The Functionalist perspective on education

• Functionalist perspective on education


  • Focuses on the positive functions of education - creating social solidarity, teaching core values and work skills, and role allocation/meritocracy
• Education creates social solidarity


  Makes us feel part of something bigger through learning shared subjects like history and English
• Education teaches skills necessary for work


  Individuals learn diverse skills required for the division of labour in a modern economy
• Education teaches core values


  School acts as the 'focal socializing agency', taking over from the family and teaching universal standards rather than particularistic ones
• Education and role allocation/meritocracy


  Education allocates people to appropriate jobs based on their talents and qualifications, ensuring the most able are in the most important roles
• Positive evaluations of the Functionalist view on education
• Criticisms of the Functionalist view of education
• The requirement to teach 'British Values' in schools is unlikely to promote genuine value consensus due to the vagueness and contradictions in the concept
• It is highly unlikely that the requirement on schools to teach British Values is going to promote Value Consensus in any meaningful way
• British Values


  Values that are so general that each of them can be interpreted in many different ways, and they are also full of contradictions
• If there is no value consensus in adult society, schools have roundly failed to foster any sense of value consensus on this issue during the last five decades
• 86.7% of graduates were employed in 2021 compared to 67.2% of non-graduates
• Graduates were three times as likely to be in 'highly skilled' jobs compared to non-graduates, suggesting that going to university successfully sifts most graduates into higher skilled jobs
• There are still around 25% of graduates who end up in lower skilled jobs so clearly the system isn't that effective, and it's also clear that going to university is NOT the only way to secure a higher-skilled job
• A range of quantitative and qualitative evidence which both supports and criticises the Functionalist view of education
• Education Yorkshire: The Case of Musharaf


  • Positive story supporting Functionalist view
• Exclusion statistics suggest that the education system doesn't act as an effective agent of secondary socialisation for every child
• Statistics on persistent absenteeism show that one in nine, or 11% of pupils are routinely absent from school, missing more than 10% of school in any one term
• Employment statistics demonstrate a strong correlation between educational level, employment skill level and income
• Longitudinal studies found that those from more advantaged socio-economic backgrounds and those who attended private schools are more likely to be in the 'top jobs' even with the same qualifications
• Ken Robinson (a Post Modern View)


  • Criticises the contemporary education system and the Functionalist paradigm
• Emile Durkheim


  French sociologist who wrote at the turn of the 20th century
• Durkheim's perspective on education


  • Schools were essential for 'imprinting' shared social values into the minds of children
  • Schools would play a central role in forming modern societies
• Mechanical solidarity


  Face to face solidarity in traditional societies
• Organic solidarity


  More abstract solidarity in modern societies based on interdependence
• Social solidarity


  Sense of belonging to wider society, commitment to society's goals, society more important than individual
• How education transmits shared values


  1. Instilling social solidarity in the individual

  2. Teaching history to link individual to social past and develop commitment to social group
• School rules


  Applied to all children, teaching them to interact on basis of shared rules, school as a society in miniature
• Punishments for rule breaking


  Reflect seriousness of damage to social group, teach self-discipline
• Social sciences can explain rational basis of social rules to children
• Education's role in division of labour


  • Teaching specialised skills required for complex division of labour in industrial societies
  • Enabling social solidarity based on interdependence of specialised skills
• Schools provide 'necessary homogeneity for social survival and necessary diversity for social co-operation'
• Postmodernists' view


  Assumption of need for shared values is flawed as Britain has become more multicultural
• Marxists' view


  School teaches working class kids to be passive, making them easier to exploit
• Liberals' view


  We don't need schools to transmit complex skills, can learn in more decentralised ways
• Particularistic values


  Values within the family where the child is judged by their own unique, special standards
• Universalistic values


  Values in wider society where individuals are judged by the same standards applied to all members
• Transition from family to society


  1. Child moves from particularistic standards and ascribed status in family to universalistic standards and achieved status in adult society

  2. School prepares people for this transition
• Schools


  • Establish universalistic standards
  • Assess conduct against school rules
  • Measure achievement through exams
  • Apply same standards regardless of ascribed characteristics
• Meritocracy


  Status is achieved on the basis of merit or worth, not ascription