The Marxist Perspective on Education

Last Updated on October 20, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Traditional Marxists see the education system as working in the interests of ruling-class elites. According to the Marxist perspective on education, the system performs three functions for these elites.

The Marxist perspective on education is one of the main topics within the sociology of education, which is examined on AQA Paper 1 (7192/1): Education with Theory and Methods.

The Marxist Perspective on Education: Three Key Ideas

• Education reproduces class inequality – middle-class children are more likely to succeed in school and go on to middle-class jobs than working-class children.
• It legitimates class inequality – through the ‘myth of meritocracy’.
• Education works in the interests of capitalist employers – by socialising children to accept authority, hierarchy and wage labour.

Behind all three sits Louis Althusser’s idea that education is an ideological state apparatus, which I cover first below.

Althusser: Education as an Ideological State Apparatus

Louis Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. His 1970 essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses is the starting point for the traditional Marxist view of schools.

Althusser argued that the ruling class keeps control in two ways. The repressive state apparatus – the government, the army, the police, the courts and prisons – works mainly through force, or the threat of it. The ideological state apparatuses – religion, the family, the media, culture and education among them – work mainly through ideology. They shape what people believe is normal, fair and inevitable, so that force is rarely needed.

Althusser thought that in mature capitalist societies education had become the most important ideological state apparatus, taking over the role the Church used to play. School takes children from every social class at a young age and spends years teaching them useful skills, or as he put it, “‘know-how’ wrapped in the ruling ideology”. Children then leave at different stages to take different places in the class structure: most into ordinary jobs at around sixteen, some into technical and middle-class posts, and a few to the top, where they become the managers of the system and the people whose job is to keep it running.

What makes this work, according to Althusser, is that schools present themselves as neutral places, free of ideology. Pupils don’t experience school as propaganda, and that is exactly why it is effective.

Evaluation: Althusser explains why inequality is accepted without anyone being forced to accept it. HOWEVER, like Bowles and Gintis below, he says little about pupils who see through or reject what school teaches them – the criticism Willis and Giroux make further down this post. It is also a theoretical argument rather than an empirical study: Althusser did no research in actual classrooms.

In the exam, the ideological state apparatus is one of the clearest ways to show knowledge of Marxist theory in a 30-mark question on the role of education.

Bowles and Gintis: Schooling in Capitalist America (1976)

The main source for the ideas below is Bowles and Gintis (1976): Schooling in Capitalist America. Alongside Althusser, these are the two sociologists most associated with the traditional Marxist perspective on education.

The reproduction of class inequality

This means that class inequalities are carried from one generation to the next.

Middle-class parents use their material and cultural capital to ensure their children get into the best schools and the top sets. This means that the wealthier pupils tend to get the best education and then go on to get middle-class jobs. Meanwhile working-class children are more likely to get a poorer standard of education and end up in working-class jobs. In this way class inequality is reproduced.

The legitimation of class inequality

Marxists argue that in reality money determines how good an education you get, but people do not realise this because schools spread the ‘myth of meritocracy‘ – in school we learn that we all have an equal chance to succeed and that our grades depend on our effort and ability. Thus if we fail, we believe it is our own fault. This legitimates or justifies the system because we think it is fair when in reality it is not.

This has the effect of controlling the working classes – if children grow up believing they have had a fair chance then they are less likely to rebel and try to change society as part of a Marxist revolutionary movement.

If you’d like to find out more, see this post on whether schools are really meritocratic, which looks at the evidence for and against the myth of meritocracy.

Teaching the skills future capitalist employers need

Bowles and Gintis suggested that there was a correspondence between values learnt at school and the way in which the workplace operates. The values, they suggested, are taught through the ‘hidden curriculum’. The hidden curriculum consists of those things that pupils learn through the experience of attending school rather than the main curriculum subjects taught at the school. So pupils learn the values they need to toe the line in menial manual jobs, as outlined below.

School values correspond to work values

• Passive subservience of pupils to teachers corresponds to passive subservience of workers to managers.
• Acceptance of hierarchy (the authority of teachers) corresponds to the authority of managers.
• Motivation by external rewards (grades, not learning) corresponds to being motivated by wages, not the joy of the job.

If you want a more in-depth post on this 1976 Marxist theory you might like to read this post: Bowles and Gintis’ Correspondence Principle.

The Marxist Perspective on Eduction: Test yourself…

Positive evaluations of the Marxist perspective on education

• There is an overwhelming wealth of evidence that schools do reproduce class inequality: the middle classes do much better in education, partly because the working classes are more likely to suffer from material deprivation and cultural deprivation. Meanwhile, the middle classes have more material capital, more cultural capital (Reay, 1998), and they benefited most from the market reforms of the 1988 Education Reform Act (Gewirtz, Ball and Bowe, 1995).
• The existence of private schools is strong supporting evidence for Marxism. Around 6% of pupils in England (6.3% in 2025/26) attend independent schools, and their families are able to buy them a better-resourced education, which in turn gives them a better chance of getting into the top universities.
• There is strong evidence for the reproduction of class inequality if we look at elite jobs. The Sutton Trust’s Elitist Britain 2025 report found that 62% of senior judges and half of newspaper columnists were privately educated, and that across all the elite roles it looked at, 36% had been to private school.

