Review Essay: Education and the Radical Critique

Sickle, Larry Van

Publication

Review Essay: Education and the Radical Critique

Sickle, Larry Van

Abstract

This essay will be primarily concerned with a critical analysis of recent writings pertaining to schooling in America. Included in the analysis will be the work of Samuel Bowles, Martin Carnoy, Herbert Gintis, Michael Katz, and Joel Spring. Although these scholars of American education will provide the theoretical framework for the essay, they do not necessarily concur on all issues. As we will later demonstrate, all of the works differ in many instances, especially their policy recommendations. If there is a common thread woven throughout all of these works, it is the intellectual debt they owe Karl Marx. All of them rely heavily on Marxian materialism in their analyses, but few utilize the Marxian dialectic to its fullest. The task of the essay will be an explication of the theories and subsequent policy recommendations of the works under scrutiny followed by a critical evaluation of the theory and its proposed praxis (or lack thereof).