Role of education

• F: Social solidarity - Durkheim

  • Education system transmitting society's cultures from one generation to the next
  • Teaching of a country's history instils in children a sense of a shared heritage and a commitment to the wider social group
  • School also acts as a 'society in miniature', for example having to work with people who are neither family or friends
• F: Specialist skills - Durkheim

  • Education teaches individuals the specialist knowledge and skills that kids need to play their part in the social division of labour
  • Cooperation of different specialists in the division of labour promotes social solidarity
• F: Meritocracy - Parsons

  • School prepares us to move from the family to wider society because school and society are both based on meritocratic principles
  • Both school and wider society judge us all by the same universalistic and impersonal standards
  • Both in school and wider society, a person's status is largely achieved, not ascribed
• F: Role allocation - Davis & Moore

  • By assessing individuals' abilities, schools help to match them to the job they are best suited to
  • Inequality is necessary to ensure that the most important roles in society are filed by the most talented people
  • Blau & Duncan: modern economy depends for its prosperity on using human capital (workers skill) and a meritocracy system does this best
  • Criticism: Tumin criticises the fact that it is a circular system
• Functionalism - Criticism

  • Wrong: they wrongly imply that pupils passively accept all they are taught and never reject the schools values
  • Neolibs & New Right: system fails to prepare young people adequately for work
  • The education system does not teach specialist skills adequately
• The New Right - consumer choice (Chubb and Moe)

  State-run education has failed because:

  • Not equal
  • Pupils lack skills to help the economy
  • Private schools are better because they are answerable to consumers not the state
  • They want a market system as it would allow consumers to shape schools to meet their own needs and would improve quality and efficiency
• The New Right - 2 roles for the state

  • Believes the state imposes a framework on schools within which they have to compete
  • Believes the state ensures that schools transmit a shared culture, socialising pupils into a shared heritage
  • They are in support of education affirming the national identity by focusing curriculum on British success
• The New Right - Criticisms

  • Gewirtz & Ball: competition between schools only benefits the M/C, as the W/C cannot afford to be picky
  • The real cause of low educational standards is not state control but social inequality
  • Contradiction between supporting parental choice and supporting state supplied national curriculum
  • Marxists: national curriculum only shares the elite's culture, not a united national culture
• M: Ideological state apparatus - Althusser

  • ISA maintains the rule of bourgeoise by controlling people's ideas, values and beliefs
  • Education reproduces class inequality by transmitting it from generation to generation
  • Education justifies class inequality by producing ideologies that disguise its true cause, like teaching kids to be subordinative
• M: Capitalist America - Bowles & Gintis

  • Education reproduces an obedient workforce that will accept inequality as inevitable
  • Schools reward precisely the kind of personality traits that make for a submissive worker, creativity gained lower grades and characteristics like obedience and discipline gained high grades
  • Criticism: MacDonald notes that they ignore that it also reproduces patriarchy, not just capitalism
• M: Correspondence principle & Hidden curriculum

  Bowles & Gintis

  • TCP: the relationships and structures found in school mirror those of work
  • THC: lessons kids learn that aren't directly part of lessons, pupils become accustomed and to hierarchy and competition
  • Cohen: youth training schemes serve capitalism by teaching young workers subordinative values
• M: Myth of meritocracy

  Bowles & Gintis

  • The education system prevents class rebellion by producing ideologies that serve to explain and justify why inequality is fair
  • Evidence shows that the main factor determining whether or not someone has a high income, is their family and class
  • Idea of meritocracy disguises this, making WC pupils feel it is themselves who are the reason for a lack of achievement, not the system, preventing a hatred for the elite
• M: Lad's counter culture - Willis

  • W/C pupils can resist attempts to indoctrinate them
  • Studied 12 W/C boys and found they are scornful to conformists
  • They reject school values with smoking, drinking, disrupting and playing truant
  • Criticism: research also disproves his point, as the rejection of school ensured that the W/C boys would end up in low paid jobs, serving capitalism