At first I picked this out and read just one chapter in order to assign it as a token radical view in a cluster of essays on education and inequality. But then I couldn't stop myself and read the whole thing after the semester was over. It is an actual real-life Marxist reflection theory (supported with the toolkit of postwar US social science: linear regressions, IQ scores, and all). B&G's "Correspondence Principle" asserts that the structure of school is determined by the structure of the economy it feeds people into. Unlike a lot of reflection theorists, they have a historical and causal account of how this might be, pointing out that US educational reform has pretty much always been driven by business and political elites. So they manage to arrive quasi-independently at Bourdieu's idea that education's social significance lies not so much in the content of schooling as in the way it shapes people's dispositions to fit their social destinies and thus legitimates and reproduces the class structure. It's amusing to imagine a mirror-universe John Guillory writing a version of Cultural Capital with B&G instead of PB as the guiding theorist (actually JG does cite their other work in that book).

Somehow these powerful and still-compelling arguments cohabit with a poignantly dated circa-1968 radical framework. The student and urban rebellions demonstrate that the socialist revolution is within reach; people are fed up with the capitalist system, whose unbearable contradictions will bring it crashing down any day now; and so on. A big introductory chunk of the book is devoted to an exposition of quite orthodox Marxism, but actually they seem to me to turn frequently to what Boltanski and Chiapello call the "artistic critique" of the second spirit of capitalism, as opposed to the critique of exploitation: for B&G what is worst about both the capitalist workplace and the capitalist school is the lack of autonomy and creativity in workers' lives. "Liberated education," they call it, will prepare everyone for economic democracy. But as we now know in hindsight, an ostensibly more creative and independent workforce can be exploited just as much---or even more---than a rigidly controlled and hierarchized one, by making jobs more precarious, exploiting the critique of bureaucracy to destroy social rights and workplace regulations in favor of a cult of the unfettered capitalist job creator.

And as for "liberated education," though the idea still lives its zombie life on pedagogy Bluesky or whatever, come on.