Questioning Assumptions about the Role of Education in American Society A Review of Schooling in Capitalist America Seth Rosenberg City College of New York seth ccny cuny edu Classrooms in America are overwhelmingly authoritarian and undemocratic They focus on fragmented knowledge that is disconnected from the students lives Proven reforms are resisted at all levels and systematic progressive change is non existent nearly a century after the progressive movement Why is this so The standard liberal outlook is that the schools are broken and neglected but that they have the potential with reform to be a major progressive force in society This paper questions these assumptions through a review of the seminal educational economic work by Bowles and Gintis Schooling in Capitalist America 1 The major claim of this text is that our educational system s primary role is to mirror support stabilize and reproduce the fundamentally hierarchical and undemocratic social relationships that exist in the majority of American workplaces The major arguments and evidence of this text are reviewed and implications for PER will be briefly mentioned I Introduction The current state of our educational system is far from ideal Nearly a century after the progressive education movement an overwhelming majority of classrooms are based on the transmissionist model learning is authority based and focused on fragmented rote knowledge We wonder why proven reform ideas are systematically resisted or nearly impossible to implement on a large scale Implicit in this wondering is the assumption that our classrooms are the way they are because our educational system is broken or neglected The state of our classrooms is an unwanted or accidental result of a lack of resources personnel and coherent ideas for reform However underlying these beliefs are even deeper assumptions about the role of education in our society that education is inherently progressive and in alignment with our own educational goals This assumption is so fundamental to the accepted paradigm that few have investigated to see if it is actually true I claim that the PER community with its roots in traditional physics research has had little exposure to the history of education and educational reform in America In this paper my goal is to introduce the community to a seminal work in the study of educational institutions Schooling in Capitalist America written by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis 1 This work has had a dramatic influence on the educational community and inspired a wide range of research So much so that an entire session was dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the text at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association Using extensive statistical and historical evidence Bowles and Gintis question the fundamental hidden assumptions of the liberal educational paradigm In the remainder of this paper I briefly review the basic arguments and evidence put forth by Bowles and Gintis and discuss a few implications for PER II Hidden Assumptions about the roles of education Few of us in PER are explicit about our goals for educational reform Some would like to make a better physics class by improving classroom environments and curricula Some would like to encourage rational scientific thinking or national scientific literacy 2 Other goals include independent thinking personal development and social economic equality Behind these goals lie hidden assumptions about the role of education in our society From the history of progressive education Bowles and Gintis distill out three major roles that are assumed Integrative Function To prepare children for their roles as adults in society to provide them with the skills necessary to survive and work and to socialize them so that they can work within the standardized norms and social relationships Egalitarian Function To provide every child with an equal opportunity to excel so that those who do will be able to use their education to their advantage Those in lower social positions will be able to improve their lives and education may mitigate the inequality between rich and poor Developmental Function To provide opportunities for every child to explore their potential and interests to help them develop into a fully independent and realized individual I claim that the smaller scale goals that I briefly discussed for the PER community are subsumed under and assume these roles for education in our society III Questioning Assumptions The Meritocratic Myth Given the state of our educational system and the growing inequality in our society it seems likely that there is a tension between the three roles of education with the integrative role dominating the other two Why do we not question the compatibility of these roles The answer lies in yet another set of hidden assumptions that many including Bowles and Gintis refer to as The Meritocratic Ideology The meritocratic ideology begins with the assumption that the modern economy requires a highly hierarchical workplace where technical skills and abilities determine one s place in the hierarchy Those with more skills and higher cognitive ability are more able and productive and thus scale the hierarchy so that they can aptly direct production These individuals are rewarded accordingly for their increased productivity The primary place for the development of these cognitive skills and abilities is the educational system each year of education leads to higher cognitive development Our educational system evaluates students based on their cognitive progress and tracks them accordingly so that each will be prepared for placement in a role suitable for her abilities Unfortunately Bowles and Gintis show that the meritocratic ideology does not hold up to empirical scrutiny They present a great deal of data gathered from a number of studies by themselves and others First in their recent Schooling in Capitalist America revisited 3 Bowles and Gintis show that social mobility in America is a myth By focusing on intergenerational wealth mobility they show that the meritocracy cannot be an effective mechanism for social mobility because that mobility hardly exists Second Bowles and Gintis show that the mechanism for more education leading to more income is not primarily cognitive in nature They agree that there is a correlation between education and income level but when they look at people of the same cognitive ability the correlation between education