Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and Diane Ravitch: a classic controversy in education revisited

Abstract

Summary Two important books in the field of US education, Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America and Diane Ravitch's Revisionists Revised, are reviewed. The author contends that the dynamic tension in the debate on US education that existed in the late 1970s when these two books were published has virtually disappeared from the mainstream of educational thought. After more than a decade of conservative national leadership the mainstream debate on educational reform has centered on more technical and institutional issues and away from the fundamental philosophical debate over the role of schools in US society. The radical analysis informed by Marxism which Bowles & Gintis employed has been essentially eliminated from the mainstream of educational thought, while the conservative‐to‐liberal analyses have moved to the right politically. Diane Ravitch has continued to be a force in this debate; she is currently a US Assistant Secretary of Education. The author examines Ravitch's response to the radical critique represented by Bowles & Gintis and argues that without the latter's challenges to conventional reason, liberal educational thought will become increasingly conservative, sterile and reactionary. No salutary dialogue can emerge from parties (i.e. US conservative and liberal thought) who share similar basic assumptions about the nature of society and education.