Body and Soul: sources of social change and strategies of education

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In the past decade, the United States has experienced a deepening economic crisis and a decline in the quality of life (Castells, 1980). The search for security in material reward and in cultural meanings which offer consolation for material deprivation and uncertainty speeds up and appears in a caricatured and bifurcated form. Careerism in work and fundamentalism in belief are the most evident expressions of the frantic fashion in which individuals try to solve dilemmas posed by the current character of social change. The social theory of education, despite its claim of detachment as science or critique, is an integral part of these social and cultural changes. The liberal or progressive view of faith in education as the basis of social reform developed during an earlier period of social expansion and belief in a democratic culture (Welter, 1962; Wexler, 1976). The current view of education as cultural reproduction began as a critique of the liberal social theory of education. Cultural reproduction theory belongs to a later time, when commitment to a common culture has become less tenable as a result of the salience of social fragmentation and class division. The most insightful intellectuals see prevailing social arrangements and patterns of culture as partial, deceptive, and socially oppressive. Withdrawal of faith in education is an aspect of this more general removal of commitment from a system of symbolic interpretation that has lost its claim to universality and its capacity to compensate for socioeconomic deprivation with cultural consolation. Cultural meanings, and the institutions through which they are are transmitted, are identified with social domination. The intellectual work of this period is the work of the critique of culture as ideology, and the demonstration of ways in which the acceptance of ideology in general, and through schooling in particular, blocks the realisation of the interests and needs of deprived, and potentially ascendant, social groups (Young, 1971; Brown, 1973; Bourdieu, 1977; Apple, 1979a). This disenchantment is connected to an affirmation, among intellectuals, of the endogenous cultures of the oppressed as more authentic and socially accurate than the official culture. It is also marked by a withdrawal of faith in cultural institutions which