Theories of education

• Functionalists view education as having three main functions: secondary socialization, role allocation, and providing necessary skills for the economy.
• These functions are explored by various functionalist writers.

Durkheim and Education

• Durkheim argues education provides secondary socialization, passing on universal norms and values shared by broader society, helping individuals become functional members.
• Norms are considered normal behaviors and attitudes, while values are important societal aspects.

Functionalist Perspective on Socialization

• Functionalists believe society members are socialized into norms and values via family, education, media, and religion.
• Secondary socialization teaches universalistic values, not just family/community values.
• Durkheim thought education was increasingly important in industrial societies.
• Agrarian societies relied on shared norms and values for community solidarity, termed mechanical solidarity.
• Modern industrial societies require learning shared values of broader society, necessitating an organized education system.
• Industrial societies need people to learn specific skills and knowledge for economic roles.

Durkheim on Secondary Socialization Role

• Durkheim believed the secondary socialization role performed by the education system instilled social solidarity.
• Learning history helps children see themselves in a bigger picture and encourages working together.
• Education teaches social rules and abiding by them, ensuring everyone follows rules, limiting deviance and teaching self-discipline.
• Education teaches specialist skills for mass production roles, adapting to industrial change where modern jobs need technical knowledge.
• Different roles may require learning different skills, not all getting the same education.

Evaluating Durkheim on Education

• Marxists argue shared values serve the powerful, not neutral norms, and education spreads their ideology.
• Durkheim’s ideas may be outdated, imagining a value consensus impossible and undesirable in diverse, multicultural societies.
• Other sociologists suggest the contemporary economy is not based on assembly lines, making Durkheim’s education model less suitable.
• There is debate on whether schools provide adequate training for most jobs, as school knowledge is often not as useful as in-work training.
• Hargreaves (1982) argued education encourages individualism over social solidarity, with norms discouraging collaboration.

Parsons on Education

• Talcott Parsons, influenced by Durkheim, sees education as establishing shared norms and values, facilitating role allocation to achieve meritocracy.
• Meritocracy means jobs and pay are allocated based on talent and achievements, not social status, rewarding hard work.
• Education sifts and sorts people into appropriate jobs with effort and abilities leading to achieved status.
• Natural ability is ascribed, but fair and unrelated to background, gender, ethnicity, etc.

Parsons on Value of Making an Effort

• The education system teaches the value of making an effort, because effort is rewarded and assigns people to fitting social roles.
• Intelligent and hardworking people gain access to jobs that require those qualities.

Evaluating Parsons on Education

• Marxists critique role allocation and "sifting and sorting," calling meritocracy an ideology or myth of meritocracy.
• They argue the proletariat is persuaded the rich reached positions through hard work, leading to accepting inequality as fair.
• Instead, class inequalities are reproduced via education, creating a false class consciousness.
• Bowles and Gintis found IQ played little part in success, which depended on social class, ethnicity, and gender.

Davis and Moore on Education

• They said that society requires unequal rewards to encourage effort.
• By providing a system of unequal rewards, social stratification facilitates meritocracy.
• Meritocracy works through competition, with important jobs bringing the highest pay, allocated to the best through intense competition.

Evaluation of Davis and Moore

• Marxists say social stratification means the education system fails to grade people by ability, instead wealthy reinforce advantages.
• Children of high-paid workers leave education with better qualifications and get high-paid jobs, reproducing inequality and reinforcing the myth of meritocracy.
• It's unclear if the most qualified necessarily earn the most, as social class, family connections, and access to high salaries without qualifications exist, alongside graduate unemployment and underemployment.

New Right Views on Education

• The New Right have a perspective similar to functionalists.
• They believe centralized state control causes contemporary state education to fail in performing its proper role.
• They want standardized policies that seek to standardize and improve equality.
• Education needs to be more competitive with competition within schools, competition between schools and skills to prosper in a market economy.

New Right Views in Practice

• Schools should attract parents with impressive results to drive education standards.
• The New Right considers education should impart shared values.
• Worries include local education with values differing from value consensus.
• Reorganizing education with parental control would create a parentocracy with a value consensus set by parents.

Evaluating New Right Views on Education

• Excessive education competition is a problem as the losers are children, teaching important life lessons, but is still problematic.
• Davis and Moore's view suggests that those who are going to fail are allocated their appropriate roles.
• New Right implication promotes pushing to get the rewards, and the spur of fearing failure ensures people want to win as everyone won't.

Fee-Paying Schools

• Fee-paying schools get better results, related to market principles and advantageous children of paying parents.
• Private schools are often selective and choosing students perform well and results in selective state schools are fairly comparable with fee-paying schools irrespective of market principles.
• While giving more power to parents was one way the New Right argued the "right values" could be imparted through education.

New Right Values

• A main approach to impart new right values was central legislation through the development of the National Curriculum in the UK and policies such as Section 28 which strictly limited what could be taught about sexual orientation.
• While the New Right claim to take a small-state,market-led approach to social policy, this was top-down state interference even though some expect them to be opposed.
• There are various strengths and criticisms of New Right approaches as they have been put into practice which will be considered in the section on educational policies.

