The initiative for an ethnography of schools of choice-contemporary progressive schools in the USA-derived from an earlier study by the same author of life in American junior high schools (Everhart, 1983). There, the top-down existence arranged by schools for students, centred on technical interests, seemed to be in opposition to the bottom-up practical interests of the internally shared knowledge system of student social and cultural life. The study of schools of choice was to test the extent to which the social structure of schools intending to reconcile technical with practical interests would alter the world view of participants to produce emancipatory interests, within that social structure. However, in the three schools studied, the same oppositional tendencies between technical and practical interests appeared within a rhetoric of liberatory education. This forced the author to seek a conceptual framework within which to analyse the processes legitimating the continued co-existence of the two conflicting interests within the third emancipatory discourse that had been hypothesised. To this end, Everhart turns to ideology as a concept, and focuses on the way in which it operates on everyday actions and intellectual beliefs in the formation and transformation of human subjectivity. He also uses ideology as a form to untangle the manner in which progressive reform turns into ideology, disguises underlying patterns and mitigates against reform. He adopts Roland Barthes's semiotic model of interaction between signifiers, signified and signs in denotative and connotative systems (Barthes, 1967) to structure his observations of discourse, action and meaning between and among teachers, students and parents. Applied at the level of language, observed discourses of freedom (choice of alternative school, lack of fixed timetable, student participation in decision-making, egalitarian relationships with teachers) signify the joy of learning and positive feelings about oneself which, combined, become a sign of the openness of the school. At the level of meaning, however, openness of itself comes to signify learning, which observation has revealed to be a myth. As with earlier studies of alternative schools, Everhart finds that the rites of openness in the schools (student work contracts, school trips and class circles to discuss matters relating to the class community) legitimate, through their practical ideologies, an apparently superficial education and a lack of critical thinking. This is, in part at least, because teachers subscribe to the rhetoric that students must be free to set their own agendas and not be pushed beyond levels to which they express the wish to go. Finally, Everhart concludes that the ritual creation of a symbolic community, which masks the way in which the natural world is affected by the interaction of human groups along the lines of race, class and power, disguises an ideology of middle class individualism, the principal motive for teachers creating and parents selecting these schools.