The critical examination of society's circumstances, institutions, and cultural predispositions and values can help detect problems and injustices and can suggest opportunities for improvement. Neo-Marxist critical theorists of the Frankfurt school are committed to work of this kind, but their perspective is informed by Marxian precepts, and their…

This paper presents a critique of various theoretical traditions in the study of schooling. Both the predominant liberal tradition of social and educational theory, with its roots firmly in structural functionalism and human capital theory, and the more radical reproduction tradition, which builds largely on Marxian and Weberian analyses of…