BOOKS
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ism. Like Westergaard and Resler, they point to processes of educa–
tional change as being stimulated by a mingling of reforming and
practical demands, with the latter as the crucial filter controlling which
reforms are acceptable and which are not. The educational system
tends
to
resemble that of the overall economic order in a fairly direct
way. Education is an institution which is geared to the social reproduc–
tion of a labor force that can be adaptively distributed in the hierarchy
of the reward system and the division of labor. Relations of authority
within the school duplicate the hierarchies of the workplace in respect
to
the concentration of power; the competitive character of school life,
with its promise of attainment and threat of failure, coordinates with
that of the economic system; and the fragmentation of the economic
division of labor is paralleled in the compartmentalized character of
academic work. "By providing skills, legitimating inequalities in
economic positions, and facilitating certain types of social intercourse
among individuals," the authors conclude, "U.S. education patterns
personal development around the requirements of alienated work. The
educational system reproduces the capitalist social division of labor, in
part, through a correspondence between its own internal social rela–
tionship and those of the workplace."
There are at least two major aspects of these books which deserve
examination, if one is to locate them with reference to the liberal
standpoint expressed in the theory of industrial society. First, are their
authors substantially correct in claiming that the reformist measures
instituted in the respective societies to secure the progressive leveling of
inequalities have failed? Second, how convincing is the view that such
failure, suppose their claims are justified, is explained as the outcome
of capitalism as a specific mode of production? For liberal thinkers, the
first
-of
these questions is all-important; for socialists it is obviously
crucial to connect the answer to the second in as satisfactory and
sophisticated a way as possible.
I believe it is difficult to resist the force of the arguments that the
basic institutional and economic structure of capitalism has survived
attempts at piecemeal . reform such as has been undertaken in the
"mixed economy" that has been the goal of successive Labor govern–
ments in Britain since the War, and that hence the ambition of securing
profound social transformation through the educational system has
been and will continue to be frustrated. On the other hand, I also think
it true to say that both sets of authors dismiss too readily the impact of
reformist impulses in creating the changes which have been achieved,
and they do not always provide a balanced assessment of debates about
