"The Sole purpose of education is to prepare working-class children for a life of low status, manual work" Discuss.

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“The Sole purpose of education is to prepare working-class children for a life of low status, manual work” Discuss.

Introduction

In this essay I am going to be discussing the Marxist theory of education and the functionalist theory of education. Marxists are the groups of the social community/people that agree with the title of this essay because they say

Main Body

The Marxist theory of education says, “The nature of education is determined by the needs of the capitalist system”.

The working-class are taught to accept their position in the class structure, in carrying out this function. Education – like the media serves an ideological state apparatus, which benefits and legitimises the position of the bourgeoisie and the inequality within the capitalist system. Althusser is one of the sociologists that we have studied and the one main criticism would be that it remains a theory and he never had any evidence to back up and support his theory. Marxists say that Working-class children are taught to believe that their failure is their fault and that they are only going to do manual labour jobs and other jobs that are at the bottom of the class structure.

Another Marxist is Harry Braverman. He believed that education had three main roles. The first one of these roles was that they prepare working-class children for the tedium of their expected work by being tedious themselves. The second one is that schools act as childminders to the children whilst their parents are out at work. Braverman points out that raising the age at which children leave schools coincides with the increased need for women labourers.

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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.

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