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Book Reviews: Silvert, Kalman H., and Leonard Reissman. Education, Class and Nation: The Experiences of Chile and Venezuela. New York, N.Y.: Elsevier, 1976. 242 + xvi pp. $13.50.

The preface of this book commences " 'We began this study on a beautiful summer day in New Hampshire.' These were the last professional words Leonard Reissman wrote before his death early in 1975." Kalman Silvert died one year later, shortly before the publication of this book in June, 1976. Silvert—in his career as a professor of political science at Dartmouth and NYU, as a staff member with the American Universities Field Staff, and as the Ford Foundation social science advisor for Latin America—did much to foster the development and dignify the status of Latin American Studies; he was a mentor and a teacher par excellence not only for North American scholars but for many Latin American social scientists whose political and intellectual freedom he championed. Leonard Reissman, an urban sociologist concerned with the issues of stratification and inequality, was head of the Sociology Department at Cornell University. The two authors combined their interests and talents in the writing of this book—an enterprise spanning the last ten years of their lives. Education, Class and Nation encompasses the ambition of the two men to enrich the theoretical literature on social change, to contribute to the methodological sophistication of comparative political sociology, and to say something of political worth. The central focus of this book is on the political sphere—that subsystem of society which integrates the institutional order—and on the role of education in the formation of citizens. The thesis of the two authors is that education contributes to "that reservoir of social understanding, relativism, and receptivity to change which can reasonably be counted as fundamental to free, secular society" (p. xii). To substantiate that thesis, the authors gathered survey data on some nine thousand students, teachers, and parents in Chile and Venezuela. Two of the book's seven chapters analyze the survey data concerning attitude formation in relation to level and type (public, Catholic, private) of schooling and demographic factors. And two chapters place the data in historical context.