Role Of Education - Marxist View Flashcards
Althusser’s ISA - explanation and example
Education is the biggest ideological state apparatus and allows the ruling class to control the thoughts of the working class and accept inequality.
Education reproduces class inequality by transmitting it to younger generations and failing w/c pupils. This is done by convincing students they aren’t bright enough (entering pupils into lower tier exams) when really the education system is stacked against them. Thus producing the ideology that inequality is inevitable and a sense of false class consciousness.
Althusser AO3
It lacks empirical evidence and Althusser’s ideas are based upon theory. Not everybody thinks that the purpose of school is to transmit ideologies about the workplace.
Bowles and Gintis’ Correspondence Principle - explanation and example
Education is designed to mirror the workplace through the hidden curriculum. Schools make students wear uniforms, reward hard work, give deadlines and timetables and the school hierarchy introduces children to authority and obedience. This helps children willingly accept their future exploitation as workers.
Bowles and Gintis’ CP AO3
It’s too deterministic to say that education is shaped by the economy. Students aren’t all passive and some do challenge school rules. Student protests in Pimlico Academy show how they don’t just willingly accept teachers’ authority.
Bowles and Gintis’ Myth of Meritocracy - explanation and example
The main factor determining educational success is social class and family income. Education system prevents a proletariat rebellion by disguising this fact and the myth of meritocracy justifies the privileges of the higher classes by making it seem that they gained them through succeeding in open and fair competition at school. This helps persuade the w/c to accept inequality as legitimate and makes it less likely that they will seek to overthrow capitalism.
Bowles and Gintis’ MoM AO3
The achievement gap is small between students on pupil premium and others. It ignores inequality based on gender and ethnicity. Some education actually encourages critical thinking, not passively accepting this theory.
Willis Lads’ Counter Culture - explanation and example
Willis contradicts the idea that students are passive recipients of ideology and by conducting research with a group of working class lads, suggested that not all students conform to education and some resist attempts by the education system to conform to m/c values. Prepare w/c young people for the boredom of manual labour - anti-school subculture,getting excluded, smoking, breaking rules. Working hard is not what is rewarded y this subculture.
Willis’ Lads - AO3
This isn’t representative of all schools and can therefore not be generalised - 12 boys from only 1 school in 1977. Romanticise these boys when in actuality they were very homophobic, racist and sexist.
