Education in Bourgeois Society: A Matter of Common Sense Robert D. White/Carleton University One of the more perplexing problems in a Marxist analysis of capitalist society arises out of inquiry into how the ruling class asserts and maintains its dominant position.1 Although class conflict should be observable, why is it that members of the working class are not only non-revolutionary but actually support the status quo? My response is that class consciousness and class actions are mediated by the dominant institutions and ideologies of society. The ruling class not only counts on material force alone to exercise its leadership but also actively seeks to create and diffuse throughout the social structure an intel- lectual, moral, and political hegemony. In other words, the process of domina- tion by the ruling class is not only material and physical but also cultural. This paper examines the educational system in order to explore some of the ways in which the school serves to maintain aspects of the capitalist hegemony. The educational system serves not only to prepare individuals for their eventual objective positions within the social structure but also to shape the subjective disposition of the participants such that the existing social order is rendered non-problematic. The importance of education to the legitimation of bourgeois society is not a new contention (see, for example, Parsons, 1959; Miliband, 1973; Althusser, 1971). However, the question remains m how does the educa- tional system reproduce this sense of legitimacy of the bourgeois social order? Research on the role of education in maintaining a system of structured social inequality --i.e., the reproduction of the division of labor (Bowles and Gintis, 1976) -- has tended to emphasize the structure of schooling and not the content. On the one hand, insofar as the internal workings of the school remain a "black box," little is said about the process leading to class differentials in academic achievement. On the other hand, work which does focus on the content of the educational process m i.e., classroom interaction and the sociology of curriculum (see Young and associates, 1971) -- often fails to locate the system of relationships and the school within the broader context of society. What needs to be done is to integrate interactional analysis, which con- siders the management of knowledge as its central problem, with structural analysis, which places greater emphasis on power and interests underlying the schooling process. To restate, an attempt must be made to resolve a major problem of Bernstein's work -- how it is that "power relationships penetrate the organization, distribution and evaluation of knowledge through the social context" (Karabel and Halsey, 1977, p. 71). There are mechanisms specific to the educational system which reflect the power and interests of the capitalist class and which serve to reproduce class relations. These can be linked to external forces which impinge upon the process of schooling. Of central con- Interchange / Vol. 11, No. 1 / 1980-81 47