role of education Flashcards
(14 cards)
Durkheim
social solidarity - individual members must feel themselves to be a part of a single body or community. Education system helps to create social solidarity but transmitting society’s culture - from one generation to the next.
Society in miniature - prepares us for life and wider society.
Specialist skills - complex division of labour where the production of even a single item usually involves cooperation of many different specialists.
Parsons
Bridge between the family and wider society - the family operate on ascribed status while the society operates on achieved status. There is a shift from primary to secondary socialisation.
Meritocracy - in school each pupil is judged against the same standard.
Davis and Moore
role allocation.- inequality is necessary to ensure that the most important roles are filled by the most talented people.
give five criticisms of the functionalist perspective on education
- education system does not teach specialist skills aqequately as Durkhiem claims.
- There is ample evidence that equal opportunity in education does not exist.
- Functionalists see education as a process that instills the shared value of society as a whole, but marxists argue that education in capitalist society only transmits ideology of a minority - the ruling class.
- Interactionist Wrong criticises over-socialised view of people as mere puppets of society.
- Neoliberals and the new right argue that the state education system fails to prepare young people adequately for work.
give three similarities between the new right and functionalist perspective of education
- both believe that some people are naturally more talented than others
- both favour an education system run on meritocratic principles of open competition, one that serves the needs of the economy by preparing young people for work.
- both believe that education should socialise pupils into shared value such as competition, and intill a sense of national identity
Why do the new right argue that the state education systems take a one size fits all approach?
it imposes uniformity, disregarding local needs. Local consumers who use the schools - pupils, parents, employers, have no say.
Chubb and Moe - why has state run education in the united states failed? (3)
- not created equal opportunity and has failed the needs of disadvantaged groups.
- inefficient because it fails to produce pupils with skills needed by the economy
- private schools deliver higher quality education because unlike state schools, they are answerable to paying consumers - the parents.
What is chubb and Moe’s solution?
call for the introduction of a market system in state education that would put control in the hands of the consumers.
they propose a system in which each family would be given a voucher to spend on buying education from a school of their choice. This would force schools to become more responsie to parents wishes since the vouchers would be the school’s main source of income.
According to new right theorists, what are two important roles performed by the state?
- state imposes framework on school which they have to complete such as publishing ofsted inspection reports and league tables of schools’ exam results, the state gives parents information with which to make a more informed choice between schools.
- the state ensures schools transmit shared culture. By imposing a single national curriculum, it seeks to guarantee that schools socialise pupils into a single cultural heritage.
Give 4 AO3 of the new right
- Gerwitz and ball - competition between schools benefits the middle class who can use cultural and economic capital to access more desirable schools.
- Critics argue that the real cause of low educational standards is not state control but social inequality and inadequate funding of state schools.
- There is a contradiction between the new right’s support for parental choice on the one hand and the state imposing a compulsory national curriculum on all its schools on the other.
- marxists argue that education does not impose a shared national culture as the new right claim but imposes culture of a dominant minority ruling class and devalues culture of the working class and minority ethnic group
Althusser
the education system is an ideological state apparatus which reproduces class inequality by transmitting it from generation to generation and legitimises it by producing ideologies that disguise its true cause.
Bowles and gintis
capitalism requires a workforce with the kind of attitudes behaviour and personality type suited to their role as alienated and exploited workers willing to accept hard work.
the correspondence principle - the relationships and structures found in education mirror or correspond to those found in work.
meritocracy is a myth
Willis
all marxists agree that capitalism cannot function without a workforce willing to accept exploitation.
Lads study - group interviews - similarity between anti-school subculture and shopfloor culture of manual workers with both seeing manual work as superior and intellecual work as inferior and effeminate. They have experienced fordism allowing them to slot themselves into manual labour.
Give three pieces of AO3 of marxist approaches
- postmodernists criticise bowles and Gintis’ correspondence principles on the grounds that today’s post-fordist economy requires schools to provide a different kind of labour force to the one described by marxists with schools now reproducing diversity.
- Marxists disagree with one another about legitimation takes place. Bowles and Gintis take a determintic view by arguing that pupils have no free will and passively accept indoctrination. Willis rejects the view by saying that rejecting school still leads them into lower class work.
- Critics argue that Willis’ account of the lads romanticises them, portraying them as working class heroes despite anti-social behaviour and sexist attitudes.
