The third and final role of education that Braverman believed was that by making sure not as many children were on the job market, youth un-employment is hidden. We witness that the increasing provision made for the less qualified to stay on in full-time education past the age of 16.
To summarise, the Marxist argument is that education reproduces the class system and it socialises the labour force to accept other people. Working-Class believe that their failure in work and in particular when a limited amount of success within the working-class group takes place in society.
Now I’ve covered the Marxist role of education, the Functionalist role of education is quite a bit different.
For functionalists, the emphasis is upon the social consensus, involving shared norms, values, beliefs and so forth. Society, in this respect, is interpreted as a functioning system that operates for the ultimate benefit of all.
Functionalists see society like the different parts of a human body. This is because they argue that just like the body needs all parts to be working for the bodily functions to work, all parts of society need to be working together for society to work. They call this a ‘biological analogy’.
Functionalists also argue that everything in society is functional for everyone e.g. if someone goes out and commits a crime towards someone/something else that’s playing a part in society, than everyone gets something good out of it in the long run.
One of the functionalist’s views is that the education system is an institution that “broadens the individual’s experience” of the social world around us all. It prepares us all for adult role relationships.
In functionalist terms, an education system has two basic functions:
- Firstly, an education function – preparing individuals for the roles that they will play in their adult lives. Therefore, people have to be socialised into the knowledge and skills that a society requires if it is to function technologically.
- Secondly, and equally important to the first function, an education system was seen to promote social solidarity (that is, a sense of social unity) by promoting an understanding of the world, experience of collective behaviour and experience of the collective consciousness necessary for the integration of individuals into the social collective called “society”.
According to sociologists school provides a transitional phase in an individual’s life between the family and the workplace. The needs and demands of the workplace are socialised in an individual in a context free from home pressures.
In effect to this, one important function on the school is to slowly and gradually socialise people into the type of relationship that is found in the workplace and wider society generally.
People learn the basic ways to behave gentler and more forgiving in the environment of the adult world of work. Within the school, therefore, people learn instrumental relationships without facing the consequences of failing to understand their significance. The school is an agency of secondary socialisation.
Another role of education, according to this form of analysis, is that of the “co-ordination of human resources” (that is, understanding the broad needs of the workplace and fulfilling them in a national system of learning, qualifications and so forth).
- In complex social systems, with a variety of different types of employment, societies must develop ways of managing their human resources. Whilst a society may need people such as doctors, dentists, accountants, police officers and manual labourers, there is no need in producing so many trained doctors that can’t get employed because of the amount of doctors that are already using those jobs.
- The co-ordination of human resources, therefore, refers to the way people behave: selected for various types of training, made different to every other person in some way (such as, in modern societies, through the possession of educational qualifications) and then allocated to different adult roles.
- In functionalist terms, therefore, the institution that can be safely charged with this aspect of co-ordination is the educational system, since is exists in a form that enables it to focus on and carryout various tasks.
In my essay I think that I have completed both views on education, from both the Marxist and functionalist views. The title is true to a Marxist but not so much to a Functionalist. Marxists role of education is seen to teach children in the working-class that they are not important enough to enter the middle-class or the upper class.
The evidence that I have found for this essay is supported most by the functionalist view whereas the title question is actually a Marxist view.