What is Education?

• Education is a formal system of teaching knowledge, values, an skills. Intended to develop the mind

• Industrialisation transformed education, machinery jobs and new jobs required workers to be able to read, write, and comprehend numbers accurately

The three r’s of the nineteenth century:

→ Reading

→ Writing (riting)

→ Arithmetic (rithmetic)

• By 1918, all U.S. state laws mandated education laws. These laws required children to attend school till they turned 16, or 8th grade.

• Dropouts: students who did not complete grade school. Political and civic leaders observed the transformation of the economy, they recognised the need for an educated workforce

• Formal education became essential in societies, as industrialization progressed. Farming became less popular

→ Graduating from school became very common

→ Free education stopped with high school

→ A central sociological principle of education is that a nation’s education reflects its culture

Education in the most industrialised nation: Japan

→ Core value: solidarity in a group, discourages competition among individuals, co-workers are not expected to compete with each other for a promotion, for example.

• Japanese Education:

→ Highly competitive college admission

→ Reflects group-centred approach to life

Education is the industrialising nation: Russia

→ After the russian revolution of 1917, soviet communist party changed the nation’s educational system

• Education was only for the elite, communists expanded education till it included all children

• Prevents critical thinking by decreasing social sciences courses

• Social sciences: study of individuals, societies, and communities

→ Economics, politics, sociology, psychology, law…

• Natural sciences: branch of science that deals with the physical world

→ biology, physics, chemistry

Education in the least industrialised nation: Egypt

→ Used to be the centre of learning, focused on astronomy, geography, philosophy, physics, maths, and medicine, largest library in the world was in Alexandria

• Egyptian education:

→ Few qualified teachers, crowded classrooms, one third to one half of egyptians were illiterate

Forms of education:

1. Most obvious function is to teach knowledge and skills

Sociologist Randall Collins observed that industrialised nations have become credential societies

• Employers depend on diplomas to determine who is eligible for a job

2. The cultural transmission of values

• A process in which schools pass on a society’s core values from generation to the next

• Schools in a socialist economy focus on values that support socialism, and capitalist societies stress on capitalism

• Regardless of a country’s economic system, loyalty to the state is a cultural value, and schools around the world teach patriotism

3. Schools bring about social integration

• Promote a sense of national identity by having students salute the flag and sing the national anthem. This means that a government is able to control the minds of children, by aiding them in adopting a specific agenda and mindset

• Conflict perspective: perpetuating social inequality

→ Educational system is a tool used by those in control to maintain their dominance

→ Education reproduces the social class structure, as well as society’s divisions of race-ethnicity

• Funnelling effect of education: children of certain ethnicities are guaranteed to get a good education while others are not

→ Regardless of ability, wealthy children are destined to go to college and poor children will not have that option