The commatization of women: Patriarchal fetishism in the sociology of education

Abstract

The traditional liberal perception of education as a liberating and socially innovative force has suffered some hard knocks in recent decades. In the United States, enormously expensive research has created and dismantled the human Capital theory in a relatively short time, demonstrating in the last analysis that expenditures on education produce a miniscule return on investment and make little impact on the social structure of inequality. In the United Kingdom, a veritable shower of polemics on educational reform has had less impact on what is actually happening in education than have the economic strictures of monetarism, In North America, too, the educational gravy train has been derailed. Conventional empirical studies in the sociology of education are thus left isolated among sums that won't add up and structures that won't fall down. As opposed to being a liberating force, education is now perceived as a stabilizing structure by theorists on both the Right and Left. Still, serious work in educational research is currently being done in the Marxist tradition, and much of it is methodologically innovative in terms of hegemony theory and the critique of structuralism. 1 Without underrating, in any way, the real gains made by a Marxist sociology of education, what I want to do here is to note the way in which gender relations and female education are marginalized in this work and to argue that this is not mere patriarchal prejudice but rather a consequence of serious defects in Marxist theory. Marx himself does not have a great deal to say on the question of education. His famous remark, in the Theses on Feurbach, that the educator has to be educated is a critical shot at the facile optimism of the Ideologues and that of other liberal devotees to the notion of the educator as benign mentor to an increasingly free mankind. The remark also obliquely implies that Marx did perceive cultural formations as significant in the ideological aspects of class struggle, a claim which Marxist sociology currently seeks to explicate. In this effort, it has either embraced a positivist structuralism, as in the case of Bowles and Gintis (1976), or it has attempted to build on Gramsci's work (1957, 1971, 1975) on cultural reproduction and the analysis of ideology. Although the two approaches are quite distinct in theory and methodology, they share a conviction that disadvantaged groups must work together to resist ruling class control of education and that the job of organizing and leading these groups falls on the progressive educator. The disadvantaged groups in question are not easily assimilable into straightforward class analysis, and it is this difficulty which produces "commatization": social class (comma) women (comma) blacks