Marxist View

Question 1

What Marxist Sociologists talk about education?

Answer 1

Althusser
Bowles and Gintis
Willis

Question 2

What is the basic Marxist view of society and class division? What is the function of education in this?

Answer 2

Bourgeoisie own means of production. The Proletariat work for them and are exploited.
Education system functions to prevent revolution and maintain capitalism.

Question 3

What two states does Althusser talk about which serve to keep the bourgeoisie in power?

Answer 3

The Repressive State Apparatus (RSA)

The Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)

Question 4

How does the Repressive State Apparatus serve to keep the bourgeoisie in power?

Answer 4

Maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie by force or the threat of it. The RSAs include the police, courts and army. When necessary, they use physical force to repress the WC.

Question 5

How does the Ideological State Apparatus serve to keep the bourgeoisie in power?

Answer 5

Maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie by controlling people’s ideas, values and beliefs. The ISAs include religion, the mass media and the education system.

Question 6

What 2 important functions does Althusser argue the education system performs?

Answer 6

• Education reproduces class inequality by transmitting it from one generation to the next, by failing each successive generation of WC pupils in turn.
• Education legitimates class inequality by producing ideologies that disguise its true cause. The function of ideology is to persuade workers to accept that inequality is inevitable and that they deserve their subordinate position so they are less likely to challenge capitalism.

Question 7

What do Bowles and Gintis argue the role of the education system is in capitalist society?

Answer 7

To reproduce an obedient workforce that will accept inequality as inevitable.

Question 8

Describe Bowles and Gintis’ findings

Answer 8

From their study of 237 New York high school students and other studies, they concluded that schools reward traits that make for a submissive, compliant worker.

E.g. students who showed independence and creativity tended to get lower grades while those who showed characteristics linked to obedience and discipline tended to gain high grades.

Question 9

What is the correspondence principle?

Answer 9

The school mirrors the workplace.

Question 10

Give examples of how school mirrors the workplace

Answer 10

• schools and workplaces are hierarchies (headteachers and bosses)
• competition among one another (students for top grades and colleagues for promotions and pay rise)
• uniform

Question 11

How do Bowles and Gintis claim the correspondence principle operates?

Answer 11

Through the hidden curriculum

Question 12

What is the hidden curriculum?

Answer 12

Lessons that are learnt in school without being directly taught

Question 13

Why do Bowles and Gintis claim that meritocracy is a myth?

Answer 13

Evidence shows the main factor in determining whether someone has high income is family and class background, not academic achievement.

Question 14

What is the difference between Bowles+Gintis and Willis?

Answer 14

Whereas B+G see education as a fairly straightforward process of indoctrination into the myth of meritocracy, Paul Willis’ study shows that WC pupils can resist such attempts to indoctrinate them.

Question 15

What methods did Willis use?

Answer 15

Overt Participant observation

Unstructured interview

Question 16

Who did Willis study?

Answer 16

A group of 12 working class boys as they made their transition from school to work

Question 17

What did Willis call the boys?

Answer 17

The lads

Question 18

What did Willis find?

Answer 18

• The boys opposed school values
• they took the piss out the girls and the ear’oles (conformist boys)
• they found school boring and meaningless
• smoking and drinking
• disrupted classes
• turned up to lessons late

Question 19

What did Willis compare this anti-school counterculture to?

Answer 19

THE SHOPFLOOR CULTURE OF MALE MANUAL WORKERS

• both cultures see manual work as inferior
• the lads identify strongly with manual work and this explains why they see themselves as superior to the girls and ear’oles who don’t do manual work.

Question 20

Why did the lads counter-culture of resistance help them slot into low paid, low status jobs?

Answer 20

• their rebellion means they won’t get qualifications which leads to them having low-skilled jobs
• they don’t expect satisfaction from work and are good at finding diversions to cope with the tedium of unskilled labour.

Question 21

For Willis, why is this ironic?

Answer 21

By resisting the school’s ideology, they are destined for unskilled work that capitalism needs someone to perform.

Question 22

How can B+G and Willis criticise each other?

Answer 22

B+G take deterministic view = they assume that pupils have no free will and passively accept indoctrination, this approach fails to explain why pupils ever reject the school’s values

Willis rejects the view that school simply ‘brainwashes’ pupils into passively accepting their fate - by combining Marxist and Interactionist approaches, he shows how pupils may resist the school and yet how this still leads them into WC jobs.

Question 23

How is Willis criticised?

Answer 23

Critics argue that his account of ‘the lads’ romanticises them, portraying them as WC heroes despite their anti-social behaviour and their sexist attitudes.

Also, his study was small (12 boys) so is unlikely to be representative of other pupils’ findings = cant be generalised.

Question 24

How do critical modernists criticise the Marxist view?

Answer 24

Criticise Marxists for taking a 'class first' approach that sees class as the key inequality and ignores all other kinds.
Instead, they argue society is now much more diverse. There are non-class inequalities e.g. ethnicity, gender and sexuality. They argue that sociologists must explain how education reproduces and legitimates all forms of inequality, not just class, and how the different forms of inequality are inter-related.

Question 25

How does Madeline Macdonald criticise B+G?

Answer 25

For ignoring the fact that schools reproduce not only capitalism, but patriarchy too.