Using information from items A and B and elsewhere, asses the view that the education system serves to maintain capitalist society

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Using information from items A and B and elsewhere, asses the view that the education system serves to maintain capitalist society’.

 

The education system is one of the most influential institutions in our society, as it ‘breeds’ children knowledge and skills from a very young age (4-5) all the way to young adulthood (16-18), through set lessons or through the hidden curriculum. Education is said to supply a capitalist society with a perfect workforce by ensuring, for example, working class student do working class jobs.

 For the Marxist, education is seen as an important part of the superstructure of society. It is believed to serve the needs of the economic base; this base shapes the superstructure, while the superstructure maintains the base. It is believed by Marx that education performs two main functions in a capitalist society; it reproduces the inequalities and social relations of production of capitalist society and it serves to legitimate these inequalities through the myths of meritocracy, instead of education being merely to teach pupils skills such as literacy and numeracy and to teach common values.

On the other hand Functionalist argue that education has three broad functions in society; socialisation (education is said to help maintain society by socialising young people into key cultural values); skill provision (Education teaches the skills required by a modern industrial society); and role allocation (Education allocates people to the most appropriate job for their talents, using examinations and qualifications).

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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, ...

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