126 SOCIAL SCIENTIST its vanguard adopt the correct ideological position and are prepared to make sacrifices, no alteration in the production relations is possible. When the working class realizes the deception of the socialist mask of bourgeois planning and calls its bluff, a class confrontation is bound to follow; more potent weapons will issue from the armoury to counter the development of proletarian consciousness. What is of paramount importance for the working-class movement is to unite and clearly formulate the correct approach to the various bourgeois techniques to hoodwink, cajole and go on exploiting. By unity and the continuous development of its level of consciousness the working class and its vanguard can constantly bring into the open the inherent contradictions of the Indian capitalist system, and in a concerted effort accentuate the crisis in the system leading to its ultimate breakdown. The present reviewer therefore feels that what is necessary for the working class and its vanguard is not so much to find ways and means of saving Indian planning as to quicken its dissolution in the present form. It must be replaced by genuine socialist planning on the basis of completely altered production relations in Indian society. T G SANKARAN ALFRED DE SOUZA, INDIAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS : A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY, Sterling Publishers (P) Ltd., New Delhi 1974, Pp 304 Rs 45. A published Ph D thesis, this book is a notable piece of research employing the analytical tools of contemporary structural-functional sociology. It has indeed succeeded in explaining "in sociological terms the social and cultural structure of the public schools.3?1 But doubts still linger about the relationship between public schools and "the wider society of which they form a part'5.2 If the public school system, a legacy of the Empire, has failed to attract "the attention of sociologists", it could well be because it is a dying institution. If, on the other hand, "they are believed to be one of the main agencies for the selection and socialization of the new elites in India"3 there would have been no such neglect throughout the last quarter of a century. The very fact that there were only 42 public schools in the whole of India in 1968 shows their comparative irrelevance to contemporary education. Moreover, as J P Naik, Member-Secretary of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, pointed out, these negligibly few educational institutions are "not only artificial islands of prosperity"4 but greenhouses for perpetuating the privileges of a rich few at the top. As De Souza states, in spite of a few merit scholarships awarded by the