Louis Althusser

• Argued the education system was part of the ideological state apparatus, spreading bourgeois ideology and ensuring the proletariat is in a state of false class consciousness.
• Schools prepare working-class pupils to accept exploitation, serving to teach norms and values that serve the interests of the ruling class.

How Althusser Viewed Ideological Role

• Education performs this ideological role through the formal and hidden curriculum.
• Curriculum decisions impact the nature of value consensus, with history leaning towards British heroism and justice, promoting conservative ideology and discouraging radical social change.
• Education teaches hierarchy, respect for authority, and obeying rules, maintaining the power of the rich and preventing rebellion.

Bowles and Gintis

• They identify a "correspondence" between school and the workplace.
• School and work involve uniforms, strict time-keeping, hierarchy, rewards, punishments, etc.
• This prepares pupils for life in the capitalist system and prevent rebellion or revolution.
• Schools work towards the interests of the capitalist system and the ruling class to produce the workforce.
• "Work casts a long shadow over school."

Bowles and Gintis' Aspects of Education Correspondences With Workplace Under Capitalism

• Hierarchy - school with clear hierarchy: head teacher->staff->pupils is similar to workplace with CEO->management->workers.
• Rewards and sanctions - school pupils rewarded with marks and sanctions for disruptive behavior are similar to pay and bonuses in workplace.

More Aspects of Education Correspondences With Workplace Under Capitalism

• Passive and docile - school trains people to be passive, docile and uncomplaining just like a capitalist system seeking a passive, docile, unimaginitative workforce.
• Motivation - school encourages extrinsic reward is similar to workplace where work is tedious but the education system has trained people not to seek fulfillment with it.

Last Aspect of Education Correspondences With Workplace Under Capitalism

• Fragmentation - pupils learn in clear disciplines which is similar to how the workplace is fragmented where people do their task with little knowledge of what else happens in the process.

Evaluating Correspondance theory

• Bowles and Gintis' 1976 research may be more applicable to when they were writing than to the present day.
• Modern workplace less like described by Bowles and Gintis than in 1970s.
• Today it continues to correspond to the workplaces of a different era, and so no longer prepares people for the modern workplace.
• Other criticisms suggest that the education system is encouraging pupils to get involved with democratic structures and improve on aspects they dislike.

Paul Willis

• Takes a different Marxist view on how schools prepare children than Bowles and Gintis.
• Being a working-class "lad" at school prepares for the boredom of manual labour by having a distinct set of values as a coping mechanism.
• The culture is "having a laff" and entertaining themselves prepares them for work tedium, rather than developing subservience and passivity.

More on Paul Willis

• Doing right thing and working hard is rewarded by school, it is less so rewarded by the anti-school subculture, a need for peers is more important to those who do not expect to do well.
• "The lads" have their little rebellions making easily exploitable workforce which never have a big rebellion to threaten the capitalist system.
• Schools does not deliberately and consciously set about to prepare the workers as teachers, some educational managers deliberately work on behalf of the bourgeoise.
• Difficult to work against exploitative or recognize the function in facilitating as education's principle function is reproduced inequality and teachers are not setting out to fail pupils.

Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein

• Capital is money with the wealthy having power.
• Bourdieu argued the children of middle-class succeed in education with attitudes and experience.
• Because schools assess cultural capital what is intelligence, then applying a label to the pupils.
• Bourdieu developed the concept of habitus a culture or worldview is associated to society and life experience.

Basil Bernstein

• Expanded on these ideas arguing teachers, textbooks exam papers, and middle-class shared different code to working class.
• This contributes to educational inequality where they are not based on intelligence, merit or effort, to having middle-class habitus.

Evaluating Neo-Marxist Views On Education

• People who work in education are famously left-wing biased and do the opposite of what they are accused of in these theories.
• This is about processes that happen unconsciously rather than Althusser-style brainwashing.
• Neo-Marxist teachers might unconsciously assume that pupils are not able, engaged or are less interested.
• If interactionists agree, teachers are pupils constructing meaning from social actors.

Feminist Views on the Role of Education

• Agreement with functionalists and Marxisits where education transmits a set of norms to pupils.
• See education as transmitting patriarchal values.
• Heaton and Lawson (1996) argued the hidden curriculum taught values to schools, family structures where textbooks focused on many stereotypes.

More Feminist Views

• Liberal feminists point out remaining issues where boys had a lower pass rate for girls, specifically for gender used in institutions rather than based on preference.
• Subjects are open for all pupils as girls outperform boys since the 1980s designed to favour boys.
• Radical feminists argue that education is still patriarchal and continues to marginalise women and reinforcing patriarchal ideology.

Last Feminist Views

• Black and Difference feminists point out how not all girls have the same and minority-ethnic students are stereotypical.
• It is agreed the work of feminism has changed views and has been improving and the education system teaches gender scripts and values preventing challenges.

Evaluating Feminist Views

• Two features with education today are the female domination in education and for success/ male underperformance.
• However, there is a glass ceiling that the education might have creates lots of women that lose out when it goes to their male peers.
• Feminists point out the system norms where highly-qualified often accept.

Links to Core Themes

• Clearly links to functionalists and theorists see education as a major socialisation agent.
• Difference of interests where a specific social group of power is.
• Theories are linked to startification and power where who has power.
• However, they don't always note they do not note in interest of those power how the interests is.