Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
SOCIOLOGY EDUCATION - Coggle Diagram
SOCIOLOGY EDUCATION
Marxists
Traditional Marxists see the education system as working in the interests of ruling class elites. According to the Marxist perspective on education, the system performs three functions for these elites:
Bowles and Ginits (1976): Schooling in Capitalist America. These are the two main sociologists associated with Traditional Marxist perspective on education.
-
-
Middle class parents use their material and cultural capital to ensure their children get into the best schools and the top sets. This means that the wealthier pupils tend to get the best education and then go onto to get middle class jobs. Meanwhile working class children are more likely to get a poorer standard of education and end up in working class jobs. In this way class inequality is reproduced
-
Marxists argue that 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. Thus if we fail, we believe it is our own fault. This legitimates or justifies the system because we think it is fair when in reality it is not.
This has the effect of controlling the working classes – if children grow up believing they have had a fair chance then they are less likely to rebel and try to change society as part of a Marxist revolutionary movement.
Willis’ research involved visiting one school and observing and interviewing 12 working class rebellious boys about their attitude to school during their last 18 months at school and during their first few months at work.
Willis argues pupils rebelling are evidence that not all pupils are brainwashed into being passive, subordinate people as a result of the hidden curriculum.
Willis described the friendship between these 12 boys (or the lads) as a counter-school culture. Their value system was opposed to that of the school. This value system was characterised as follows:
- The lads felt superior to the teachers and other pupils
- They attached no value to academic work, more to ‘having a laff’
- The objective of school was to miss as many lessons as possible, the reward for this was status within the group
- The time they were at school was spent trying to win control over their time and make it their own.
Willis therefore criticises Traditional Marxism. He says that pupils are not directly injected with the values and norms that benefit the ruling class, some actively reject these. These pupils also realise that they have no real opportunity to succeed in this system.
BUT, Willis still believes that this counter-school culture still produces workers who are easily exploited by their future 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 interests of capitalist employers – by socialising children to accept authority, hierarchy and wage-labour.
-
functionalists
value consensus, organic analogy, harmony
-
parson meritocracy, univeralistic and particularistic standards
-
criticisms
-
-
-
-
wrong argues that functionalist have an over socialised view of people where they reject the system and join anti-school subcultures
-
new right
-
higher paying consumers have better education and creates unequal opportunities for the disadvantaged
favour marketisation similar to functionalists, both argue people are more talented a system ran on meritocracy
-
-
-
-
-
-