Education Flashcards
Informal Education
- Ppl acquired knowledge + skills — spontaneous, unplanned—from parents + other group members.
- knowledge from things you consume (conversations, media, literature)
Formal education
academic setting - school - planned instructional process + teachers who convey specific knowledge, skills + thinking processes
less spontatneous + more meticulous learning objectives, there are different learning objects
Mass Education: An Overview
- Education system displaced organized religion
- second important agent of socialization
- Universal mass education ecent phenomenon + limited to relatively wealthy countries
History of Mass Education
•300 yrs ago: Most were illiterate
•1950: 10% of world compulsory mass education
•Today: Half of citizens in developing countries illiterate
Canadian Education
- access to higher education remains uneven, Canadian accomplishment impressive when compared with other countries
- education made a priority earlier
Canadian Education
•In 2009, Canadian students ranked 4th out of 65 countries in reading, mathematics, and science.
Uniform Socialization
- Creating systems of education sufficient resources include all children
- Religious training was never widely available and tended to set people apart from surrounding community
Uniform Socialization
- forms of instruction centralized + rationalized system = uniformity + standardization
- Diversity gradually gave way to homogenized indoctrination into common culture
Uniform Socialization
- similarities, core ideas decided by ministry of education
- state less involved in uni, direct say into how to shape ppl
- create a sense of us
- important part in spreading canadian ethos, culture, identity
- learn about Canada, major source of knowledge of country
Rising Levels of Education
•Amount of education risen + expected to continue
Educational achievement
learning/skill individual acquires + what grades reflect
Educational attainment
number of years of schooling completed, certificates + degrees earned
Individual Advantages and Disadvantages
- Higher educational attainment effective securing more employment + higher earnings
- more education attainment = better earnings
Rise of Mass Schooling: Factors
i. Development of the printing press: literacy spread
ii. Protestant Reformation: Protestants encouraged to read scriptures regularly
Rise of Mass Schooling: Factors
iii. Spread of democracy: free education for all
iv. Industrialization: Mass education necessity for creating industrial economy
Functions of Education: Manifest (intended functions)
i. Homogenize indoctrination into common culture
Gellner: mass education basis for modern nationalism humanity divided into pops defined by common culture, territory + continuity within kin group
•Common language
Functions of Education: Manifest (intended functions)
imagined communities—sentiments of solidarity + identification with those who share cultural capacities ii. Sort and steer students to different class positions as adults: Sorting ppl into diff jobs + opportunities
Functions of Education: Latent (or unintended) functions
i. Create youth culture: spend lots of time with ppl around same age
ii. Create marriage market: assortative mating—mate similar on various ranking criteria
Functions of Education: Latent (or unintended) functions
iii. Create custodial + surveillance system for children
iv. maintaining wage levels by keeping postsecondary students temporarily out of job market
•We have to raise the bar: we can’t have 10000 doctors
Functions of Education: Latent (or unintended) functions
v. “school of dissent” that opposes authorities
Sorting into Classes and Hierarchies: Conflict Perspectives
i. Economic barriers: ability to pay
ii. require academic credentials effective at excluding less advantaged from privileged professions
Sorting into Classes and Hierarchies: Conflict Perspectives
iii. Schooling reproduces differences in cultural capital + preserves class differences
Economic Barriers to Higher Education
- Almost no postsecondary education system is able to admit only the qualified and to supply all who do qualify with funding to meet all expenses
- Social class origin strongly affects how much education people attain
Economic Barriers to Higher Education
•higher education in Canada requires students + their families to shoulder significant financial burdens, including rising tuition fees, residence fees, etc.
Economic Barriers to Higher Education
- In many cases 3, 4, 5 years of debt
- Real cost with uni + compounding
- We have a vision that everyone has a fair shot: for some ppl it’s more manageable when financial side is less of a concern
SELECTION
- structured in a stratified manner
- diff backgrounds have unequal rates of success
- Exposes ppl to same curriculum + lots ppl directed to higher education
- Sponsored: identify + nurture few youth
SELECTION
- Diff jobs based on what they did in school
- Naturalizes high status + low status
- Most parents expect children to receive postsecondary education
- Aspirations can be good + expectations can be constraining
Tracking
assignment of students to specific courses + educational programs based on their test scores, previous grades
•Extra attention, work, aspiration, support early on leads to better result, higher ceiling
Social Inequality
Race, class, language, gender + other social categories may determine placement ofchildren in elementary tracking systems, than their actual academic abilities and interests.