Criticisms of the Marxist perspective on education

• Henry Giroux (1983) argued that reproduction theories like this are too deterministic and leave too little room for human agency. Working-class pupils are not entirely moulded by the capitalist system, and do not accept everything that they are taught – Paul Willis’ study of the ‘lads’ also suggests this.
• There is less evidence that pupils think school is fair – Paul Willis’ lads knew the system was biased towards the middle classes, for example, and many young people in deprived areas are very aware that they are getting a poorer quality of education compared to those in private schools.
• Education can actually harm the bourgeoisie – many left-wing, Marxist activists are university educated, for example.
• The correspondence principle may not be as applicable in today’s complex labour market, where employers increasingly require workers to be able to think rather than to just be passive robots. The creative industries alone accounted for 2.46 million jobs in the UK in 2025, up by 58% since 2011 – work that depends on creativity and independence, the very traits Bowles and Gintis said schools punish.

Neo-Marxism: Paul Willis – Learning to Labour (1977)

Willis’s research involved one school in the Midlands. He observed and interviewed 12 working-class boys about their attitude to school during their last years there, and then followed them into their first jobs.

Willis argues pupils rebelling are evidence that not all pupils are brainwashed into being passive, subordinate people as a result of the hidden curriculum.

Willis therefore criticises traditional Marxism. He says that pupils are not directly injected with the values and norms that benefit the ruling class – some actively reject them. These pupils also realise that they have no real opportunity to succeed in this system.

BUT Willis still believes that this counter-school culture produces workers who are easily exploited by their future employers.

The counter-school culture

Willis described the friendship between these 12 boys (or ‘the lads’) as a counter-school culture. Their value system was opposed to that of the school. This value system was characterised as follows:

1. The lads felt superior to the teachers and other pupils.
2. They attached no value to academic work, more to ‘having a laff’.
3. The objective of school was to miss as many lessons as possible; the reward for this was status within the group.
4. The time they were at school was spent trying to win control over their time and make it their own.

Attitudes to future work

• They looked forward to paid manual work after leaving school and identified all non-school activities (smoking, going out) with this adult world, and valued such activities far more than school work.
• The lads believed that manual work was proper work, and that the type of jobs hard-working pupils would get were all the same and generally pointless.
• Their counter-school culture was also strongly sexist.

Evaluations of Willis

• On a positive note, this study does recognise that working-class lads are not simply passive victims of a ‘middle-class’ education system – they play an active role in resisting that system.
• The study lacks representativeness – Willis conducted his research with a sample of only 12 white working-class boys in just one secondary school.
• Willis has been criticised for being overly sympathetic to the boys – he could be accused of going native!
• This study is now nearly 50 years old, and so one has to question whether it is still relevant – the education system, the experience of education and the working classes are very different today compared to the mid-1970s!

For a more in-depth summary of Paul Willis, please see my summary post on his classic work Learning to Labour.

Marx on the Run

Contemporary evidence to evaluate the Marxist perspective (2026 update)

A range of contemporary research evidence offers broad support for the view that education continues to reproduce social class inequalities, or at the very least fails to prevent it by improving social mobility in England.

The disadvantage gap at GCSE

The Department for Education’s key stage 4 statistics for 2025/26 show that 27.5% of disadvantaged pupils achieved grade 5 or above in both English and maths, compared with 54.3% of all other pupils – a gap of 26.8 percentage points.

The DfE’s own measure of this, the disadvantage gap index, narrowed in 2026 (to 3.82, from 3.92 in 2025), but it is still wider than it was before the pandemic (3.70 in 2019). Before the pandemic, progress was slow anyway: according to the Education Policy Institute, the gap in England narrowed only from 20 months of learning to 18 months between 2011 and 2019.

[IMAGE: the existing chart “poor-kids-get-worse-GCSEs-than-rich-kids.png” — I suggest DELETING it: it shows 2018/19 data that has now been superseded, and I couldn’t confirm its source. Keep it only if you want it, and caption it as 2018/19 data.]

The disadvantage gap continues post-16

The Education Policy Institute’s 2026 annual report found that disadvantaged students in 16–19 education were 3.4 grades behind their better-off peers across their best three qualifications in 2025 – slightly wider than in 2019.

Earlier EPI research (2021) found that disadvantaged students were more likely to take vocational and technical qualifications such as BTECs, while their better-off peers took more academic qualifications such as A-levels, which bring greater returns in the labour market later in life. This suggests that the education system reproduces class inequality overall.

Able disadvantaged pupils fall behind by A-level

An older but still useful study from Oxford University’s Department of Education (Sammons, Toth and Sylva, 2015) followed pupils identified as highly able at age 11. Only 35% of the bright disadvantaged pupils went on to get three A-levels, compared with 60% of their bright, better-off peers. Only 33% of the disadvantaged group took at least one ‘facilitating subject’ favoured by top universities, compared with 58%.

