Education Flashcards
Functionalists: Durkheim:
Socialisation: importance for development of morality. Sense of achievement and pride necessary for maintaining social solidarity. A lack of development in these areas may lead to anomie.
Functionalists: Parsons:
Education provides a value consensus. Child develops a meritocratic view.
Skills provision: education responds to societal needs, teaching general and occupational skills.
Greater division of labour needs more education.
More wealth from greater educational training.
Functionalists: Davis and Moore.
Role allocation: examinations and qualifications allocate individuals to the best suited job for their skill set.
Exams encourage competition.
Functionalists: Evaluation.
Ignores negative aspects of educational system.
Views may not fit multicultural societies.
Not all pupils conform to the school system.
Questionable as to whether British pupils leave school with the necessary skill requirements.
New Right: Chubb and Moe.
Pupils from low income families do 5% better in private schools, state education is not meritocratic.
Does not create equal opportunity, non-responsive to pupil’s needs.
Private schools deliver higher quality education as they have to answer to parents.
Marxism: Overview.
The wealthy own the means of production, allowing them to dominate and control the superstructure.
Education: reproduces inequalities of the capitalist system.
Legitimised inequalities through myth of meritocracy.
Marxism: Althusser.
Education is an ideological state apparatus, reproducing class inequalities. Transmits ruling class values. Encouraged to accept without question. RSAs maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie through force or the threat of it.
Marxism: Bowles and Gintis.
Correspondence Theory: capitalism require a hardworking, docile, obedient workforce.
Education delivers a hidden curriculum to achieve this.
Conformist pupils achieve higher grades.
Students accept a hierarchy, little control over the system, both work for a reward.
Marxism: Willis.
Hidden curriculum is not always accepted. Teachers can reject capitalist ideology. Lads counter culture: saw themselves as superior to teachers and conformist pupils. Not interested in gaining qualifications. Went to school to have a laugh. Anti school culture: sexist and racist. Valued traditional working class masculinity. Manual work is more valuable. Reproduced class inequalities.
Marxism: Evaluation.
More competition between schools, emphasis on vocational qualifications.
Exaggerate negative effects of education.
Ethnicity: Official statistics.
Highest pay: Chinese.
African Caribbean pupils achieve less, even when class is taken into account.
Black Caribbean boys are more likely to be excluded and in bottom sets.
Children entitled to free school meals do worse on average.
Mohood: immigrants are more mobile, have higher skills and higher cultural capital.
Ethnicity: Ethnic Differences.
Sutton Trust: differences may be due to improvement in urban schools, cultural attitudes, targeted funding.
Bereiter and Engelmann: language of black American families is disjointed and ungrammatical. Children unable to explain abstract ideas.
Evans: brutal street culture in white working class areas results in a strong pressure to reject education.
Lupton: poorer levels of behaviour and discipline in white working class schools. Lower parental support.
Basit: completed interviews and focus group with Asian families, all generations place a great value on education, saw free education as a blessing.
Jasper: racism in the wider society explains black underachievement. Institutional racism: economic exclusion, increases in poverty and unemployment, growing racism in the criminal justice system, low teacher expectations, low motivation, demonisation of black children.
Ethnicity: Evaluation.
Sewell: children are undermined by poor parenting, peer pressure and a lack of responsibility for their own behaviour. They did not do their homework or pay attention in lessons and they were disrespectful to their teachers.
Brought up in a single parent family, lack a male role model, drawn to gangs.
Sewell is criticised for blaming black underachievement on individuals rather than on inequalities and inadequacies in the system.
Material deprivation is not the primary factor for underachievement. Low earning ethnic families encourage and support their children.
Ethnicity: Internal Factors.
Strand: 3 White-British : 2 African-Caribbean entered for higher tier papers.
Gillborn and Youdell: educational differences due to institutional differences. Teachers interpret policies in a way that disadvantages black students.
Marketisation of education means schools are driven to ensure students achieve C grades or above. High achievers and no hopers are neglected. Black students are disproportionately judged to be in the ‘no hoper’ position. Chinese and Indian students are model minority groups. African-Caribbean students likely to have appearance and speech labelled as a challenge to teacher’s authority.
Sewell: subcultures form in response to treatment:
rebellion, retreatist, innovators.
Mirza: some teachers treated all pupils equally but failed to challenge racism. Some had lower expectations of black pupils. Some were overtly racist.
Fuller: some students can react positively to labels. Group of black girls motivated to work harder and achieve high grades.
Coard: ethnocentric curriculum: British history portrays other cultures as primitive. Lowers self-esteem.
Moore and Davenport: ethnic segregation through marketisation.
Archer: ideal pupil - white, middle class, male, heterosexual, natural ability and intuition.
pathologised pupil - Asian, deserving poor, female, asexual or repressed sexuality, conformist, overachiever.
demonised pupil - black, working class, hypersexual, unintelligent, peer-led, culturally deprived, underachiever.
Ethnicity: Multicultural Education.
Assimilation policies: some minority underachievement lies in poverty and racism.
Multiculturalism education policies: promotes achievements of minority ethnic groups by valuing all cultures.
Mirza: no genuine change in policies, focus on culture, behaviour and the home rather than poverty and racism.
African-Caribbean supplementary schools. Thriving black community, social capital.
Pearce: multiculturalism undermines British way of life.
Parekh: used to keep ethnic minorities quiet.
Gilroy and Mohood: only focuses on black and white.
The Macdonald Report: blamed anti-racist policy for alienation of white working class.
Sewell: underachievement of black boys: lack of legitimate opportunities, poverty, single mother households, cultural deprivation, anti-school peer pressure, poor schools, low expectations, lack of self-belief.
