key sociologists

• Emile Durkheim


  Founder of functionalist sociology
• Functions of education identified by Durkheim

  • Creating social solidarity
  • Transmitting specialist skills
• Social solidarity


  Bonds or connections between individuals in a society that keep the society functioning cohesively
• According to Durkheim, individual members must feel to be a part of a single 'body' or community, otherwise social life and cooperation would be impossible
• How education creates social solidarity

  Transmitting society's culture: shared beliefs, values - from 1 generation to the next
• Schools act as 'society in miniature', preparing us for life in wider society, through teaching to cooperate with strangers
• Specialist skills


  Due to modern industrial economies being very complex, with production of single items usually involving the cooperation of many different specialists, specialist knowledge and skills need to be taught in the education system, so people can perform their roles
• Talcott Parsons


  Sees school as the 'focal socialising agency' in modern society, acting as a bridge between the family and wider society
• Universalistic standards


  Standards or rules that apply to everyone
• Particularistic standards


  Standards or rules that only apply to one person/family/group
• Achieved status


  Status achieved through our own efforts
• Ascribed status


  Status based on fixed characteristics that we are born with and cannot normally change
• Davis and Moore


  • Education acts as a device for selection and role allocation
  • Inequality is necessary to ensure most important roles in society are filled by the most talented people
• Role allocation


  Involves 'sifting and sorting' people into the roles that they will go on to perform in life
• Louis Althusser


  • Argued that formal and informal agencies of social control are necessary to maintain capitalism
  • The education system is an important ideological state apparatus that reproduces class inequality and legitimates it
• The education system achieves the aims of the ideological state apparatus through: having a fragmented curriculum, teaching of basic skills, having a curriculum based on ruling class values, teaching the myth of meritocracy, and changes to the curriculum under the Coalition Government
• The education system reproduces class inequality by transmitting it from generation to generation, and legitimates class inequality by producing ideologies that disguise its true cause
• Bowles and Gintis argued that the role of the education system in a capitalist society was to reproduce an obedient workforce that would accept inequality as inevitable
• Correspondence principle


  The idea that the social relationships and values found in the workplace are mirrored in the classroom, thereby preparing working-class students for their future roles as obedient and exploitable workers in capitalist society
• Hidden curriculum


  The values, norms, and beliefs that are transmitted to students through the school's socialisation process, which reinforces the dominant ideology of the capitalist system
• Myth of meritocracy


  The belief that the education system is fair and rewards hard work, when in reality it legitimates class inequalities
• Paul Willis found that working-class pupils can resist attempts by the education system to indoctrinate them
• Pierre Bourdieu


  • The education system favours and transmits the dominant middle-class culture, through cultural reproduction
  • Working-class children are subject to symbolic violence as their culture is devalued
• Cultural capital


  The knowledge, attitudes, values, language, tastes and abilities that the middle class possess, which give them social status and help them navigate within their society
• Habitus


  The norms, values, attitudes and behaviours of a particular social group (or social class)
• The education system acts as cultural reproduction through the language used, the dress sense typically used, and the cultural knowledge taught and learned - all of which is chosen by the middle class
• Chubb and Moe believed an education system controlled by state and local authorities is not the best means of achieving the New Right aim
• Deft habitus


  The capacity of individuals to navigate the constraints and opportunities of their social environments, drawing on their habitus (dispositions) to do so
• Habitus is not simply inherited or imposed but can be actively cultivated and deployed in ways that can help individuals to overcome barriers to social mobility
• Students with higher amounts of cultural capital achieve higher in education
• Evaluations of education


  • Functionalists suggest that education is meritocratic
  • Functionalists argue that pupils are socialised into a value consensus as the skills are needed to achieve
  • Students acquire cultural capital throughout their time in the education system
• Parentocracy


  A situation where parents with more resources and cultural capital are able to use their influence to secure places in the most desirable schools for their children, leaving those without such resources at a disadvantage
• Types of choosers


  • Privileged-skilled choosers
  • Disconnected-local choosers
  • Semi-skilled choosers
• Marketisation of education has created a "parentocracy", whereby parents with more resources and cultural capital are able to use their influence to secure places in the most desirable schools for their children, leaving those without such resources at a disadvantage
• Marketisation reproduces inequality, but also legitimates it by concealing its true causes and by justifying its existence
• Educational Triage


  Schools categorise pupils into those who will achieve anyway, who are hopeless cases, and who are borderline cases who require attention and input to get their 5 Cs at GCSE
• Despite negative labels and low expectations, Black girls from a low-income London neighbourhood were able to achieve academic success by drawing on support from their families, peers, and communities outside of school
• Comparing international tests can lead to policy changes based on 'ill-founded assertions about educational cause and effect, inappropriate transplanting of the policies to which success is attributed, and even the reconfiguring of entire national curricula to respond less to national culture, values and needs than to the dubious claims of "international benchmarking" and "world class" educational standards - the latter equated with test scores in a limited spectrum of human learning'
• PISA Panic


  The linking of PISA and TIMSS results with the state of the British education system, and there being a search for a miracle cure for school improvements
• Examples of PISA Panic


  • National literacy and numeracy strategies
  • Slimming down the National Curriculum to 'essential knowledge'
  • Raising entry requirements for teachers
  • Master Teachers idea used in Singapore