In 1842, Horace Mann, one of the most important educational reformers of the nineteenth century, declared that “nothing but universal education can counter this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of labor. If one class possesses all of the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor . . . the latter . . . will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former.” This basic idea — that education is the great equalizer — has become a fundamental tenet of liberal education reform.

But there’s a problem. In more than a hundred fifty years of education reform, it hasn’t been true. And crucially, the data we have about the impact of education on material well-being and economic status shows it isn’t true.

In 1976, two Marxian economists, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, set out to interrogate the claims made by liberal education reformers, not only through political theory and philosophical argumentation, but with a quantitative analysis of the relationship between schooling and economics. Nearly fifty years later, their findings, written up in the landmark study Schooling in Capitalist America, remain clarifying. Above all, they identify the systemic barrier to real education reform: a capitalist economy that produces inequality by design.