Education Booklet 1

Durkheim: (Functionalist)

• School is society in miniature - teaching secondary socialisation to act as a bridge between family and society

• Schools functions:

  • Teaching social rules

  • Instilling social solidarity - history allows children to see themselves as a part of the bigger picture

  • Teaching specialist skills - basics like maths

Parsons: (Functionalist)

• Meritocracy - effort is rewarded in society

Davis and Moore: (Functionalist)

• Role allocation - society is meritocratic

• Social stratification - system of unequal rewards - school sifts and sorts people into their place in society

Chubb and Moe: (New Right)

• Parent’s Survey - shown that state schools fail disadvantaged children, who do 5% better in private schools

• Marketisation - suggested a voucher system where parent’s could choose which school their child went to with that voucher

Bowles and Gintis:

• Correspondence principle - school mirrors society

  • Rewards and sanctions - suspension, bonuses/prizes, verbal warnings

  • Passive and docile - neither rewards creativity but encourages compliance

  • Hierarchy - the parallel with teachers and bosses

  • Fragmentation - different tasks given to alienate the worker from their work (links to different subjects)

  • Motivation - things needed to be given to motivate besides what you already get out of it

• 237 high school students in New York filled out a questionnaire - results showed that school rewards compliance more than anything

Louis Althusser: (Marxist)

• Ideological state apparatus - superstructure manipulates people into having a false class consciousness

  • Superstructure - institutions

  • Base - means of production (things that produce products)

Paul Willis:

• Learning to labour - working class boys don’t put much effort into education because of fatalism