Women's Oppression Today by Michele Barrett

Author:Michele Barrett [Barrett, Michèle , Introduction by Weeks, Kathi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

In the summary given above Wolpe’s argument appears to be functionalist to a high degree. The educational system is posed as an instrument by which an existing division of labour is somewhat mechanistically reproduced. Even the particular constituent elements identified (occupationally related skills and the transmission of ideologies) are reminiscent of the ‘functions’ of the educational system (‘allocation’ and ‘socialization’) identified by the functionalist sociologist Talcott Parsons.7 Several points can be made here. First, programmatic theoretical statements frequently give rise to this problem: what the reader gains from concise, lucid statements is inevitably counter-balanced by oversimplification. In the discussion which follows the theoretical introduction I have referred to, Wolpe examines in some detail the precise processes through which the ideology of gender is constructed. Second, she has in her subsequent work developed an alternative (non-functionalist) approach to these questions and it perhaps tells us more about the readership than about the author that the most functionalist formulation is invariably seized on as having, apparently, the greater explanatory value.

In ‘Education and the Sexual Division of Labour’, Wolpe argues that the specificity of the educational system is defined by a process of struggle and is not directly functional for production. The educational system is hence ascribed a ‘relative autonomy’ in relation to the capitalist mode of production; it is presented as an agency of ‘mediation’ between pupils and their allocation to places in the division of labour. Wolpe points to a series of contradictions within official British educational discourse and she emphasizes that the educational system is the product of historical struggle. ‘At any one time,’ she argues, ‘there is … a necessary disjunction between the “requirements” of the economy and the range of skills the educational system can produce’.8 These points are important qualifications of Wolpe’s earlier position. The reproduction of technically and ideologically equipped agents becomes dependent upon the outcome of struggle, and the allocation of these agents to places in the division of labour is a mediated rather than a direct process.

In these respects Wolpe’s later arguments are not unlike those put forward by Bourdieu and Passeron in their analysis of Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. A central point of this recondite text on the subject of pedagogic mystification is that the educational system makes a ‘relatively autonomous’ contribution to the reproduction of class relations and that its operations should not be reduced mechanistically to the expression of class interests.9 Bourdieu and Passeron argue that the ideology of democracy insists that class privilege be legitimated by certification from an apparently neutral educational system. Legitimation by the school rests on social recognition of the legitimacy and neutrality of the school. The relative autonomy of the educational system resides in its ability to conceal the truth of its functions and mask its relationship to the class structure.

There is not space here to go into these arguments in detail. They are relevant, however, to the question of gender division in the educational and training processes of capitalism in that the position taken on these general theoretical issues will affect the analysis produced.

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