Schools, Work and Consumption: Education and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Abstract

This paper examines several contemporary social theorists and commentators who have focused on conflicts in contemporary social values and beliefs and have pointed to what has been called the 'cultural contradiction of capitalism.' These contradictions, it is argued, tum on the conflict between traditional notions of bourgeois morality and attitudes, and those that have been spawned by a consumption-oriented capitalism. The paper suggests that it is within this context that many of the problems and predicaments presently faced by schools become comprehensible. School may now constitute the final bulwark for the socialization of the young into the work-oriented, instrumentally-motivated values of traditional bourgeois society. In so doing it has become the public battleground for the struggle to resolve the contradictory nature of culture in contemporary society.