Role of Education Flashcards
Durkheim
- Social solidarity - shared beliefs + values are transmitted through the school’s teachings, e.g. history instils shared heritage.
- Specialist knowledge - education teaches individuals skills that they need to play their part in the social division of labour.
Parsons
Bridge - link between family + wider society, allowing students to move from ascribed + particularistic values to universalistic + meritocratic ones - equal opportunity to achieve, based on ability + effort.
Davis + Moore
Role allocation - inequality is necessary to ensure that the most important roles are filled by the most talented people - not everyone is equally talented, so society offers higher rewards for these jobs.
Schultz
Human capital - education ensures that people are properly trained for the workplace - the most qualified end up in jobs that require the most skills.
Functionalist Criticisms
- Bowles + Gintis: myth of meritocracy - private education.
- Wong: see children as passive puppets of socialisation.
- Feminists: education maintains + reinforces patriarchy, not meritocracy.
- Weak link between educational achievement + economic success.
Functionalism + New Right
- Meritocratic principles.
- Preparing young people for work
- Education should socialise pupils into shared values.
New Right
- Marketisation - education system run on open competition empowers consumers + increases schools’ ability to meet the needs of the pupils + parents.
- OFSTED inspections + league tables on exam results so parents can make an informed decision.
- Schools transmit a shared culture, e.g. National Curriculum guarantees schools socialise pupils into a single cultural heritage.
Chubb + Moe
- Consumer choice - private schools deliver quality education as they are answerable to paying parents: students from low-income families perform 5% better in private than state.
- Market system where parents shape schools to meet their own needs, improving the quality + efficiency of schools.
New Right Criticisms
- Ball: m/c have cultural + economic capital that is more desirable.
- Low educational standards due to inadequate funding.
- Marxism: schools impose r/c values.
- Contradiction between parental choice + national curriculum.
Althusser
- Ideological state apparatus - maintains the rule of the bourgeoisie by controlling people’s beliefs, values + beliefs.
- Transmits + legitimises class inequality through generations - subordination as inevitable / deserve their subordinate position.
Bowles + Gintis
- Correspondence principle - school mirrors the world of work, e.g. uniform; hierarchy; obedience.
- Hidden curriculum - schools discriminate in favour of the m/c.
- Myth of meritocracy - meritocracy serves to justify the privileges of the h/c, making it seem as they gained them through success + fair competition.
Willis (Interactionism + Marxism)
- W/c pupils resist attempts to indoctrinate them - shows how pupils that resist school still leads them into w/c jobs.
- Participant observation + unstructured interviews on ‘lads’ - flouted rules as a way of resisting school (anti-school subculture).
- Acts of rebellion guarantees that they end up in unskilled jobs / labour.
Marxist Criticisms
- Postmodernists: education produces diversity, not inequality.
- Giroux (NM): assumes w/c passively accept their position.
- Morrow + Torres: ‘class first’ approach - see class as the key inequality, ignoring all other kinds.
- MacDonald (MF): schools reproduce capitalism + the patriarchy too.
- McRobbie: females are largely absent from Willis’ study.
- Connolly: education produces both ethnic + gender inequalities.
