“They can provide students with a broad set of basic skills (reading, writing, calculating, analysing, reasoning) and a broad understanding of major aspects of the natural and social world, the kinds of broad capacities we tend to consider part of a liberal education. Schools can be very effective at assimilating immigrants, transients, and other social newcomers into a local community and into the broader political, cultural, and social fabric of US society. They can have a modest effect in increasing the comfort level between people across social barriers of race, class, and gender by getting them accustomed to interacting with each other in the hothouse environment of the school. They can provide students with a variety of social skills and strategies for pursuing self-interest in an institutional setting by teaching them how to game the process of doing school without having to do much academic learning. Most of all, schools are good at credentialing. Their most important social function is to certify that students have completed a particular level of schooling by conferring degrees. This in turn helps assign graduates to particular positions in the queue of prospective workers, providing both employers and employees with a predictable and apparently legitimate method of deciding who gets which jobs.” Pg. 156