The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
the relative autonomy of the educational system: Whether one sets out to analyse the communication of the message, the organization of the exercise, or the assessment and sanctioning of the effects of the communication and the exercise, i.e., pedagogic work, as the prolonged action of inculcation through which the basic function of every educational system is accomplished, or whether one seems to grasp the mechanisms by which the system overtly or tacitly selects the legitimate addressees of its message, by imposing technical requirements which are always, to various degrees, social requirements, we have seen that it is impossible to understand the dual objective truth of a system defined by its capacity to employ the internal logic of its functioning in the service of its external function of social conservation, if one fails to relate all the past and present characteristics of its organization and public to the complete system of relations prevailing, in a determinate social function, between the educational system and the structure of class relations. To grant the educational system the absolute independence which it claims, or, on the contrary, to see in it only a reflection of the state of the economic system or the direct expression of the value system of 'society as a whole', is to refuse to see that its relative autonomy enables it to serve external demands under the guise of independence and neutrality, i.e., to conceal the social functions it performs and so to perform them more effectively.