Theories on Education
Theories and Perspectives of Education
Functionalism
Functionalism:
Concerned with links between education and other social institutions (family, workplace, etc.) by identifying social roles and obligations.
Functionalists see education as an important agency of socialisation helping to maintain social stability through the development of value consensus and social cohesion.
Social Cohesion - Social bonds that bring people together and integrate them into a full society.
Education has a key role in preparing young people with the means to improve their lives through upward social mobility by providing necessary skills for the economy.
Durkheim:
Durkheim argued the education system provided what he terms secondary socialisation as opposed to the primary socialisation which is delivered by the family.
While the family passes on particular norms and values, secondary socialisation passes on universal norms and values that are shaped by broader society.
This helps individuals to become fully functional, normal members of society and this, in turn, helps society because people know how to behave.
Norms refer to behaviour and attitudes which are considered normal, while values are those things that people consider important to them.
Functionalists believe that all members of society are socialised into their norms and values, first through family and later through institutions such as education, the media, and religion.
It is in secondary socialisation that people learn universalistic values rather than those values particular to their own family or community known as particularistic values.
Organic Analogy/Society
The organic analogy compares some social institutions as incredibly important, representing vital organs as if they’re taken away, society couldn’t function. This would lead to social anarchy.
3 Main Functions of Education:
Instilling social solidarity.
Teaching social roles and how to abide.
Teaching specialist skills.
Evaluation
Marxists question where these shared values come from and whose interests they serve. Don’t accept that there are a set of neutral norms and values that are best for everyone, instead argue that the powerful in society use education to spread their ideology.
Can be considered outdated eg. Postmodernists argue contemporary society is now too diverse for shared norms to be universal.
Hargreaves (1982) argues the education system encourages individualism and competition rather than social solidarity.
Parsons:
Ideas influenced by Durkheim.
Particularly interested in how education facilitates role allocation in later life.
Argues the education system helps society to be meritocratic.
Meritocracy: a society where jobs and pay are allocated on the basis purely of people’s individual talents, abilities, qualifications and skills.
Meritocracy
Individuals that work hard will be rewarded in society.
Rather than people holding positions in society based on their parents and what they were born into (ascribed status) people, through hard work, attain achieved status.
Education sifts and shifts people into appropriate jobs.
The education system teaches the value of making an effort, because effort is rewarded.
Evaluation
Marxists criticise role allocation and ‘sifting and sorting’ and say that the appearance of meritocracy is nothing but ideology (the myth of meritocracy).
Argue the proletariat are persuaded to believe the rich reached their positions through hard work, but in fact are reproduced in education.
Myth of meritocracy helps develop false class consciousness.
Bowles and Gintis argue IQ has very little to do with success, but the social class does.
Davis and Moore:
Argue that for society to function there had to be a system of unequal rewards.
Being able to access higher rewards encourages individuals to put in the extra effort.
Social stratification is essential.
The most important jobs deserve the highest pay.
Competition is important and healthy for society.
Education sifts and sorts people into their appropriate roles.
Evaluation
The education system manifestly fails to grade people by their ability or effort.
Wealthy and rich people have all manner of advantages in education (eg. better qualifications due to private tutoring at a young age.
Myth of meritocracy - reproduction of class inequality.
Allows the rich to get away with entrenching their privilege and convinces everyone the process is fair.
Old boys network - some people access high salaries without good qualifications.
Summary:
Society is a system of independent parts held together by a shared culture or value consensus - an agreement among society’s members about what values are important.
Each part of society, such as the family, economy or education system, performs functions that help to maintain society as a whole.
New Right
New Right
New Right has a similar perspective to functionalists.
However, they tend to think that contemporary state education fails to perform the role it should perform, because of centralised state control and policies that seek to standardise and improve equality.
Argue that in order for education to be meritocratic (Davis and Moore), school needs to be more competitive, more about choice and winning and losing compared to collaboration and fairness.
Argues that sports day and ‘participation awards’ fails to provide people with the drive and ambition to achieve in today’s society.
New Right believes there should be competition within schools, competition between schools and as well as socialising pupils with the skills to prosper in a market economy.
This drives up educational standards too, as schools try to attract customers (parents) with impressive results.
Chubb and Moe:
Private schools perform better than schools in the public sector because the schools were answerable to paying parents.
The more the education system follows this model, the better they would become.
Clearly has an impact on educational policies.
New Right
Furthermore, they agree that education should impart shared values but again are concerned about the way it happens in practice.
They argue that in the 60s and 70s, schools were dominated by local education authorities that might have values that differ from the value consensus.
