Role Of Education Flashcards
F According to Durkeim (1903), what are the main functions of education?
To encourage solidarity solidarity - Schools bring pupils together in a sense of community, providing them with a role to play and a sense of cooperation with others.
Education is society in miniature - it imitates the ways in which adults engage with one another in the wider world of work and social interaction. Education transmits society’s culture to young people too. It does this through the subjects that children study, encouraging them to feel a sense of pride in their country which further heightens the feeling of being a part of a community.
F According to Durkeim (1903), education is an essential institution for helping to maintain the economy, what is meant by this?
Specialised division of labour - There are different roles to play in the economy, with different levels of skill and expertise required depending on the job. A key role of education is to provide young people with the skills that they require in order to progress into future job roles. Different subjects will provide young people with different forms of knowledge or strategies for working and learning, which can then be transferred into the workplace. For example, essay-based subjects such as English and sociology encourage the development of comprehensive and literacy skills, whereas practical subjects such as science and technology encourage the development of more hands-on skills.
F What does Parsons (1961) argue about education playing an important role in socialising young people after their early years of primary socialisation in the family?
School as an essential institution which bridges the gap between family life and the real world. He points out that within the family unit, children are judged by the particularistic standards of their family unit. What his means is that parents set their own rules and expectations of their children, but this will ultimately vary from family to family. By contrast, schools judge children in a more universalistic way. This refers to the idea that, in a school, all children are expected to follow the same rules and work towards the same goals. In schools, this sense of competition is seen through the exams system, in which children have to work to achieve qualifications and secure a future for themselves in the job market. This is vastly different from the family unit, in which a child’s status is ascribed and they will likely be valued regardless of how successful they are. Education provides children with their first taste of meritocracy, which in turn prepares people for the meritocratic principles which are practiced in wider society. By this, he means that all children in school are afforded the same opportunities, and how successful they are will be determined by a combination of intelligence and work ethic.
F What do Davis & Moore (1945) regard the main function of education as?
Davis and Moore (1945) Regard to main role of education is to allocate people roles within the wider economy. They regard inequality as necessary, as everyone needs to play different roles in order for the economy to function. They say that education helps to sift and sort pupils according to their ability and skill set. For example, some pupils will be more talented in subjects such as maths, whilst others may be more successful in creative subjects such as art. This helps to identify their human capital, or the area in which their skills are richest, which will enable them to pursue careers which are most suitable for their ability. They also agree with Parsons’ view that education is a meritocratic system which provides young people with the same opportunities.
M Althusser (1973) claims that education is a type of ideological state apparatus, what is meant by this?
Education transmits information to young people which gets them to accept the main ideas, or ideologies, of capitalism and to regard it as an adequate system to follow. This then helps to keep the bourgeoisie in power. For example, he would regard the functionalist claim that education is a meritocracy as a myth, which incorrectly makes people think that all schools offer young people the same opportunities.
M What are the 2 main this Althusser (1973) proposes that education does as an ISA?
Firstly, it helps to actively reproduce class inequalities in society. This can be seen by the fact that, year-on-year, pupils from working-class, disadvantaged backgrounds such as those on free school meals, vastly underperform at GCSE compared to their more privileged, middle-class peers. This comes about as a consequence of other issues within the school system, such as teachers having lower expectations of working class pupils. Secondly, the education system also justifies the ongoing existence of class inequalities in society. For example, it promotes the view that the reason working- class pupils do less well in education is down to them having a poorer work ethic than middle-class children, or their parents not being as interested in their schooling. By placing the blame on the culture of the working classes, this helps to distract from the structural causes of class inequalities (i.e. the capitalist system), thus helping to maintain the power of the bourgeoisie.
M Bowles & Gintis (1976) view the main role of education is to mirror the work place. How do they claim education does this?
They use the term correspondence principle to describe the idea that schools mirror the world of work in a number of different ways. For example, schools are structured in a hierarchical way, with senior leaders possessing the most power and authority whilst pupils are at the bottom of the hierarchy with no real power or influence. Furthermore, schools have complete control of the structure and daily routines which pupils have to follow, which replicates the control that employers will have over their workers’ pay and conditions. They also argue that, in addition to teaching pupils an academic curriculum, schools teach pupils a hidden curriculum of subliminal messages which they will process and internalise before eventually taking them into the workplace as adults. For example, children learn to passively accept authority, to not challenge rules and routines, and that they must compete with others for status and rewards.
M What is Bowles and Gintis argument that directly contradicts the views of the functionalist Parsons?
Like Althusser in his theory of education as an ISA, they argue that education encourages people to believe in the myth of meritocracy. They claim that people are wrongly led to believe that the education system is fair, so any inequalities between the classes in terms of success can be justified by attributing the blame to working class pupils themselves. However, in reality it is the school system which is to blame for the class divide in exam results. Bowles and Gintis propose that the education system deliberately encourages working class pupils to lower their aspirations, whilst pushing those of a middle class background to be successful. Furthermore, it champions the view that middle-class pupils are successful because they are harder working, more naturally intelligent and therefore more deserving of high achievements. As a result, working-class pupils who experience disadvantage in the school system are left feeling like it is their own fault because they aren’t intelligent or driven enough.
M What is Willis (1977) view of education?
Whereas Bowles and Gintis suggest that young people are indoctrinated into following rules which make them obedient workers, Willis believes that many working class young people actively reject the rules of school, creating an alternative counter-culture which challenges the system. In his study, Learning to Labour, he conducted a study of the culture created by 12 working-class boys. He observed that the boys were very resistant to the middle-class culture of the school, deliberately engaging in disruptive behaviours such as messing around in lessons, smoking on the school premises and truanting from school. Furthermore, the boys regarded themselves as superior to those pupils of a middle- class background who conformed to the school rules. They would intimidate such pupils, mocking the boys for being effeminate and regarding the girls as subordinate. They generally found school to be boring and did not want to engage in academic work because they had no intention of pursuing further education. However, this rejection of the school system actually benefitted capitalism.
The New Right view of the role of education
The New Right are in many ways similar to functionalists. Both believe that education is largely a meritocratic system which helps to identify and reward the hardest working and most intelligent pupils. They also agree that education is an important tool used to socialise children into the shared values and culture of wider society. However, unlike functionalists, the New Right do not feel that education always achieves these goals. They believe that, in order for education to improve, it needs to advance the application of neoliberal policies stated above, allowing individual schools to have more control over how they operate.
N Chubb and Moe (1990) conducted a US study into the educational achievements of 60,000 pupils from low income backgrounds, some of whom were studying in state run schools and some who were in private schools. What did they find?
Their findings demonstrated that children at private schools performed better on average than those attending state schools. Chubb and Moe concluded that children at private schools get a better quality education because they are treated like consumers – the schools offers them a good service in exchange for hard cash. the New Right believe that educational policies need to be tailored around a neoliberal system known as marketisation. Marketisation has been a feature of British education since 1988 and will be discussed in more detail in the final topic of the module. This is the idea that schools should operate like an economic market, where they have to compete for the “custom” of parents and pupils. Rather than doing this through a voucher system, in the British system parents can “shop around” different schools and pick their preferred school for their child. Usually parents will base their decisions on things such as the school’s exam result history and inspection data. Schools are then encouraged to try and recruit more pupils because, the more popular they are, the more funding they get from the government.
