School Ideology and Social Reproduction

I’m not sure that Althusser can or will serve as a seminal social theorist for any of us. That said, his analysis of schooling and ideology is certainly worth our attention. It’s not that you cannot get where he gets without him; but his explicit focus on schooling does make him somewhat unique among the theorists we have read this semester.

Our discussion tonight seemed to me quite compelling; worth repeating. We asked how it is that schools hail “individuals,” bring them into being as “subjects,” and in the process lay the groundwork for the reproduction of the social order.

How then does the teacher/school ideology hail in school? What are its effects?

First off, I think we rejected the notion that school ideology hails by sending particular messages; that is, by broadcasting a certain content.

Second off, I think we rejected the notion that school ideology reproduces the social order by hailing individuals in their economic, social class location: bourgeois, proletariat, etc.

Rather, we jointly theorized that the school ideology hails individuals in (at least) two ways:

1) as isolated “autonomous individuals”

--You’re in this alone, and you rise or fall based upon your efforts!

2) as “intelligent individuals”

--Intelligence is measurable and fixed; it is uniform; individuals can be singularly ranked according to their intelligence. Therefore, I will rank you in school, and this in turn will reflect how far you’ll be able to go in life. 

There are of course other ways in which school ideology might hail individuals into subject positions. I encourage you to think about them.

In sum, several interesting things follow from this. First, remember that schools do not directly reproduce the social order by preparing us for either certain jobs or for certain social class identities. Rather, the work seems subtler. Schools teach us to internalize our “failings.” They teach us that we are interchangeable parts. Statistics. 

Are schools classist, racist, and sexist? Of course they are. But the reproduction of class, race and sex, Althusser suggests, seems to happen in a more indirect way than we might expect. 

Ultimately, Althusser should help us wonder why mass, compulsory schooling become so widespread--became so tied up with the projects of modernity. It is because we all became so Enlightened? Or is it because schools are very good at what they do--and what they do is dangerous indeed.

The medium is the message.