Private schooling still pays off after university

Research by Lindsey Macmillan and Anna Vignoles, tracking graduates who left university in 2006/07, found that privately educated graduates were more likely to get high-status jobs than state-educated graduates – even after comparing students with the same attainment, from the same type of university and with the same degree subject. The remaining advantage was small (about 2.5 percentage points), but it suggests that private schooling buys something beyond qualifications, such as networks or confidence.

Lockdowns harmed poor kids more than rich kids

The COSMO study (COVID Social Mobility and Opportunities), run by UCL with the Sutton Trust, surveyed around 13,000 young people in England. Its October 2022 findings showed that students at state comprehensives were much less likely than those at independent schools to feel they had caught up on learning lost during the government’s decision to close schools during the pandemic: 46% of comprehensive students said they had not caught up, compared with 27% at independent schools.

Further COSMO research also revealed that the pandemic had a different effect on the career aspirations of young people from different backgrounds.

Students at state comprehensives, and those from disadvantaged backgrounds, were more likely than others to have changed their plans because of the pandemic.

This triangulates with the findings when we compare changing aspirations with household deprivation. Children from the most deprived areas were more likely to change their career aspirations because of Covid than those from the least deprived areas:

Although you could interpret the evidence above as criticising the Marxist perspective on education:

When schools close, the confidence and aspirations of poor kids decline more than for rich kids, which you might interpret as evidence that when schools are open they have a relatively positive impact on the social mobility of poor kids.

HOWEVER, given the pre-pandemic research above, it’s clear that schools did very little to close the gap between 2011 and 2019, the years before lockdowns, and school closures were still a government policy which harmed poor kids more than rich kids.

Exposure to elite peers helps rich kids more than poor kids

Moving away from the UK, a 2022 study from Norway (Cattan, Salvanes and Tominey) found that exposure to peers from elite-educated families increases the probability of a student themselves enrolling on an elite degree – highly selective, high-paying courses such as medicine, law and economics at the top universities.

The study found that if students from low socio-economic backgrounds are exposed to elite peers, they are more likely to enrol on elite degrees, but the same is true if students from higher socio-economic backgrounds are exposed to elite peers.

And the effect is about three times as large for rich students as for poor students (a rise of 4.0 percentage points for students from richer backgrounds, against 1.3 points for those from poorer backgrounds).

This means that elite peers do more to reinforce the reproduction of class inequality than to encourage social mobility.

Using the Marxist perspective in the exam

The Marxist perspective comes up in the Education section of Paper 1 (7192/1), in the short outline questions, the 10-mark questions and the 30-mark essays. Two recent examples:

• June 2023: “Outline two similarities between the functionalist and Marxist views of education.” (4 marks) – see my post on the similarities and differences between functionalism and Marxism.
• June 2024: “Applying material from Item B and your knowledge, evaluate the usefulness of Marxist perspectives in understanding the role of education.” (30 marks) – see my model essay on the Marxist view of the role of education.

Other related posts on the Marxist perspective on education

• The Correspondence Principle – a more in-depth look at this aspect of Marxist educational theory.
• Paul Willis: Learning to Labour – the full summary and evaluation of Willis’s study of ‘the lads’.
• Evaluate the Marxist view of the role of education in society – a model 30-mark essay.
• Arguments for and against private schools.

Other related posts on other aspects of Marxism and related perspectives on education

• Summary of the key ideas of Marxism
• The Functionalist Perspective on Education
• The New Right’s View on Education
• Sociological Perspectives on Education Summary Grid

Sources/ Find out more

• Althusser, L. (1970) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1971). Full text at the Marxists Internet Archive.
• Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America.
• Cattan, S., Salvanes, K. and Tominey, E. (2022) First generation elite: the role of school networks. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies.
• COSMO study (2022) initial findings, UCL Institute of Education.
• Department for Education (2026) Key stage 4 performance, 2025/26.
• Department for Education (2026) Schools, pupils and their characteristics, 2025/26.
• Department for Culture, Media and Sport (2026) DCMS Sector Economic Estimates: Employment, 2025.
• Education Policy Institute (2021) Measuring the disadvantage gap in 16–19 education.
• Education Policy Institute (2022) Inequalities in GCSE results in England and Wales.
• Education Policy Institute (2026) Annual report 2026: disadvantage.
• Gewirtz, S., Ball, S. and Bowe, R. (1995) Markets, Choice and Equity in Education.
• Giroux, H. (1983) Theories of reproduction and resistance in the new sociology of education. Harvard Educational Review, 53(3).
• Macmillan, L. and Vignoles, A. Graduates who attended a private school have additional advantage in the labour market, LSE British Politics and Policy.
• Reay, D. (1998) Class Work: Mothers’ Involvement in Their Children’s Primary Schooling.
• Sammons, P., Toth, K. and Sylva, K. (2015) Subject to Background. Oxford University Department of Education / Sutton Trust.
• Sutton Trust (2025) Elitist Britain 2025.
• Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour.

Signposting and related posts

This post has been written primarily for students studying the education topic, as part of the AQA’s A-level sociology course (Paper 1, 7192/1).

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