Marxism Flashcards
Marxism on education
- The main role of education is to produce an efficient, submissive, obedient workforce to help maintain the unequal capitalist society.
- Education is a tool that controls the working class.
It serves to legitimate these inequalities through the myth of meritocracy.
Louis Althusser (1970)
Ideological Control
Althusser Overview
- if the proletariat is a victim of capitalism, why do they not challenge and unite against it as Marx suggested? IDEOLOGICAL CONTROL .
- capitalists influence our values through ideological state apparatuses (ISAs).
- education system manipulates our thinking to make us believe that it is vital to obey a set of rules established by one’s superiors and that success and failure are a fair representation of aptitude and effort
What happens if Ideological State Apparatuses fail?
There are repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) that utilise force to maintain the bourgeoisie’s dominance (or the threat of it).
Examples of ISAs
Religion
The media
Education system
Examples of RSAs
The police
Judiciary
Army
Althusser evaluation
This theory has the semblance of a conspiracy. Assuming that teachers nowadays are consciously backing the bourgeoisie and repressing students – despite the fact that many of them have backgrounds in sociology and want their students to succeed. It’s tough to accept that working-class students are being deliberately made more docile. This hypothesis appears to ignore the fact that teachers devote their careers to assisting students of all backgrounds to succeed.
Bowels & Gintis (1977)
The Correspondence Principle + Hidden Curriculum
Bowels & Gintis
- Labour power is needed in a capitalist system thus the purpose of the education system is to prepare students for work.
- education system reproduces an obedient workforce that will accept inequality as inevitable.
- Creates exploited workers willing to accept hard work, low pay and orders from above.
What is the Hidden Curriculum?
- the unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended lessons, values, and perspectives that students learn in school
- prepares working-class pupils for their role as the exploited workers of the future, perpetuating class inequality from generation to generation.
Examples of the Hidden Curriculum
- respecting authority.
- respect for other pupils’ opinions.
- punctuality.
- aspiring to achieve.
- having a ‘work ethic’
Paul Willis’ (1977)
Learning to Labour
Paul Willis Overview
- working-class pupils can resist such attempts to indoctrinate them.
- combines Marxism with an interactionist approach
- focuses on the ‘meanings’ pupils give to their situation and how these enable them to resist indoctrination.
- Willis observed counter-school culture of ‘the lads‘ in class.
What did Willis find when studying ‘the lads’?
- The ‘lads’ resisted education and became accustomed to boredom and finding ways to amuse themselves in class.
- This act of rebellion ensured that they left school unskilled and ended up with unskilled jobs.
- school life had given them lots of practice in being bored and the tedium of work. They had ‘learned to labour’-the most important lesson of all
Paul Willis Evaluation
- Critics have tried to argue that the fact he was obviously a researcher, and an adult, may have meant the lads played up,
- he counters this by saying that no one can put on act for 2 years, at some point you have to relax and be yourself.
- Validity is regarded as being excellent because of the unstructured, open ended nature of the research allowing Willis to sensitively push the lads into giving in-depth explanations of their world view.
