Marxist Role of education

• The role of education is to reproduce social class inequality
• Education has 3 functions

  • Reproduces class inequality
  • Legitimates class inequality
  • Works in the favour of capitalist employers
• It reproduces class inequality - middle class children are more likely to succeed in school and go onto middle class jobs than working class children
• it legitimates class inequality - through the "myth of meritocracy"
• It works in the interest of capitalist employers - by socialising children to accept authority, hierarchy and wage-labour.
• Reproduction of class inequality

  Class inequalities are carried from one generation to the next
• How class inequality is reproduced

  1. Middle class parents use their material and cultural capital to ensure their children get into the best schools and the top sets

  2. Middle class pupils tend to get the best education and then go onto to get middle class jobs

  3. Working class children are more likely to get a poorer standard of education and end up in working class jobs
• Legitimation of class inequality

  In reality money determines how good an education you get, but people do not realise this because schools spread the 'myth of meritocracy'
• In school we learn that we all have an equal chance to succeed and that our grades depend on our effort and ability
• If we fail


  We believe it is our own fault
• Myth of meritocracy


  Legitimates or justifies the system because we think it is fair when in reality it is not
• If children grow up believing they have had a fair chance


  They are less likely to rebel and try to change society as part of a Marxist revolutionary movement
• Hidden curriculum


  Those things that pupils learn through the experience of attending school rather than the main curriculum subjects taught at the school
• School values


  Correspond to work values
• School values that correspond to work values

  • Passive subservience of pupils to teachers
  • Acceptance of hierarchy (authority of teachers)
  • Motivation by external rewards (grades not learning)
• Work values that correspond to school values

  • Passive subservience of workers to managers
  • Authority of managers
  • Being motivated by wages not the joy of the job