Chapter 17: Education

“Sociology: A Down to Earth Approach” by James M. Henslin

Learning Objectives

Summarize the development of up to date learning and talk about the links between democracy, industrialization, and universal education.

Compare education in earlier societies; understand how and why the concept of education changes as society becomes more industrialized.

Compare the learning schemes of Japan, Russia, and Egypt, and converse about how they comprise the differences in education between Most Industrialized, Industrializing, and smallest Industrialized Nations.

From the functionalist viewpoint, recognise and assess the manifest and latent purposes of education.

From the functionalist perspective, identify how education has replaced certain family functions, the reasons for this transition, and what is the controversy that this situation has created.

From the confrontation viewpoint, interpret and talk about the different ways the learning system strengthens rudimentary communal inequalities.

Understand and specify what is intended by “the concealed curriculum” and the reasons it serves in the education system.

Chapter Summary

Education is the formal agent of socialization and a formal system for teaching knowledge, values, and skills. In earlier societies, education consisted of informal learning and was synonymous with acculturation, or the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. As societies developed a more effective method of agriculture that produced surpluses, a distinct institution evolved devoted to teaching. With industrialization, the approach to discovering moved from acculturation to a more prescribed system to rendezvous the desires of the industrializing society. The emerging industrial age created jobs that required workers to read, write, and work accurately with figures—the classic “three R's” of the nineteenth century: reading, writing, and arithmetic.

In general, prescribed learning reflects a nation's heritage and economy. Formal education is extensive in the Most Industrialized Nations such as Japan and the United States. The public school system can find its source to the “common schools” proposed by Horace Mann in 1837.

According to functionalists, the advantages of learning encompass the teaching of information and abilities, providing credentials, heritage transmission of values, social integration, gatekeeping, and mainstreaming. Many developed countries, such as the United States, have become credential societies in which diplomas and qualifications are utilised to work out job eligibility. Education furthermore presents a means to forge a national identity and stabilize the political system. Over the years, the functions of U.S. schools have expanded to rival family functions such as childcare and sex education, which has led to controversy since some families resent schools replacing parents in these roles.

Unlike functionalists, who gaze at the advantages of education, conflict theorists examine how education assists the elite to sustain their dominance. Conflict theorists contend that learning duplicates the social class structure. As such, they argue that the education system reinforces society's basic social inequalities. It does so through a hidden curriculum of unwritten goals such as the cultural transmission of obedience to authority, unequal funding of schools and the use of culturally biased IQ tests. Symbolic interactionists focus on face-to-face interactions interior the classroom, examining, for demonstration, how the anticipations of educators deeply sway students' ...