education sociologists

the different sociologists in education

Functionalist

• Davis and Moore

• Durkhiem

• Parsons

davis and moore

* education encourages role allocation
* education also serves meritocracy
* sifts, sorts, and allocates
* Simular to Parsons

talcott parsons

* schools act like a bridge between family and society
* teaches role allocation and meritocracy
* %%‘focal socialising agency’%%
* teaches secondary socialisation maintaining value consensus.
* universalistic standards
* role allocation: particularistic, ascribed, acheived
* ==marxists argue that meritocracy is a myth and its about who you know not what you know==

emile durkhiem

* teaches secondary socialisation
* teaches specialised skills for workplace and employment
* teaches punishment and that actions have consequences
* teaches unity as children view themselves as part of something larger as a result, developing a commitment to society and their education (social solidarity)
* teaches you to interact witth people you normally would not interact with
* %%‘education is society in minature’%%

Marxist

Althusser

* schools create __**smoke-screens**__ so people cannot see the inequality and lies of meritocracy
* ideological state apparatus
* Its main purpose it to maintain and reproduce generation after generation of class inequalities by transmitting ruling class values and disguising them as common values.
* replaced the church as the main agency of __**ideological control**__.
* transmits capitalism and prepares students for the workforce and to accept exploitation.
* The qualifications provided are compatible to their position in the workforce.
* Qualifications are used to legitimate positions of power  and they become agents of exploitation and repression.

Bourdieu

•The middle class have different values, experience and hobbies which is their __**habitus**__ which will be different to the working class. 

•The working class is more likely to struggle as they do not have the __**cultural capital**__

•Middle class parents can help their children as they are more educated and have the cultural capital to do so.

•Material capital – they have the means to get the new items – the opposite of material deprivation

Harry Braverman

* The main function is for childrent o be looked after whilst the parents go to work
* schools socialise children into the captialist system so they are ready when they leave.

Paul Willis

•Studied a group of 12 boys throughout their time at midland school and identified an anti-school subculture via participant and nonparticipant observations, recording group discussions, informal interviews and diary entries . With this he tried to identify how working-class children get jobs. He identified there are 2 subcultures in schools: the anti school-subculture, and pro-school subculture.  The boys ‘lads’ and their rejection of school made them suitable for unskilled or semi-skilled manual work.

•Their disruption and disobeying authority was seen as a way of curing boredom.

•This correspondence has been created through the lads rejection of the school. (schools cannot be blamed as they did not enforce it.)

Bowles and Gintis

* Correspondence principle
* The main purposed for the education system is to reproduce the labour power necessary for capitalism
* In American schools they found that punctuality, obedience and hard work were rewarded while creativity, independence and critical awareness were discouraged.
* The class system is legitimated and reproduced through education (private & public school).
* Schools merely exist for qualifications and if someone fails to achieve such qualifications, they fail in the capitalist society.

Usher and Thompson

•Education should be less focused on ‘one size fits all’

•Should be less fixed in time and space

•Education should be provided in different locations and should be accessed at all stages of the life cycle.

•It should be diverse and be able to change and respond to the needs of the everchanging economy

•Faith and specialist schools reflect the fragmented and diversity of the postmodern education

Post modernist