Lois Weis

Class, Race, and Gender in American Education (Suny Series, Frontiers in Education) Lois Weis

From the Introduction Education plays a crucial role in both offering opportunities for individual mobility, and at the same time legitimating large scale structural inequalities The ideology of schooling in the United States is that it offers opportunity to scale the class structure, and the notion of an open class structure means that people have to accept their position as at least partially deserved, as not simply ascribed or passed on Not every group or individual has believed this, of course, and the struggle over the racial state in the 1950's and 1960's, and the resurgence of the women's movement in the 1960's , are recent and obvious testimonies to this Nevertheless, there are no longer any formal barriers to the top The way in which individuals and groupls are prepared for, and prepare themselves for, their own future positions, thus leaving the class structure largely intact, needs to be carefully assessed