SELECTION
•more youth enter higher education, competition shifts to higher levels, making stratification within universities + colleges increasingly important
Higher education: stratification
- Ranking betw uni, not as much, attracts best + brightest, employers look to specific school
- Selectivity of institution (best reputation offer graduates access to elite jobs, higher wages, contacts)
- More demand for certain fields who have higher status, they can raise the bar
- Field of study (differs in prestige, selectivity, access to resources + payoffs for graduates)
SELECTION: Inequality among Students
- schools reduce learning gaps along socioeconomic lines
- gaps widen in summer when students are not in school
- progressive institutions that offer opportunities for all youth, limited in their power to eliminate inequalities
SELECTION: Inequality among Students
- Affluent children more advantages + fare better in school •More ppl in uni making more than 50,000
- Less aboriginals
- Students from families with no portsecondary only ¼ of them go to uni
- More immigrants going to uni
Process of Reproducing Inequality: Contribution of Symbolic Interactionism
- Hidden curriculum: messages already been communicated to you
- Pedigodigal violence: clash betw values, message, expectations of school + home, imposing of particular set of norms
Process of Reproducing Inequality: Contribution of Symbolic Interactionism
- teaches obedience to authority + conformity to cultural norms + influences content of classroom lessons
- Staying in school requires accepting terms of the hidden curriculum
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
expectation that helps to cause what it predicts
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
teachers may suspect disadvantaged students + minority intellectually inferior
•Treat + give more attention to good students which have high impact
•Impact on grade, achievement + attainment
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
students may come to feel rejected by teachers, other classmates + curriculum
minority disadvantaged by overt racism + discrimination
HOW SCHOOLS CONNECT TO SOCIETY
- selection: broader patterns of social inequality
- socialization
- social organization: affect how we learn + define types of occupations
- Gives us particular skills, makes us interested in fields, trains us
Elementary School Enrolments per 1000 Children Aged 5–14 for Various Countries, 1870–1930
- gov made education priority
- 50 year course
- some countries started late
- some started a lot
Canadian Numbers
- Canada has over 16 000 elementary and secondary schools employing nearly 276 000 teachers, who educate 5.3 million children and have an enrolment rate of about 95%.
- In 2008–9, university enrolment stood at 1.11 million.
- 49% of people between the ages of 25 and 64 have a college or university degree (highest in the world).
- education system, opportunities, result on the whole does very well
Mass Schooling and National Wealth
- investment in education is important step in achieving national wealth
- Expensive: Education not only source of wealth; also product of wealth
- Accelerates development of country
- Spread of tech
- Increases efficiency
Conflict Perspective
• Most sociologists find conflict perspective on education more credible than functionalist one
In their view, benefits of education are unequally distributed and tend to favor reproduction of existing stratification system
Conflict Perspective
ensuring children will continue in class similar to parents
•Important mechanism for social mobility
•Ability to go up ladder is not equally distributed
•Strong correlation betw educational background of parents + children
•Meritocracy not possible
Sponsored mobility
- Selects few youth early in their lives to enter elite universities
- highly structured streaming to restrict access to higher education
Contest mobility
- educational competition groups bulk of youth into same school, expose same curriculum, relatively large numbers directed to higher education (found in Canada)
- Promotes more competition within a unitary structure
SELECTION: Inequality among Students
- Educational attainment for youth from all class backgrounds has steadily risen over past half century
- Yet student success is consistently related to socioeconomic background
SELECTION: Inequality among Students
- More women than men now attend university + have surpassed men on most measures of education attainment
- young members of visible minorities exceed young whites in attainment of university degrees
Rates of Participation in Postsecondary Education by Highest Level of Parental Education
for Canadians Ages 24–26, 2007
- Parental stronger relationship than class/race
- Something about that family has been there
- Some of those skills/knowledge passed on outside confines of school
Cultural Capital
Bourdieu: education central to creation + transmission of cultural capital—learning + skills that ensure superior positions in productive activity
Cultural capital is scarce, valuable, expensive + difficult to acquire
Cultural Capital
involves discipline/pedagogic violence—teachers punish to discourage deviation from the dominant culture
•If messages, priorites, values aligned at home, with friends, at school then more likely to do well
Credentialism and Professionalization
Education means of social exclusion—setting up boundary so that certain social opportunities + positions are restricted to members of one group
Credentialism and Professionalization
enhanced by credential inflation: takes increasingly more certificates/degrees to qualify for a particular job
Credentialism and Professionalization
professionalization: members of occupation insist ppl earn certain credentials to enter occupation
Sociology of Education
- Lots of reforms in educational field
- Always striving for diff outcome
- Alternative forms, decentralized, progressive forms of learning
- Boys drop out more
Flynn effect
average IQ increase over time on every major test, in every age range + in every industrialized country
