Althusser (1971) believes that education is an ideological state apparatus (ISA) and disagrees that the main function of education is the transmission of common values. He argues that educations main function is to maintain, legitimate and reproduce generation by generation, class inequalities in wealth and power. Education is said to reproduce the conditions needed for capitalism to flourish without having to use force, instead, ideology gets the same result exerting its influence subconsciously. A way this could be done is through the hidden curriculum at schools, whereby the working class children are encouraged to conform to a capitalist system, through lower streaming and ‘failure’ labelling and as a result accept failure and inequality uncritically.
The capitalist society need people to do the low paid, hard labour, gritty jobs, they need students to fail, as high achieves would want to continue their education and aim for higher paid jobs. And the most likely class to fail is the working-class males, as they fulfil their ‘failure’ label, they are made to believe that they can’t achieve any higher, and as a result they turn to vocational courses instead, and so the capitalists get their work force, no questions asked, which results in a happy capitalist society. Vocational courses are said to train student for a particular work sector so that they can only steer towards that career in the future (student that attend pluming courses are very likely to have a career in pluming and maybe their children will pick up the trade ect).
‘Symbolic violence’ was the term used by Bourdieu (1977) to describe the means by which the working classes are effectively duped into accepting their failure and limited social mobility. As a result their cultural attributes are rejected because the system is defined by, and for, the middle-classes who succeed by default rather than greater ability.
Bowles and Gintis (1976) correspondence theory suggests that what goes on in school corresponds directly to the world of work. They argue that education serves to reproduce directly the capitalist relations of production with the appropriate skills and attitudes. Teachers are like the bosses and students as workers, teachers are to be respected and students are to work hard if they want to be rewarded (same as in a work place), also things like early start in the morning, being punctual (prepares students for the 9-5 day) ect. B and G however, point out that success is not entirely related to intellectual ability, and that those pupils who fit in and conform, rise above those who challenge the system. Schools therefore, reproduce sets of workers with the appropriate ways of being for the position that they come to occupy. The education system disguises this injustice through the myth of meritocracy. So therefore, the hidden curriculum of the school not only reproduces the relations of production, but it makes inequality in society seem legitimate and fair.
Many writers have criticised Bowles and Gintis for their failure to recognise a lack of correspondence between schools and the formal curriculum. They point out that the survival of liberal humanities-based subjects and limited emphasis on science and applied knowledge suggests a lack of correspondence. Furthermore, numerous studies show that many pupils have little regard for the rules of the school, and little respect for the authority of the teacher; they often reject the school values and form their own values and beliefs within a subculture. Paul Willis’s (1977) research ‘Learning to Labour’ showed that working class ‘lads’ learned to behave at school in ways quite at odds with capitalism’s supposed need for a docile workforce. As also supported by Item B, ‘having a laff’ prepares the lads to cope with manual work as the ‘laff is used to defeat boredom and fear and overcome hardship and problems’ that follow hard labour work. Willis supported the principle that schools reproduce the relations of production by demonstrating that the boys in the anti-school subcultures acted similarly to factory workers.
Item A reflects that schools need to improve because there is a problem within educational institutions. ‘they must support the hardworking, the inventive and the original’, this suggest that teachers haven’t been fully supporting student’s talents and therefore need to show support in able for student to reach their full potential. This doesn’t support the capitalist view of society as they believe that class determines success and not educational achievement, I believe the opposite of this, that education determines success and not class.
To conclude, on general I agree with some aspects of the Marxist perspective on education, I think there is a hidden curriculum set to prepare student for work, however I disagree with Althusser. I don’t think that educations main function is to produce class inequalities; I think education is there to teach pupils about different social classes, class doesn’t determine the job that you will get, education and qualifications do. I agree with the functionalist’s perspective in that all pupils have equal opportunity to achieve if they put in the effort and learn then it doesn’t matter what class you are, you can still be an excellent achiever and still be from a working-class background. However to some extent I do believe that the education system servers to maintain a capitalist society but only to some extent, I think education helps maintain any type of society.
Saida Murati