Educational Opportunity and Social Inequality in Western Europe

Abstract

The existence of equality of educational opportunity is assessed according to four standards: (1) equality of educational access; (2) equality of educational participation; (3) equality of educational results; and (4) equality of educational effects on life chances. By all of these criteria it appears that the educational systems of Western Europe fail to provide a significant equalizing influence, and that to a large degree the educational treatments and results for western European youth tend to mirror their initial social class origins and sex differences in favoring students from more advantaged families and males. It is argued that the interpretation of this pattern can best be understood by considering the dual role of schooling in preparing wage-labor for the systems of monopoly-capitalist and state work enterprise as well as in representing a vehicle for social mobility and sustaining an ideology that such mobility is possible. The combination of prodigious educational expansion in conjunction with a reduction in the postwar rate of economic growth has created a crisis of an educated and underemployed proletariat. The magnitude of this crisis is engendering interventions by both the state and capitalist employers to mediate the contradiction by altering both educational and work patterns. The effectiveness or failure of these interventions to resolve the contradiction will have a profound impact on the nature and magnitude of inequality within both the schools and the larger society in Western Europe.