Chapter Summary for Chapter 19
Education is often seen as a social good but, as the examples of Shaun and Sakina show, what education means is culturally and socially variable. Education is a social institution enabling and promoting the acquisition of knowledge, skills and broadening horizons. Schooling is the formal process through which certain types of knowledge and skills are delivered.
Durkheim argued that education is an important part both of the socialization process, which transmits culture and values between generations, and in the production of a skilled labour force. Functionalists such as Parsons saw education systems as promoting meritocracy: social worth being determined by ability and effort, not birth. This view has been challenged by conflict theorists who emphasize the significance of education systems in supporting existing structures of inequality.
Bowles and Gintis argued that schools operate on the correspondence principle: the structures of formal schooling correspond to the structures of workplaces in capitalist economies. Hence education via schooling is not a great leveller but a great divider. Illich focused on the hidden curriculum within compulsory schooling, including learning the dominant values of society and passive consumption. Instead, he argued for the de-schooling of society in order to promote a much broader experience of learning.
Bernstein points to the significance of language in the reproduction of social inequalities. Formal education is conducted in the language of the middle classes and thus favours those children. Bourdieu extends this argument beyond language codes, pointing to ways in which the education system values and develops particular kinds of cultural capital which is already owned and valued by the middle classes. Education systems thus legitimize and reproduce existing social inequalities.
In the 1970s, Willis investigated the experiences of working-class boys in secondary school, showing how interactions between groups of pupils within a school act to reproduce particular kinds of class-based masculinities. In doing so, rebellious sub-cultures help to reproduce the unskilled and semi-skilled workforce, developing anti-school values which lead to failure in school. In the 1990s, Mac an Ghaill studied similar school subcultures, finding evidence of a crisis of older forms of masculinity. This concern has been heightened as the previous underachievement of girls has, in recent years, been transformed as girls began to outperform boys. There are also some significant differences in the educational attainment of different ethnic groups in education systems.
Bourdieu’s perspective on forms of capital is an important development for the sociology of education. Cultural capital, which can be gained via the family and education, takes three forms: embodied, objectified and institutionalized. Recent studies in this vein have focused on the close relationship between families and education systems in the acquisition of cultural capital.
Educational debates on the existence and effectiveness of IQ have been sharply polarized with IQ advocates such as Hernstein and Murray arguing that IQ tests show clear differences across races and ethnic groups, whilst opponents such as Gould say that there are multiple intelligences that do not derive substantially from genetic inheritance. In recent years, theories of emotional intelligence and emotional literacy have gained some ground in educational debates.
Previously gendered education systems have given way to much more equal curricula today, though there still exists a hidden curriculum of dress codes and role models within textbooks that is strongly gender-typed. Studies of subject choice still reveal that the ‘hard’ sciences are male-dominated whilst the Arts are female-dominated. Nonetheless, in the developed countries, girls now do better than boys in most subjects at all levels, and the policy focus has shifted towards ‘failing boys’.
Educational experience and attainment differ across ethnic groups. Evidence from the UK suggests that the rate of exclusions from school has been rising for mixed white and black Caribbean students, with Chinese students having the lowest rate. Research studies have found that teachers in some schools stereotyped African Caribbean boys as disruptive and were quicker to reprimand them, whilst Asian pupils were perceived to be compliant and willing to learn. Asian and black pupils were also subject to racial abuse by white children.
Globally, many children in the developing countries struggle to gain access to education and illiteracy is widespread. Many colonial regimes saw literacy as a potential threat to their rule. In 2007 some 781 million adults did not have basic literacy skills and 64 per cent of these were women. In the developed countries, issues of choice and consumer freedom are at the centre of debates. Attempts to find measures of global comparison have included governments’ spending on public education and rates of primary school enrolment.
Modern mass education systems developed during the nineteenth century, coming quite late to Britain with the 1870 Education Act. Following the Second World War, political demands for equality ensured that an expanded state education system should be concerned to promote equality of opportunity. Moves towards comprehensive education in the 1960s and ’70s were also concerned to promote equality. As in other developed countries, education in Britain has undergone significant change since 1945 with the introduction of a national curriculum, city academies and the rapid expansion of higher education. The latter has raised serious issues of how such expansion should be financed.
The next big challenge for education systems is how best to make use of information technology (IT) in the classroom. Although IT offers many new opportunities and so-called e-universities operate across national boundaries, bringing higher education within the reach of more and more people, some also see the potential for creating a new ‘computer underclass’ as poorer social groups and countries fall behind the IT literate ones. One lesson from the sociology of education is that education systems tend to reinforce social inequalities just as much as they provide opportunities for advancement.
