EDUCATION

Curricula

lessons and academic content taught in school/specific course/program

Schools help

• Provide skills and knowledge

• Act as powerful agents of socialization 

• Creates homogeneity out of diversity

• Sorts students into paths of differing socioeconomic classes

Homogenizing and sorting

• The key to give young people skills and knowledge to succeed in society 

• Accomplish 2 tasks:

  • Create homogeneity out of diversity by instructing all students in a uniform curriculum. 

  • Sort students into paths that terminate in different social classes.

education system has displaced organized religion as the main

• provider of formal knowledge

Mass education mostly starts with the generation of

baby boomers

education in canada

• Nine of every ten Canadians (between ages of 25 and 64) has graduated from high school. 

• Two of every three Canadians (ages 25 to 34) has some postsecondary education. 

  • This level of educational attainment is second only to South Korea

Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

• OECD administers standardized tests to assess academic performance of 15- year-olds in reading, math, and science. 

• First wave conducted in 2000 – Canada scored among the top countries in educational achievement.

Uniform Socialization

• Creating systems of education that had sufficient resources to include all children was a huge social change. 

  • Costs a lot of money

• Replacing the family and religion with a centralized and rationalized system → made strong pressures toward uniformity and standardization.

Educational achievement

• The learning or skill that an individual acquires and, at least in principle, is what grades reflect.

Educational attainment

• The number of years of schooling completed or, for higher levels, certificates and degrees earned.

• For functional economy – more education  

Individual Advantages and Disadvantages

• Higher educational attainment is effective for securing more employment and higher earnings. 

• Education also enhances earnings prospects. 

• There are exceptions, but generally more education and better earnings tend to go together.

The printing press:

Enabled literacy to spread beyond elite circles

Protestantism

Protestants were encouraged to read scriptures regularly

Democracy

• Led to free education for all children. 

Industrialization

• Mass education is widely recognized as an absolute necessity for creating an industrial economy

• The most important reason for the rise of mass schooling

Rise of mass schoolings

• evident that a highly productive economy requires an education system

  • large enough to create a mass labour force; 

  • rich enough to train and employ researchers able to work at the cutting edge of modern science.

• investment in education is an important step in achieving great national wealth

Education is not only a source of wealth;

• is also a product of wealth.

Functionalism on education

• Talcott parsons

  • Focused on the critical role schools play in allocating individuals to distinct positions in the social hierarchy

•  Meritocracy 

  • social hierarchy where rank corresponds to individual capacities fairly tested against a common standard.

Latent (unintended) Functions

• Create a youth culture. 

• Create a marriage market—facilitates assortative mating. 

• Create a custodial and surveillance system for children. 

• Create a means of maintaining wage levels. 

• Occasionally create a “school of dissent.”

Manifest (intended) functions

• Industrialism requires the widespread application of science and technology in the economy

  • making work more specialized and technical, and changing working conditions. 

  • The education system mirrors these trends. 

• A variety of manifest functions that schools perform are aimed at creating solidarity through cultural homogeneity. 

• Schools also transmit shared knowledge and culture between generations, thereby fostering a common cultural identity.

Common School Standards

• Industrial work requires an education system that teaches workers common standards. 

  • A system had to be created where a privileged few were recruited to elite institutions → socialized to the new standards → and then sent back to peripheral regions 

    • impose the uniform standards on students.

  • Tldr; choose the privileged to then teach students 

National Solidarity

• mass socialization shifted to a common set of cultural beliefs, norms, and values directed by a central state

  • Public education promoted membership in a national community

  • They became part of an “imagined community” known as the nation.

Conflict theory on education 

• Meritocracy

• challenge the functionalist assumption 

  • Educational attainment and subsequent social ranking are regulated by performance based on individual merit.

Conflict theory on education 

• Economic Barriers to Higher Education

• higher education in Canada requires students and their families to shoulder significant financial burdens

• Social class origin strongly affects how much education people attain.

Social Exclusion

• creating barriers so that certain social opportunities and positions are not open to all. 

  • Postsecondary education is smth that children from richer families are more likely to obtain.

  • Intergenerational transfer of advantage: more likely to go to college if your parents went

Subjugated knowledge

• Includes descriptions and explanations of events that dominant groups selectively devalue or ignore. 

  • Exclusion also occurs by disregarding the knowledge that minority groups possess.

• Ex. modern medicine being seen as better/higher than traditional chinese medicine

Credential inflation

• Qualifying for specific jobs requires more and more certificates and degrees. 

  • It is fuelled by professionalization

professionalization

• occurs when members of an occupation insist that people earn certain credentials to enter the occupation.

Cultural capital

• The stock of learning and skills that increases the chance of securing a superior job. 

  • Cultural capital is scarce and therefore valuable, because it is expensive and difficult to acquire.

Pedagogic violence

• Bourdieu’s term: teachers’ application of punishments intended to discourage deviation from the dominant culture. 

  • Pedagogic violence requires that students be treated as “docile bodies” (Foucault)

• Ex. “shakespeare sucks” → teacher makes student write essay on why shakespeare is amazing

Symbolic interactionism on education

• Hidden curriculum

• The curriculum in school teaches obedience to authority and conformity to cultural norms. 

  • Staying in school requires accepting the terms of the hidden curriculum.

Concerted cultivation

• middle-class parenting style 

• systematically organizes and directs children’s time to activities that prepare them for success in school. 

  • out-of-school cultivation is in contrast to the parenting style of working- and lower-class families.

Natural growth

• parenting style of working- and lower-class families that leaves children largely to their own devices

  • except when parents demand obedience to authority.

Testing and Tracking

• Testing and tracking maintain social inequalities. 

  • results are due to classrooms stratified by socio-economic status, race, and ethnicity instead of academic ability.

• Most sociologists believe that IQ reflects social standing

IQ test results turn on a combination of two factors: 

1. How effectively an individual absorbs what his or her environment offers. 

2. How closely his or her environment reflects what the test includes.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

• The expectation that helps to cause what it predicts. (dont have to memorize, just understand)

  • Can influence a person’s life chances. 

  • Teachers may suspect that disadvantaged students and students who are minority group members are intellectually inferior, and treat them as such. 

  • Students who are treated as inferior may come to feel rejected by teachers, other classmates, and the curriculum. 

    • Some of them eventually reject academic achievement as a goal. 

  • Discipline problems, ranging from apathy to disruptive and illegal behaviour, can result.

Gender Differences: A Feminist Perspective

• Women currently receive more than 60 percent of university degrees awarded annually. 

• Women now exceed men in years of completed schooling. 

• However, men remain more likely to complete programs that lead to high pay

Participation and Indigenous Background

• The systematic operation of social forces over time produced the pattern of low educational achievement among Indigenous peoples 

Closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous educational achievement would have positive effects on:

• suicide and incarceration rates

• family stability

• civic participation

• health outcome

Truth and Reconciliation

• 1876 Indian Act gave the federal government authority over the education of Indigenous children. 

• Schools were underfunded and mismanaged and failed in their most basic aspects.

• Calls for action released in 2015 by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission

• Primary and secondary school level – revised curricula to include Indigenous history, perspectives, and ways of knowing 

• Postsecondary – offering Indigenous-focused courses; integrating Indigenous content and perspectives into courses