Marxist view on education

• basics of Marxist view on education


  main role is to produce an efficient, submissive, obedient workforce to help maintain inequality and control the working class
• Althusser's Repressive State Apparatus (RSA)


  physical control through institutions such as the justice system and the military
• Althusser's ideological state apparatus (ISA)


  control over the way the working class think. Passes on dominant ideology through agents of socialisation
• Antonio and Gramsci's hegemony


  the idea that the working class have a false class consciousness and false concept of who they are, which is fueled by governments and states and RSA and ISA
• Willis - learning to labour (1970)


  study of 12 WC 'lads' who had a counter school culture opposing values of education and actively accepted failure. They went into manual labour and created a shop floor culture to fulfill their working class masculinity
• Rikowski


  education has become a privatised commodity to create profit e.g. cleaning and food provided by hired companies

  marketisation of schools competing for funding
• Bowles and Gintis - correspondence theory


  role of education is to reproduce the workforce and is a myth making machine designed to justify inequality by promoting the idea that failure is the individuals fault
• Bowles and Gintis study


  Studied 237 NYC students found that schools rewarded traits that make a good worker.

  higher grades = discipline, consistency, punctuality rewarded

  lower grades = creativity, aggression, independence sanctioned
• Bowles and Gintis - hidden curriculum


  hidden curriculum teaches

  1- subservience (obedience)

  2- motivation (rewards and punishments)

  3- acceptance of the hierarchy

  4- fragmentation of knowledge (specialisatiosn)

  5- legitimisation of inequality (myth of meritocracy)
• Bourdieu's forms of capital

  economic capital

  social capital

  symbolic capital

  cultural capital
• Sugarman's features of WC subcultures that act as a barrier to education


  -fatalism

  -collectivism

  -immediate gratification

  -present-time orientation
• Bernstein's speech codes


  -restricted code - working class, limited vocab, context bound

  -elaborated code - middle class, wider vocab, communicates abstract ideas, context free