H., Brown, P., and Wells, A.S. (eds), Education, Culture, Economy and Society, London: Sage 1990.

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  History and Education

  Engaging the Global Class War

  • Curry Stephenson Malott, Peter McLaren, Michael Adrian Peters(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

    (Publisher)

  We provide a broad view of the historical development of education in capitalist society through the lens of how the telling of that story has changed over time and through the construction of a Marxist historiography for the history of education, drawing primarily on The German Ideology (Marx & Engels, 1846/1996) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx, 1852/1972). The debate and struggle over the narrative of the history of edu- cation in the United States never exist in a vacuum, unaffected by the larger society in which it is situated. For example, because textbook companies in the U.S. are capitalist enterprises driven by the desire to create capital (i.e., self-expand), they gravitate toward narratives perceived to be popular, and in today’s hyper-bourgeois U.S. society, where even the Left has largely abandoned Marx and the notion of a global class war (i.e., capitalist coun- tries against both socialist countries and workers and the colonized in their own countries), the prospects of major textbook companies adopting Marxist titles appear to be slim. Successful professors in the U.S., therefore, tend to be professors that reproduce the dominant ideology—the ideology of the ruling class—not because of a conspiracy, but because it has become common sense. That is, the idea that communism equals a static, authoritarian inevitability is largely taken for granted even in critical pedagogy. While Marxist perspec- tives are far less common, interest in Marx’s vast body of work is experiencing a global rejuvenation as the bigotry and fog of anticommunism slowly dissi- pate. This chapter hopes to contribute to this resurgence. However, highlighting the importance of historical contextualization, the Marxist approaches to the history of education, represented by Katz and Bowles and Gintis, emerged during the height of the global communist move- ment and national liberation struggles against colonialism that manifested themselves in the U.S.

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  Knowledge, Ideology and the Politics of Schooling

  Towards a Marxist analysis of education

  • Rachel Sharp(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5  Ideology and schooling

  In the previous chapter the elements of Marx’s theory of ideology and some of the more recent developments in the Marxist tradition were outlined. It is now possible to show how concepts emanating from that discussion can be applied fruitfully to the analysis of schooling and the ‘knowledge’ which educational institutions transmit. The concept of ideology will play a crucial role in clarifying the way in which schooling functions to reproduce the social relations of production, or the class relations within society, as well as generating some of the tensions and contradictions which are a necessary consequence of the logic of capitalist development. Nevertheless a major qualification is necessary. However important the role of schooling, other institutions or apparatuses as well are involved in these processes. Any systematic account of the ideological function of education has to locate education within a more comprehensive theoretical framework which takes cognizance of the complex ideological mediation occurring within such institutions as the family, the media, the churches, and trade unions, as well as within the day-to-day routines of capitalist work processes and within the forms and practices of the capitalist state. A whole network of institutions and practices articulate with those which characterize what is normally understood as schooling.

  The contemporary form of schooling in capitalist societies is the result of historical processes and struggles. The accumulation process in any social formation structured by the capitalist mode of production is characterized by certain phenomena which occur generally. These combine with more idiosyncratic features of its development and the class struggle in particular socio-historical conjunctures to produce the specific characteristics of each national educational system. However, whilst schooling in general tends to reproduce capitalist social relations, it does not follow that it can do no other, that the mechanisms and ideological forms through which this end is achieved are invariant, or that the process of ideological reproduction occurs without simultaneously reproducing or reflecting the contradictions which latently are inherent in any capitalist society. This contradiction is related to the tension between the private appropriation of capital and the increasing socialization of production. It is important to avoid a timeless functionalism and an invariant teleology, for reasons which will be elaborated briefly in the next chapter in the context of a brief discussion of the inadequacies of Althusser’s analysis of the ideological role of schooling.

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  Making Sense of Mass Education

  • Gordon Tait(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Importantly, within this logic, education is deemed to have a very special role to play in these processes. Some of the logic of critical theory In order to best understand the relationship between social class and education, according to the reasoning of critical theory, the work of a number of writers needs to be briefly addressed. These writers don’t tell the complete story, because there’s no ‘complete story’ to tell, but their work provides some of the central landmarks of the position, and offers a generalised flavour of how social class has been understood within educational research from the 1960s onwards. So who should we look at? Althusser Althusser ( 1971 ) attempts to explain how society works by adopting the basic Marxist model of an economic base acting as the foundation for a social superstructure (that is, all the legal, political and cultural systems that define a society). Within this superstructure, Althusser delineates the repressive state apparatus, which includes the police, the courts, the army, i.e. all the machinery necessary to exert control by force if necessary, and, of importance to us, the ideological state apparatus – all those mechanisms which exert control through the use of ideas. He argues that the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) use the education system, more than any other part of the ideological state apparatus, for maintaining its power. What the bourgeoisie has installed as its number-one, i.e. as its dominant ideological State apparatus, is the educational apparatus, which has in fact replaced in its functions the previously dominant ideological State apparatus, the Church. (Althusser 1971, 103–4) Yes, the wealthy may send their children to different schools to the poor, but according to Althusser, that’s only one small part of how social class and education interact.

