Marxist sociologist Louis Althusser suggests that the bourgeoisie maintain power by using both repressive state apparatus (coercive power like the police and the army) and ideological state apparatus: institutions that spread bourgeois ideology and ensure that the proletariat is in a state of false class consciousness. Schools and educational institutions are, for Althusser, part of the ideological state apparatus: they prepare working-class pupils to accept a life of exploitation.