For example, the New Right was concerned with children educated in very left-wing council areas’ schools as they believed that they may be taught history that was not sufficiently patriotic (therefore not passing the shared values of all working for common goals as described by Durkheim), or there may be radical ideas regarding gender and/or sexual orientation that would not reflect the views of children’s parents.
Evaluation:
If education could be reorganised in such a way as to put the parents in control (to create a parentocracy) then the value consensus would be set by parents, and not by politicians who were often far from the mainstream.
Problem with excessive competition in education is that the losers are children. May teach some important life lessons to them but is undoubtedly a problem.
Of course, there is logic in Parson’s and particularly Davis and Moore’s view that some children are going to receive low rewards, but there’s an implication that this is them being allocated their appropriate social roles, therefore this is functional.
All these theories focus on rewards for those with ability and who actually put effort into education rather than those who don’t.
New Right implies that everyone should push and struggle and fight to get rewards, yet the spur of fear of failure is fundamentally important: everyone should want to win, but most people will lose.
Fee-paying schools due to reasons other than the schools being answerable to paying parents. (link to social class and differential educational achievement).
Private schools are often selective and able to choose pupils that will perform well.
Parentocracy was argued to be one way that imparted the right values through education, but other ways were present. For example, Section 28 of limiting the teaching of sexual orientation within schools.
While the New Right claim to take a small-state, market-led approach to social policy, this was top-down state interference in education of a sort that you might otherwise expect them to oppose.
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.
Marxism
Marxists are critical of the capitalist system and the inequality it produces.
Contrast to functionalists - a conflict view.
Society is based on class division and exploitation.
Marxists believe that society is an unfair system built upon the exploitation of those who lack power, by those who possess it.
The capitalist class - the bourgeoisie - are the minority class but they own and control the means of production and dominate wealth.
The working-class - the proletariat - are the majority who provide their labour to the bourgeoisie. They suffer resulting in exploitation - paid less than the value of what they produce.
Division creates class conflict - working-class realise they are exploited - this would lead to revolution - but hierarchy is used to teach the ideas that will prevent a revolution.
Marxist Views on Education
Ultimately, education reproduces and legitimates the class structure.
See education as a means of social control, encouraging young people to be conformists and accept their social position to not disturb current inequality.
Education gives the impression that those who fail, do so because of their lack of ability or effort, and only have themselves to blame.
People are encouraged to accept the position they are in after education, despite it being a social class issue.
Key Thinkers:
Althusser
Bowles and Gintis
Willis
Althusser - Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)
States education is an ideological state apparatus
(agencies that serve to spread the ideology and justify the power of the dominant social class).
Argues the bourgeoisie maintain power by using both this and repressive state apparatus (coercive power eg. police and law) to spread bourgeois ideology and ensure the proletariat is in a state of false class consciousness.
(a failure by members of a social class to recognise their real interests).
Schools are ISAs preparing working-class pupils to accept a life of exploitation.
Education performs the ideological role through both the formal curriculum and other aspects of school life or the hidden curriculum.
Formally, what is taught and not taught impacts the nature of the value consensus.
Michael Gove argued students should learn British history, but he meant all the moments Britain was heroic, not all the bad history.
Believes that education has replaced religion as the most important ISA (secularism).
The education system passes on ruling-class ideology and teaches basic skills needed to perform in a capitalist society.
The working-class are essentially forced to fail and end up taking up low status, low paid, alienating work roles.
The ruling class ‘go to the top of the pile’ and go on to university where they are trained to fill their ruling-class roles.
All of this means that social class inequalities are reproduced.
Ideology (set of beliefs and ideas) is used to justify inequalities. Workers accept their place and believe they deserve their position.
Meritocracy is a myth that has to be constantly reinforced so that inequalities are legitimised.
Evaluation:
Feminists may argue that the real issue with exploitation is the gender pay gap in the workplace and how women are continuously underpaid for the exact same hard work as what a man does.
New Rightists would disagree with this view as they may argue that capitalism isn’t a bad thing and that exploitation is non-existent.
Bowles and Gintis - Correspondence Theory
Identified a correspondence between school and the workplace.
School and work (for working-class pupils and workers) both involve uniforms, strict time-keeping, hierarchy, rewards and punishments.
This prepares students to live in a capitalist system and prevents rebellion.
School works directly in the interests of the ruling class.
Suggests that ‘work casts a long shadow over school’ and meritocracy is a myth.
They identified 5 features that have made students ready for work after school:
Hierarchy
Rewards and Sanctions
Passive and Docile
Motivation
Fragmentation
Bowles and Gintis agree with Althusser that meritocracy is a myth.