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  Handbook of Sports Studies

  • Jay Coakley, Eric Dunning, Jay Coakley, Eric Dunning(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Some of the academic controversies (for exam-ple, Seligman, Simmel, M. Weber) about Marxism show parallels with the debates about Marxism and political and social practice – as outlined before. The social-scientific elabora-tion of Marxist theory and research in the past has almost always been dogmatic and is even nowadays often very orthodox. This can only be explained adequately if we separate out the development of a Marxist theory which on the one hand became increasingly an ideologized general theory used by socialist/communist states and their educational institutions (schools, colleges, universities) – the so-called ‘scientific socialism’ grounded in ‘Marxism– Leninism’ and its variations (for example, Maoism) – while on the other hand, a number of critical and progressive scholars and schools of Marxist theory developed advanced theories and linked these with non-Marxist paradigms and methods, for example, ‘struc-turalist Marxism’, ‘critical theory’, ‘hegemony theory’, ‘critical philosophy’, feminist criti-cisms of Marxist theory, Marxist theories of ‘underdeveloped’ societies (cf. Bottomore, 1979: 125–43). In a nutshell, the academic development of Marxist theory has always been overshadowed by controversies about Marxism as an ideology. 4 This conflict between ideology and acad-emia emerged from a fundamental objective of Marxism, namely the utopian idea of a future communist society. All historical attempts to put socialism and communism into practice had to face the dilemma that Marx did not develop any practical models of communist society. In addition, the socio-economic condi-tions under which communist revolutions occurred never fulfilled the fundamental con-ditions Marx had identified. Some of the revo-lutionary movements did not have widespread support from the people, others took place before the predicted self-destructing crisis of industrial capitalism had set in.

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  Comprehensive Introduction to Socialism, A

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Library Press

    (Publisher)

  Taking the idea that social change occurs because of the struggle between different classes within society who are under contradiction against each other, the Marxist analysis leads to the conclusion that capitalism oppresses the proletariat, the inevitable result being a proletarian revolution. Marxism views the emergence of a socialist system as a historical inevitability that arises from the obsolescence of capitalism and the corresponding social revolution, where private property in the means of production would be superseded by co-operative ownership. The hypothetical system of socialism would succeed capitalism as the dominant mode of production when the accumulation of capital can no longer sustain itself due to falling rates of profit in real production relative to increasing productivity. A socialist economy would not base production on the accumulation of capital, but would ___________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ___________________________ instead base production and economic activity on the criteria of satisfying human needs - that is, production would be carried out directly for use. Eventually, socialism would give way to a communist stage of history: a classless, stateless system based on common ownership and free-access, superabundance and maximum freedom for individuals to develop their own capacities and talents. As a political movement, Marxism advocates for the creation of such a society. A Marxist understanding of history and of society has been adopted by academics studying in a wide range of disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, media studies, political science, theater, history, sociological theory, art history and theory, cultural studies, education, economics, geography, literary criticism, aesthetics, critical psychology, and philosophy. Classical Marxism The term Classical Marxism denotes the theory propounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

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  From Radical Marxism to Knowledge Socialism

  An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader, Volume XI

  • Michael A. Peters, Liz Jackson, Michael A. Peters, Liz Jackson(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Knowledge and ideology in the Marxist philosophy of education Robin Small

  Monash University

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003216421-6

  Important contributions to the philosophy of education in recent years have come from the direction of Marxism. Two books in particular have presented an extended treatment of this approach to the subject: Kevin Harris’s Education and Knowledge, and Michael Matthews’ The Marxist Theory of Schooling.1 It is these books that I want to discuss here. The purpose of this article is to look into some of their main arguments and theories, and in particular those which surround the themes of knowledge and ideology. The discussion will be one in which a number of criticisms are made of these ideas. I have tried to bear in mind that “The task of criticism is criticism”.2 Accordingly many of their merits will no doubt be overlooked. Fortunately several reviewers have done justice to these.3

