Emile Durkheim suggested the idea of differentiation. He said that as societies develop and become more complex, they need to enhance the division of labour and provide specialist agencies for executing this function. Education takes over the role which is previously filled by the family. At the level of individuals, industrial societies require specialists and education is seen as providing the appropriate educational output. The existence of a connection between personal abilities and industrial needs is assumed by the tendency towards meritocracy, people come to fill particular positions on the basis of achievement instead of their ascribed characteristics. However, although achievement is more important in society, social class, gender and ethnicity are also important in the sense that the quality of a person’s educational achievement can be related to their ascribed characteristics.
Davis and Moore linked the education system more directly with the system of social stratification. Social stratification is said by functionalists to be a mechanism for making sure that the most talented and able people in society are paired with positions that are functionally the most important in society.
A criticism of functionalism is that it seems to place too much emphasis on the power of the school in regards to shaping peoples attitudes. Functionalism seems to overlook the role of the family once the child is at school when it comes to obeying rules. Instead of viewing school as helping to play a part in discipline alongside the family, it suggests that by respecting the school rules the child will learn how to respect rules in general. But most children tend to learn to respect rules from a young age, before they even start school, for example; a three year old child can be told that if she does not eat all of her dinner, then she will not have desert, or a toddler who tends to throw tantrums and does not listen to his parents when told to is likely to be disciplined in some form, maybe by sending the child to his bedroom or by taking away something that the child enjoys for a little while such as a favourite toy. So schools should really be seen to work alongside the family in order to help the child learn to obey rules and behave well and not just as a take over form the family once the child is at school.
For Marxists, education is apart of the superstructure of society. The superstructure is regarded as being ultimately subordinate to the base the economic organisation of society. The economic arrangements of a society structure the holding of wealth and capital and create social classes.
Henry Giroux suggested that working class children actively help to shape their own education because they do not accept everything that they are taught and their behaviour is not completely determined by capitalism. From this point of view, the failure of so many pupils in schools is not a failing of the system but actually what the schooling system is designed to do. So working class children who drop out r fail are indicators that schooling is working successfully. In contrast to the functionalist view that education is designed to develop human potential, this view say’s that education is designed to in fact limit it.
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis argue that there is a close correspondence between the social relationships which control a personal interaction in the work place and the social relationships of the education system.
Marxist theory suggests that one of the functions of education is to provide capitalists with a workforce that provides the most useful traits for them. The education system succeeds in achieving objectives mainly through the hidden curriculum. Bowles and Gintis suggest that high grades are awarded to the pupils who are punctual, consistent, dependable and persevering whereas low grades are given to the pupils who are creative, aggressive and independent, which means that grades are not awarded in accordance with the pupils academic abilities, but instead they are awarded depending on their personality traits.
Another theory put forward by Bowles and Gintis is that there is a hidden curriculum which encourages an acceptance of hierarchy. The teacher is at the top of the chain of command and control and the pupils have to listen and conform. Pupils tend to not have any control in regards to the subjects that they study and they are used to being given orders from the teachers which they must obey. This prepares them for the social hierarchy that they will encounter when they go to work, where they will have to listen to orders form their managers and supervisors and they will have to comply with those orders, just as they do at school.
Another Marxist view is that high educational achievement easier to influence depending on class background. Although education is free to every child, the children whose parents are wealthy and powerful will attain high qualifications and as a result of this will then get highly rewarded jobs regardless of their abilities. Those from a poor background may have the academic capabilities but because they lack the necessary class status, they will not be able to achieve as highly as those with the inherited social status.
The Bowles and Gintis theory on the hidden curriculum places itself open to criticism because it appears to generalise. They appear to have carried out little research to back the theory up and as a result they have classed education as being class prejudiced. They give the view that the children who descend from a wealthy background are given a better opportunity because they obtain better qualifications regardless of their abilities and so they obtain better jobs with substantial rewards. But to argue this view, surely most employers would rather have workers who are able to do the job and committed to gaining promotion and reward through hard work instead of using the status of being wealthy and high class to succeed? It wouldn’t take long for an employer to realise that the worker they have taken on is in fact not as well educated as their qualifications would make out they were, but had received favouritism at school due to class status and in fact could not do the job as well as somebody who perhaps had a lower class background, but had worked hard to achieve their qualifications and not bought their way in to academic achievement. So the idea of the hidden curriculum just doesn’t seem to be able to support the theory that an educational system that is so prejudiced would be able to survive.
The interactionist theory looks at the interaction between students and teachers and also interaction amongst fellow peers. It looks at how these interactions may affect the performances of pupils in the educational system.
Interactionist theory suggests that a teacher will type or categorise pupils as bright or troublesome, good or bad. David Hargreaves, Stephen Hester and Frank Mellor argue that teachers make sense of and respond to a student in terms of the way in which they have typed them. Hargreaves et al distinguish three stages of typing. The first stage is said to be where the teacher will speculate about the type of pupil they are dealing with, according to appearance, ability and enthusiasm, fellow peer relationships, personality and on how obedient the pupil is. At this speculation stage, teachers might change their views if they are proved to have been misled in their judgement. The second stage is elaboration, the opinions that the teacher has formed about the type of student in the speculation stage are tested and either proven correct or incorrect. Whatever the outcome is in this stage, the teacher’s confidence in the way that they judge their typing is refined. The final stage is stabilisation. The teacher assumes that he knows and understands the pupil and is normally not surprised by the way the pupil acts or what the pupil might say. The teacher evaluates the pupil’s actions and types them into a category, once they have been put in a category such as disobedient; it is difficult for the teacher to adapt a positive view of the pupil.
Aaron Cicourel and John Kitsuse argue that students are labelled in accordance with their social class. If students are from a middle or upper class background, then the teacher is more likely to label them as having natural higher education prospects and so they will be placed on top level courses, whereas the lower class students would be placed on low level courses, even if students from the different classes had similar grades. This is referred to as streaming.
Hargreaves and Lacey have the theory that a students self perceptions are influenced strongly by the stream in which they are placed in. Teachers have lower expectations of lower band pupils and tend to interact with them in a different way. This causes the lower band pupils to feel denied of status, which leads them to take an anti-school attitude and seek out others who are labelled as troublemakers and award high status to pupils who break the school rules. This leads to pupil subcultures being formed.
The interactionist theory can be criticised for not acknowledging the fact that not all students respond to labelling and streaming in a negative way. Lots of people are motivated to achieve success in the face of those who have labelled them as failures in order to prove them wrong. So students may go the opposite way of how they have been labelled and devote their time to working hard and achieving good qualifications in order to go against the stereotype that has been applied to them. Likewise a student who is streamed onto a high level course and is expected to achieve, may want to rebel against what everybody else expects of them and so they may become a trouble maker and start to underachieve in order to defy the teacher who has typed them as an achiever. It is hard to understand what kind of effect labelling and streaming will have on a person, because everybody is different and just because some pupils are of the opinion that if they are going to be labelled as a troublemaker and streamed onto a low level course, then they might as well act as how they are expected to act and live up to the label placed on them, but this doesn’t mean that all pupils who are labelled and streamed will behave in the same manner.
In conclusion, all of the theories that have been outlined in this essay seem to agree that social class background plays a major role in educational achievement. Both functionalist and Marxist theories agree that the school plays the role of socialising students into the prevailing norms and values of a society. Interactionist theories are mainly concerned with the interactions that a student has with their tutor and fellow peers at school, if a pupil has negative interactions with a tutor, it will encourage them to perform badly in the subject.
Bibliography
Sociology Themes and Perspectives by Haralambos and Holborn
