Marxist view

• 2 classes

  Bourgoisie - minority capital class

  Proletariat - majority working class

  Althusser (1971) the bourgioisie exploit the proletariat and profit from their labour
• Willis - learning to labour

  • neo marxist
  • w-class pupils develop counter culture opposed to the values the school pushed
  • used participant observation
  • 'lads' felt superior to conformist students
  • avoid doing work by 'having a laff'
  • rebellion led them to unskilled jobs
• correspondence principle 


  Bowles and Gintis

  • There is a link between the interactions and values expected by schools and those within the workplace
  • this operates within schools through hidden curriculum
  • e.g hierarchy within school, rewards and sanctions
• myth of meritocracy


  Bowles and Gintis

  • capitalists society promotes the myth that everyone has an equal opportunity to achieve, as this is not true
  • some lower class pupils will not have as much cultural capital, causing opportunities to be unequal
• 2 state apparatuses

  Althusser

  • Repressive state apparatus - state maintains the rule of bourgoisie by force or threat of it e.g police, army
  • Idealogical state apparatus - maintain rule through control of peoples ideas and beliefs e.g religion, mass media
• Education reproduces class inequality

  by transmitting it from generation to generation
• Education legitimises class inequality

  by producing ideologies that disguise its true cause

  this ideology persuades workers to believe this inequality is inevitable - false class consciousness
• Evaluation of marxism

  • Postmodernists criticise B+G correspondence principle as it is outdated - different workforce today
  • Deterministic view
  • Morrow and Torres criticise because they take a class first approach and ignore ethnicity and gender