Key Theorists Flashcards
Emile Durkheim
Functionalist
Believed that education is the bridge between family and wider society.
Schools should condition children to think in terms of meritocratic achievement - work hard for your successes.
Education leads to value consensus: a general agreement about basic values in society.
Talcott Parsons
Functionalist
He said school functions as one of the institutions that meet the needs of society.
Schools should emphasise the moral responsibilities that members of society should have towards each other.
A shared identity is crucial to social harmony so, for example, subjects like History should help develop a loyalty towards ones own society.
Davis & Moore
Functionalist
Claimed education serves the purpose of allocating people to the most appropriate job for their talents - role allocation.
Some jobs are more important than others and education helps to identify the best people for these roles - we need to be accepting of that as it for the greater good.
The examination system is useful as it encourages competition and hard work and closely links to a reward system of high pay for jobs with more specialist skills.
Althusser
Marxist
Education is an ideological state apparatus - one that benefits the “haves” and not the “have nots” in society.
The main function of the education system is to legitimise, maintain and reproduce class inequalities in wealth and power.
The education system transmits capitalist (ruling class) values by presenting them to people as common values.
Bourdieu
Marxist
Bourdieu had a specific interest in culture and power. He developed many influential concepts such as cultural reproduction, cultural capital and habitus.
His concepts of cultural capital and habitus have shown ways in which upper and middle class children are given advantages through inherited cultural capital. This may lead working class children to see the success of the higher classes as legitimate; the result of ability rather than class inequality.
The education system tricks the working class into thinking and accepting that their failure and limited social mobility are justified.
The education system values a culture of upper and middle class people and it is this culture that is presented as having greater value and worthy of investment.
Cultural attributes of the working class are rejected by a system defined by the Middle Class - who therefore succeed as a default, not because of their effort.
Bowles & Gintis
Neo Marxist
Education is controlled by Capitalists and serves their interests.
Schooling is used to prepare students to be workers.
A docile, obedient and hardworking workforce is prepared through a hidden curriculum of hidden and informal messages transmitted by the way school is organised.
David Hargreaves
Interactionist
Hargreaves was one of the first to develop an interactionist approach while carrying out research in schools and classrooms; to uncover the processes that shaped the experience of schooling and achievement of students. For example, he and his colleagues studied how teachers labelled students starting secondary school.
Teachers considered a range of factors such as their appearance and behaviour to decide what type of student they were. they then tested this idea and if it seemed to be correct it became a label. This leads to some students being labelled as a deviant so that nothing they do is likely to be seen in a positive light.
Hargreaves also interviewed boys in subcultures and found that being in low streams and being labelled were among the factors that led to the formation of anti-school subcultures.
Giroux
Neo Marxist
The curriculum/hidden curriculum is not always accepted - the traditional Marxist view of passivity is incorrect.
Rebellion / rejection of this system still ends up reproducing class inequality.
Both Functionalism and Marxism exaggerate conformity in education.
Diane Reay
Reay’s research looks at inequalities within schools in Britain, focused on social class but often covering gender and ethnicity as well.
she argues that the school system in the UK fails working class children, they have to work much harder than their middle class peers to succeed. This is due to poorly funded schools, less qualified teachers, high teacher turn over rate and other problems. She criticises her own university (Cambridge) due to their failure to offer more equality of opportunity to wc/ethnic minorities.
Mirza
Mirza’s research has been focused on race, gender and identity in education. She has also explored topics on black feminism, multiculturalism, Islamophobia and related issues.
Her research involved young people at two working class comprehensive schools in South London, using questionnaires, interviews and participant observation.
She argued that there was a myth of black female underachievement. the afro carribbean girls she studied did better than black boys or white students. the girls did not let racism or labelling from some teachers affect their self esteem.
Mirza also studied how African Caribbean mothers set up supplememtary schoolsto resist the racism their children encountered in mainstream schools.
place
Halsey & Floud
Education has the potential to be, but is not automatically, meritocratic.
Comprehensives mean that Middle-Class pupils cannot gain an advantage by going to selective state schools.
Some places in Higher Education can be reserved for students of Working Class background.
place
Chubb & Moe
New Right
State Education is unresponsive to the needs of parents and pupils and therefore has lower standards.
Private education is more dynamic as there is a need to “please customers”.
These ideas have been used to by New-Right minded politicians when justifying the “marketisation” of schools in the UK.
place?
Usher, Bryant, & Johnson
Adult education routes are typical of a postmodern society - where this a blurring of the lines between different areas of life and greater choice and variety.
place
Haralambos & Holborn
There is actually a large degree of centralisation within the education system - best evidenced by the introduction of a National Curriculum in the 1980s.
