1. Samuel Bowles  ED 530 Theorist Presentation  Summer 2010  Heather Borden  image source: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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. ”

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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.