Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited

After reading some of the ideas expressed in this book I did an internet search for the title and found that the authors went back to this subject in 2001 and wrote an article titled: "Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited" by Bowles & Gintis

Correspondence principle (from original book)
'by structuring social interactions and individual rewards to replicate the environment of the workplace.' p. 1

'schools socialize students to accept beliefs, values, and forms of behavior on the basis of authority rather than the students’ own critical judgement of their interests.' p.17

BUT... (Revised Book)

"Socialization theory, however, has been broadly criticized for two reasons.

• First, it treats the process of adopting and rejecting new behaviors as a black box. It does notexplain how individuals learn what.
  
• Second, many variants of socialization theory appear to place the individual in an entirely passive role, a mere receptacle of the content of socialization rather than an active participant in the process.

For this reason socialization theory appears incompatible with widely accepted notions of human agency that stress our rationality, intelligence, and capacity to make choices informed by knowledge of the consequences of such choices for achieving goals." p. 18

"...schools influence which cultural models children are exposed to.
and
Second schools immerse children in a structure of rewards and sanctions." p.18

“A simple model of this process is the following.

• Children initially acquire cultural traits by vertical transmission from their parents (assume the parents have identical traits)
• They are subsequently paired with a cultural model (a teacher, that is) who may have the same or a different array of cultural traits.

• Confining attention to a single trait, suppose the teacher has the same trait as the parents. Then the youth is assumed to retain the trait.

• But if the parents and the teacher have different traits, the youth considers which one to adopt, surveying the experiences of those he knows (his classmates) for guidance in making the switch.” p.19

So in this model the agent has is a more active participant when there is conflict between the parent and teacher traits. In this case he/she will seek out different role models/experiences upon which to base their own traits.

Questions

• What is the middle ground?
• How has this changed and what affects those changes in any?
• Is this a structuralist approach? (article by Gordon on Paul Willis says it is)
  
• In this case, what other models are there from which children and adolescents collect such information to inform their own character traits?
• Does this mean traits in terms of evolutionary biology or in other terms:
• 1. A distinguishing feature, as of a person's character. See Synonyms at quality.
• 2. A genetically determined characteristic or condition: a recessive trait. (from The Free Dictionary

The authors of this paper have their own websites (which are linked to from the main blog page at Articles and Education Links) .

Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (Economic Learning and Social Evolution) is the latest book from Bowles & Gintis' which looks at cooperation and looks at the uses and limits of cooperation in human behavior. It challenges the role that all people are selfish. (taken from Amazon.com) This book is available online (see Online Books).