MARXISM

Question 1

Which Marxists sociologists impose theories of Education?

Answer 1

1) Louis Althusser
2) Bowles & Guintes
3) Paul Willis

Question 2

What does Louis Althusser say that the state consist f 2 ‘apparatuses’, both of which to keep the bourgeoisie in power. What are they?

Answer 2

1) The Repressive state apparatuses (RSAs): state agencies that use coercion (force or threat) to maintain order. (e.g. police, secret police, military, judiciary)
2) Ideological State apparatus (LSA): Agencies or social structures that transmit the benefits, values and ideology of the elite and ruling class.(e.g. education, mass media, religion)

Question 3

What are the 2 functions which Althusser argues that the education system performs?

Answer 3

1) Education reproduces class inequality: It replicates the class structure each generation. Working class students are failed by the system and remain working class.
2) Education legitimates class inequality: It justifies the inequalities between rich and poor people. If you do’t get good qualifications, you don’t get a good job, so you deserve to be poor.

Question 4

What is the name of the principle which means ‘schools mirror the workplace’?

Answer 4

The correspondence Principle

Question 5

Which marxist suggests that the school mirror the workplace?

Answer 5

Bowles and Guintes (USA)

Question 6

How does the education system carry out the correspondence principle and hidden curriculum according to Bowles and Gintis?

Answer 6

School and work are very similar with hierarchies and obedient students. School takes place in the long shadow of work and the correspondence principle operates through the hidden curriculum to prepare children for their role of being exploited.

Question 7

How does schools mirror the workplace according to Bowles and Gintis?

Answer 7

1) They both have power hierarchies
2) They both offer extrinsic rewards for work
3) They both make people feel powerless and alienated as they have little control over what they are required to do everyday.
4) They both encourage competition between the pole within the structure.

Question 8

What does the correspondence principle operate through? And what is the meaning of it?

Answer 8

Hidden Curriculum:
These are unspoken values transmitted through textbooks, subject content, teachers and the institution of education. These values include ideas about:
-Gender
-Power and authority
-Ethnicity and race
-Coping with boredom

Question 9

What are the values and ideas taught through the Hidden curriculum?

Answer 9

• Obey authority
• The world is unfair get over it
• Gender:there are different rules for boys and girls
• Some people win, some people lose
• Hierarchy is normal-someone has power over you
• Coping with boredom

Question 10

What is the myth of meritocracy?

Answer 10

Education is a myth making machine:
1)Evidence shows the main factor is a determining whether someone has a high income is class and family background- not education.

2)Education justifies class inequality by making people believe they are poor because they failed in schools, not because they have been failed by schools.

Question 11

What are the criticism towards the Correspondence Principle?

Answer 11

1)Postmodernists criticise the correspondence principle on the grounds that today’s post-Fordist economy recquires schools to produce a very different kind of labour forces from the one described by marxists. Post Modernist argue that education now reproduces diversity, not inequality.

Question 12

Give a criticism towards Bowles and Guintes?

Answer 12

Bowles and Gintis take a deterministic view. That is, they assume that pupils have no free will and passively accept indoctrination. This approach fails to explain why many pupils reject the school values.

Question 13

What does Paul Willis reject about what other marxists say about students?

Answer 13

Most marxists see students as passive actors in the education system. Paul Willis did not. He used interactionists methods to discover the meaning students gave to their relationships in school.

Question 14

What was Paul Willis’s methodology?

Answer 14

• He focused on 12 working class ‘lads’
• He used overt participant observation. He taught lesson, observed lessons and ran football matches.
• He also used unstructured group interviews.

Question 15

What were Paul Willis’s findings?

Answer 15

• The 12 lads rejected school value and resisted them by breaking schools rules (drinking, traunting, disrupting lessons)
• They made fun of girls and academically successful boys, who they saw as effeminate.
• They perceive themselves as superior to and more masculines than academically successful boys.
• By inverting school values, they creeped an anti-school/subculture and their own response to school set up the lads up for academic failure, as school led them to expect no job satifsfaction at work and skilled them at coping with boredom in the meaningless factory floor jobs, they would take as adults.

Question 16

Give a criticism to Paul Willis’s study?

Answer 16

Feminism Angela Mcrobbie notes that Paul Willis’ study largely ignore women and girls. Many sociologists that as interesting as hi study is Willis’ work looks at only 12 boys which is a very small sample and so is not representative.