The Marxist perspective on education

Question 1

What are the two elements which Althusser says serves to keep the Bourgeoisie?

Answer 1

Repressive state apparatus and Ideological state apparatus

Question 2

What does the Repressive state apparatus do?

Answer 2

maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie by force or the threat of it

Question 3

What does the Ideological state apparatus do?

Answer 3

maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie by controlling people’s ideas, values and beliefs

Question 4

What apparatus is the education system?

Answer 4

Ideological state apparatus

Question 5

How does education reproduce class inequality?

Answer 5

By transmitting it from generation to generation by failing each successive generation of working-class pupils

Question 6

How does education legitimise class inequality?

Answer 6

By producing ideologies that disguise its true cause, the function of ideology is to persuade workers that inequality is inevitable

Question 7

What does Bowles and Gintis believe the role of education is?

Answer 7

Within a capitalist society, the education system reproduces an obedient workforce that will accept inequality as inevitable

Question 8

What personality traits did schools reward?

Answer 8

the traits that would make for a submissive, compliant workforce

Question 9

What is the correspondence principle?

Answer 9

there are close parallels between schooling and work in a capitalist society as they both have hierarchy

Question 10

How does the correspondence principle operate?

Answer 10

through a hidden curriculum - lessons learnt in school without being directly taught

Question 11

What does the hidden curriculum teach?

Answer 11

teaches pupils to become accustomed to accepting hierarchy and competition, working for extrinsic rewards

Question 12

What is the myth of meritocracy?

Answer 12

That the idea that everyone has equal educational opportunities is not true

Question 13

What does Bowles and Gintis argue is the main factor in determining whether someone has a high income or not?

Answer 13

Their family or class background

Question 14

What does the myth of meritocracy justify?

Answer 14

the privileges of the upper class

Question 15

How does the education system justify poverty?

Answer 15

by blaming poverty on the individual for not being smart enough or working hard enough

Question 16

What is different between Willis’ and Bowles + Gintis’ viewpoint?

Answer 16

where Bowles + Gintis see education as fairly straightforward process of indoctrination, Willis’ study shows working class pupils can resist indoctrination

Question 17

What did Willis’ study find?

Answer 17

there are similarities between the lads’ anti school counter culture and the shop floor culture of male manual workers

Question 18

How does the lads counter culture help capitalism?

Answer 18

helps them slot into the jobs that are inferior in terms of skill, pay and conditions that capitalism needs someone to perform

Question 18

What do both culture see manual work as?

Answer 18

superior and intellectual work is inferior and effeminate

Question 19

Why does Willis’ find this ironic?

Answer 19

as by resisting the schools ideology, the lads’ counter culture ensures they are destined for the unskilled work that capitalism needs someone to perform

Question 20

How do post modernists criticise the Marxist view on education?

Answer 20

Criticise the correspondence principle as today’s post-Fordist economy requires schools to produce a different type of labour force from the one described by Marxists

Question 21

What do Marxists disagree over?

Answer 21

Bowles and Gintis take a deterministic view which suggests pupils have no free will which fails to explain why some pupils reject the schools values but Willis rejects this view

Question 22

How do feminists criticise Marxists view?

Answer 22

MacDonald says Bowles and Gintis ignore the fact that schools reproduce patriarchy as well as capitalism

McRobbie points at that females are largely absent from Willis’ study

Question 23

How do critical modernists criticise Marxists viewpoint?

Answer 23

They criticise them for taking a ‘class first’ approach that sees class as the key inequality and ignores all other kinds