Although education, as an activity mandated, sponsored, and supervised by the capitalist state, is as much an apparatus of the state as any other state agency, it is far more democratic, open to change and innovation, and subject to potential community control than any other state apparatus. To understand education's function in a capitalist society, it is necessary to emphasize that capitalist education, like the capitalist state, has a dual character. On the one hand, capitalist education provides means to contribute to the reproduction of the capitalist system, either as a tool to enlarge capital accumulation and labor force reproduction, or as an instrument which enhances political domination structures, practices, and codes. On the other hand, education is forcefully expressing the notion of national sovereignty and civil society's demands upon the state, e.g., people's expectations toward greater social mobility. Thus, at the same time that capitalist education is in strong correspondence to the social organization of labor and to the social relations of production, it constitutes by itself a moral and an empirical expression of democracy in capitalist society. (RM)