This assessment of the politics of education is an attempt to clarify the kinds of political commitments of educational agencies through discussion of labels, concepts, classificatory schemata, and general conceptual frameworks which allow a person to bound his experience so he can organize it in a manner that is coherent with his physical environment and his social milieu. The approach rests upon three intellectual traditions which are conjoined in a model of the politics of education. The first comes from the linguistic analysis tradition in contemporary philosophy, the second is a version of the sociological conception of social control, and the third is the concept of ideology which has a basis in several intellectual disciplines (political science, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology). A framework for evaluating the labels employed in education and the conceptual commitments to which these labels are attached is developed. (Author/SHM)