The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
absolute societal control:
That exercised by the educational system in a society; to posit, at the outset, that the educational system of a given society reflects that society's social system, is summarily to reduce the academic institution to its generic function of 'social control', the common residue of all its specific functions, and to make it impossible to perceive all that an educational system owes to its essential function, in particular its specific way of fulfilling its external functions in a given society at a given moment. However, similarly, one is bound to see no more than a product of bureaucratic organization in the most typical attitudes of the lower categories of administrative staff, whether it be the tendency to formalism, punctuality fetishism, or rigid adherence to the rules, so long as one fails to note that all these traits, which may also manifest themselves outside of the bureaucratic situation, express, in the logic of that situation, the system of depositions (ethos) - probity, meticulousness, propensity to moral indignation - which the members of the petty-bourgeoisie owe to their class position and which would be sufficient to predispose them to espouse the values of public service and the 'virtues' demanded by the bureaucratic order even if administrative careers were not also their means par excellence of social advancement. By the same token, the disposition which middle-class students or middle-rank teachers, and a fortiori, students whose fathers are middle-rank teachers, manifest towards education - e.g. cultural willingness or esteem for hard work [see petty-bourgeois ideology of laborious ascesis] - cannot be understood unless the system of scholastic values is brought into relation with the middle-class ethos, the principle of the value that the middle-classes set on scholastic values. In short, only on condition that one mediates the structure of relations between the sub-systems through the structure of relations between the classes is it possible to grasp, beyond the too obvious similarities, the true homologies between the bureaucracy and the educational system, by bringing to light the homology of their relations with the social classes. Thus, by suggesting with the amorphous notion of 'social control' that the educational system performs an indivisible, undifferentiated function for 'society as a whole', such all-purpose functionalism tends to conceal the fact that a system which helps to reproduce the structure of class relations indeed serves 'Society', in the sense of the 'social order', and through it the educational interests of the classes which benefit from that order. (See liberation and exposure of corruption as the means of concealment of corruption.)