THEORIES OF EDUCATION - KEY PEOPLE

Question 1

Durkheim

Answer 1

Two main functions of education:
Teaching specialist skills
Creating social solidarity
He argues that modern economies need skilled, specialist workers. Modern economies are characterised by a division of labour- where people complete one skilled task, rather than doing lots of different things.

Question 2

Miriam David

Answer 2

For example, argues that the national curriculum is specifically white, European and middle-class. She calls this the ethnocentric curriculum.

Question 3

Parsons

Answer 3

Argues that schools are a “focal socialising agent”. It play a key role in fitting children into society (socialising them) that cannot be fulfilled in the family alone. Schools act as a ‘bridge’ between home life and work.
ASCRIBED STATUS: children are not judged against anyone in wider society- their value is just based on their existence, not a comparison.
ACHIEVED STATUS: we are judged against everyone else- the same laws and rules apply
- In the family, children live by particularistic values, that are unique to the family. At school, though, they live by universalistic values that can be applied everywhere.

Parsons also argues that schools perform a second function: selecting and allocating pupils to their future work roles. School matches students to roles that they are suited to, based on their skills and characteristics.

Question 4

Davis and Moore

Answer 4

Davis and Moore call this role allocation.
A key part of Davis and Moore’s theory is that some inequality is necessary. If all jobs were paid the same, there would be no incentive to do harder jobs, or to go through the training to get skilled work. Not everyone is equally talented so society has to offer higher rewards for these jobs. This will encourage everyone to compete for them and society can then select the most talented individuals to fill these positions.

Question 5

Blau and Duncan

Answer 5

Argue that a modern economy depends for its prosperity on using its ‘human capital’ – its workers’ skills. A meritocratic education system does this best, since it enables each person to be allocated to the job best suited to their abilities. This will make most effective use of their talents and maximise their productivity.

Question 6

Louis Althusser

Answer 6

RSAs: Repressive State Apparatus, use physical force to keep a capitalist society.
ISAs: Ideological State Apparatus, control ideas, values and beliefs.

Question 7

Bowles and Gintis

Answer 7

Studied 237 schools in New York City. They found that intelligence was not rewarded; what was rewarded was obedience to authority. In fact, creativity and independence were in fact punished, because those students were more difficult to control.
Correspondence Principle: Almost anything that isn’t important to school work has some ‘correspondence’ to something in the workplace.
Hidden Curriculum: One that teaches key subjects, and one, the ‘hidden curriculum’, that teaches us how to survive in the workforce by teaching us capitalist values.

Question 8

Willis

Answer 8

Unlike Bowles & Gintis, Willis thinks that working class boys deliberately reject academic success. They aren’t just passively absorbing capitalist messages; they are convinced that they will not amount to anything, so they accept that to be the case.
This is an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy, where something that is predicted becomes true because people believe it.