Danger for capitalism if the poor recognise the inequality of the system, as they may rebel.
The system must prevent rebellion.
Education is a ‘myth-making machine’ designed to justify inequality by promoting the idea that failure is due to lack of hard work rather than injustices and inequalities of capitalist society. The myth involves beliefs that:
“Education is the path to success in work”
“Those at the top deserve to be there as they have worked the hardest”
“Likewise, those at the bottom are to blame themselves”
Evaluation:
Research was conducted in the 70s, so findings may not be applicable to today. Modern-day jobs are not all factory based.
In turn, could this mean that school does not prepare students for modern-day working life? Robinson argues that education today strifes creativity as it is still based on industrialism.
Increase in student voice and school council would suggest students now take ownership of their education, which is generally unwanted in the workplace (according to Marxists).
Willis - Learning to Labour
Combined Marxist ideas with interactionist ideas - he wanted to look at the meaning of education as well as the system.
Unlike Bowles and Gintis, Willis does not believe that there is a simple relationship between education and work (he argues this view is too deterministic).
Conducted a study of 12 working-class ‘lads’ in their final year of school using unstructured interviews and observations.
Found that the lads had a counter-school culture that directly opposed the values of the education system (and capitalism).
They rejected values of subservience, motivation, and acceptance of hierarchy.
The lads actively chose to fail so that they could land their ‘dream jobs’ of manual labour.
Ironically, not accepting the system (through their counter-culture) meant the ‘lads’ ended up doing the unskilled labour that capitalism needed.
The outcome is the same: an easily exploitable workforce that serves the interests of capitalism.
For Willis, the ‘lads’ - at work - have their little rebellions through schoolyard humour and mockery, which contributed to there never being the sort of big rebellion that could really threaten the capitalist system.
Evaluation:
Small sample (unrepresentative/can not generalist findings).
The ‘lads’ could have exaggerated/lied.
Willis ignores ‘conformist culture’ within education and only focuses on one small subculture.
Feminism
Feminism:
Possess large areas of agreement with functionalist and Marxist’s view of education system’s socialisation.
However, rather sees the education system as transmitting patriarchal values.
Heaton and Lawson (1996):
Argued that the hidden curriculum taught patriarchal values in schools.
Noted traditional family structures in textbooks (along with many other gender stereotypes, subjects aimed towards specific gender, gender divisions in PE and sport and the gender division of labour in schools (predominantly female teachers and male managers).
Liberal Feminists:
Points out remaining issues of patriarchy whilst also acknowledging significant strides towards equality in the education system.
In the 40s and 50s, under the tripartite system, boys had a lower pass rate for the 11+ than girls (essentially institutionally failing the girls), and some subjects being specifically for one gender or the other used to be institutional rather than based on apparent preference.
Subjects are still gendered, despite being open to all pupils.
In the 80s, girls began outperforming boys in education.
Therefore, if the system is a patriarchal one, then it is singularly failing.
Michelle Stanworth (1983):
There are still higher expectations of boys and teachers would be more likely to recommend boys apply for higher education than girls at the same academic level.
Radical Feminists:
Argue that the education system is fundamentally patriarchal, and continues to oppress and marginalise women.
It reinforces patriarchal ideology through the formal and hidden curriculum, whilst also normalising marginalisation and oppression of women so when girls leave school they view it as normal and natural rather than patriarchal oppression.
Kat Banyard (2011):
Sexual harassment in education is not treated as seriously as other forms of bullying and harassment.
Black and Difference Feminists:
Not all girls have the same experience in education.
Minority-ethnic girls are often victims of specific stereotyping and assumptions.
For example, teachers might assume that Muslim girls have different aspirations in relation to career and family from their peers.
Most types of feminism focus on white middle-class women.
Improvement for Girls in Education:
Sue Sharpe (1996):
School girls in the 70s had priorities in marriage and family.
Whereas, in the 90s they had priorities in their career.
A number of potential reasons for this was legislative changes such as the 1970 Equal Pay Act and the 1976 Sex Discrimination Act, which likely had a major part, hence supporting a liberal feminist perspective).
Summary:
Education system works as an agent of secondary socialisation which teaches girls and boys what are seen as universal norms and values, and gender scripts that are actually those of contemporary patriarchy.
Girls and boys learning these values prevents social change and prevents any challenge to patriarchy.
Evaluation:
Education is an increasingly female-dominated sector
Most teachers are women.
Increasing number of female managers as they are drawn from the available teachers.
Education is resulting in female success and male underperformance, patriarchy within the education system is failing. An increase of girls going into higher education.
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