Functionalism, Conflict, and Interactionism

Functionalism, Conflict, and Interactionism

Introduction:

Class refers to economic position based on income, wealth, or a combination, as well as social expressions of class membership. More fundamentally, class refers to structural relationships based on control over wealth and its production. Research on class in curriculum mainly asks the extent to which curriculum enables children and youth to transcend their family's class or conversely, the extent to which it helps to reproduce the existing class structure, including the position of most individuals within that structure. Surprisingly, little research directly investigates these questions, although there is considerable theory about them, rooted in quite different perspectives. The primary question asked about class and curriculum from a functionalist perspective what the relationship is between educational attainment, student family background, and class mobility. The primary question that is asked from a critical perspective is in what ways curriculum contributes to the reproduction of the class structure and individuals' position within that structure. The primary question that is asked from an interpretive perspective is how do students from specific class backgrounds make sense of and respond to curriculum.

Functional Approach:

Education is connected in various ways with the economic, family, political and religious. Social institutions are complex structures. However, the functionalists recognize that the organic analogy cannot be taken too far. In the living organism the cells are programmed by nature to perform its functions. In society, these roles are filled by people who are not biologically programmed. If an institution has to function effectively, people must be forced or induced to fulfill their roles. This is where the functionality introduced the concepts of culture and socialization, and leaves the organic analogy (Weber, 1978). Durkheim is undoubtedly the key sociologist in the constitution of sociology of education as an autonomous field of social analysis. Not only was the first sociologist to hold a chair of sociology of education, but was the only one of the founding fathers of sociology reflected an explicit and extensive on education. In fact, his educational thought is shaped as an epistemological rupture with the pedagogy of his day, which constituted the hegemonic view on teaching doctrines opposed to the sociological perspective. The teachers saw education as essentially individual, so that pedagogy is a corollary of psychology. When disconnecting the educational analysis of social conditions just entering the metaphysical question of what is human nature (Young, 1971)?

Three aspects of the sociology of Durkheim were critical to the development of functionalist sociology of education. First develop the historical argument that the changes in education systems were the causal result of external social and economic changes in the society as a whole. Secondly he said that the specific features of educational structures and their cultural contents kept a strong relationship with the needs of society. Third, following the transition from a mechanical to organic one is more accurate identification and this is reflected in the changes in pedagogy and school organization (Sadovnik, 1995). Sociology of education is a continuation and deepening of general ...