Typologies of Education and the Capitalist World System.

Ideology is the central principle of classification in the dominant sociology of comparative education. It occupied an unchallenged a priori status in thought and research. This exaggerates the differences between capitalist and socialist education systems. The two systems do not exist and develop self-referentially. The faults of analysis which treats the two education systems as polarized types are illustrated by juxtaposing it with a world system approach. This is used as the basis of proposing that advanced socialist socities are fully integrated into the capitalist core. Their education systems operate to both subvert and reproduce the characteristic division of power in the world system between core, periphery and semi-periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]