  The scope of this discussion is limited in another way, being confined to the two texts just mentioned. This may seem an artificial restriction, for it leaves out other writings on these themes which are of interest, including some by the same authors. Yet an adequate treatment of the range of topics within even these two books would require a far longer essay than this one. For that reason I have deliberately restricted its scope to what seem to me the central issues. Perhaps another occasion might allow its omissions to be remedied. I should also mention another objection to the limited character of this discussion. In considering books written several years ago (and this is usually the case with books) one is faced with the possibility that the authors no longer hold the views expressed there. People do alter their outlooks, and they are often right to do so. It may be that these authors agree now with very little of what they wrote then. More generally, fashions change, in philosophy as elsewhere. One can see this happening in the philosophy of education, especially in its radical version. (The case of Althusser is an obvious example. Who now upholds the ‘correspondence principle’, for that matter?) There is really no way of avoiding this problem. The only defence is to point out that the ideas themselves are under examination, not their authors — that the discussion is philosophical rather than biographical in its direction.

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  Sociology and School Knowledge

  • Geoff Whitty(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Thus, certainly within the sociology of education, theories and methodologies that, in their original form, were used to critique Marxism have been used to refine neo-Marxist approaches rather than to discredit them. In their very different ways, for instance, both Donald (1979) and Sarup (1982, 1983) have tried to use the perspectives and methods of writers such as Barthes and Foucault to develop an analysis of ideological and political practice around education under capitalism within a broadly neo-Marxist paradigm.

  Indeed, it does seem that the theoretical strand of the British sociology of education may now be emerging from a period of purely theoretical development in which a succession of different approaches were seen as exclusive and incompatible. Many of the oppositions that have characterized the different phases of the sociology of education over the past decade now seem less rigidly drawn. Within broader fields of social theory, the dichotomy between structure and agency is being increasingly rejected and attempts are being made to synthesize elements of the humanist and structuralist strands of contemporary Marxism (Giddens 1979; Johnson 1979b). There has also been an increasing rejection of the tendency to veer ‘from the view that representation is an unmediated reflection of material conditions of existence to the view that representation is necessarily totally autonomous of those conditions’ (Barrett et al . 1979). If these developments become established within the sociology of education, the obsession with theoretical purity may give way to the development of theoretically informed empirical research. If, for instance, it is clear that the relationship between economic, political and ideological practice is not, except perhaps in the very broadest terms, to be understood at a purely theoretical level, it becomes necessary to study the relations between such practices in specific historical conjunctures (and even sites) within a particular mode of production. Thus, it is to be hoped that the theoretical strand of the sociology of education will follow its parent discipline in recognizing that the immediate future of studies of ideological practice lies in ‘the analysis of … meaning production in historically specific conditions of existence’ (Barrett et al

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  Gender, Class and Education (Routledge Revivals)

  • Stephen Walker, Len Barton(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  10.  Social Theory, Social Relations and Education Lorraine Culley, Leicester Polytechnic Jack Demaine, Loughborough University Introduction

  The predominant trend in recent sociology of education has been the attempt to develop ‘general theory’ of social relations and their educational contexts. Attempts have been made to analyze class divisions and sexual divisions and indeed to combine concepts of ‘class’ and ‘gender’ in a theory of capitalist and patriarchal education. The problem usually addressed in such discourses is how educational institutions (or apparatuses), policies and practices relate to a general theory of the functioning of capitalist society or capitalist social relations.1 Educational practices are commonly discussed in terms of a relation between education or ‘schooling’ and the ‘needs’ and ‘interests’ of capitalism and/or patriarchy. Political arguments, struggles and outcomes are conceived as the clash of different pre-given ‘interests’ or ‘needs’.2

  Such analyses are usually conducted in relation to discussions of an entity which is variously referred to as ‘social democracy’, ‘liberal democracy’ or the ‘corporate state’.3 The development of education and the forms of its development are conceived as determined by, or as a response to, the interests of ‘capital’, ‘capitalism’ or the ‘capitalist mode of production’ and secured by the action of an aggregate agency — the state in its capitalist or corporatist form. Such analyses were initially concerned with an explanation and critique of class inequalities in education and the reproduction of the social relations of production but subsequently there have been attempts to ‘graft on’ or in some way incorporate a series of other inequalities, social relations and divisions — predominantly ‘racial’ and sexual divisions.4 That is to say, the argument has been that education is conditioned by the pre-given interests not only of ‘capital’ but also, in some way, of ‘men’ as a group or white people as a group.5

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