Samuel Bowles

ED 530 Theorist Presentation Summer 2010 Heather Borden

image source: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/

Background

Born 1939 B.A. from Yale in 1960 Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard in 1965 Has served as an economic advisor to the

governments of Cuba, South Africa, and Greece, presidential candidates John F. Kennedy, and Jesse Jackson, and to World Bank and International Labor Organization

Additional Background

Samuel Bowles is a former Harvard University professor

Currently a professor of economics at The University of Siena, Italy and Arthur Spiegel Research Professor and Director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Professional Works

Bowles is a co-author of the book Schooling in Capitalist America and article “Contradiction and Reproduction in Educational Theory”

He alone has written A Cooperative Species: Human reciprocity and its evolution among numerous scholarly papers

Theories on Education

 Argues that schools prepare students for the future through socialization

Argues that personality traits, rather than skills, are the determinant of labor market success

Bowles & Gintis show that parental economic status is passed on to the children

Explains that the heritability of IQ is not important as a factor for future success

Socialization Theory

Theorized that certain behaviors were taught in schools that would later be needed in industry as adults introduced the “correspondence principle” where “social relations of schools correspond to the social relations of production.”

In their book Schooling in Capitalist America, Bowles and Gintis assert the economic base of America as having a series of social levels one of which is schooling

Socialization Theory (continued) In their article “Contradiction and Reproduction in

Educational Theory,” their educational theory is that of a theory of sites and practices.

Bowles defines a site as a cohesive area of social life characterized by a specified set of characteristic social relations or structures.

He defines practice by individual, group or class intervention to transform some aspects of social reality

Personality Traits and Parental Economic Status Samuel Bowles was a sociologist –

shared this educational theory with Herbert Gintis- “teacher expectations are substantially affected by students’ personalities, social and family backgrounds, presentation of self and cognitive skills.”

Education and Economics

Interpreters of Bowles’ theory assert the power of capitalists requires a reserve army of skilled labor

Schools provide this reserve army Students are the basis of our future

economy

Education and our economy

Bowles criticizes American schools that they are based on a merit and social system that is inconsistent with our capitalist economy

References Bowels, S. (2010, February 19). Samuel bowles. Retrieved

from http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/

Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2002). "Schooling in Capitalist America" Revisited. Sociology of Education, 75(1), 1-

18. Retrieved from ERIC database.

Corbett, B. (n.d.). An Overview and comments on the text of bowles and gintis. Retrieved from http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/education/bg/bg- overview.html

Iadicola, P., & Moore, H. (1977). Ethnic and Class Bias in Teacher Expectations of Junior High School Students: A Test of the Bowles and Gintis Thesis. Retrieved from ERIC database.