Sociology of education

1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias The sociology of education is the study of how public institutions and individual experiences affect education and its outcomes.

It is mostly concerned with the public schooling systems of modern industrial societies, including the expansion of higher, further, adult, and continuing education.

[2] It is understood by many to be a means of overcoming handicaps, achieving greater equality, and acquiring wealth and social status.

[3] Many would say that the purpose of education should be to develop every individual to their full potential, and give them a chance to achieve as much in life as their natural abilities allow (meritocracy).

Some take a particularly critical view, arguing that the education system is designed with the intention of causing the social reproduction of inequality.

These all implied that, with industrialization, the need for a technologically skilled labour force undermines class distinctions and other ascriptive systems of stratification, and that education promotes social mobility.

[1] Sociological studies showed how schooling patterns reflected, rather than challenged, class stratification and racial and sexual discrimination.

[1] After the general collapse of functionalism from the late 1960s onwards, the idea of education as an unmitigated good was even more profoundly challenged.

Neo-Marxists argued that school education simply produced a docile labour force essential to late-capitalist class relations.

More recent work in this tradition has broadened its focus to include gender,[8][9] ethnic differentials[10] and international differences.

This explains why individuals act as role incumbents and perform specific tasks on a regular basis as manifested at the level of observable event.

The educational setting introduces students to social networks that might last for years and can help people find jobs after their schooling is completed.

Another latent function is the ability to work with others in small groups, a skill that is transferable to a workplace that might not be learned in a home school setting.

[3][24] Many teachers assume that students will have particular middle class experiences at home, and for some children this assumption isn't necessarily true.

[25] The demands of this domestic labour often make it difficult for them to find time to do all their homework and thus affects their academic performance.

[21] Wilson & Wyn state that the students realise there is little or no direct link between the subjects they are doing and their perceived future in the labour market.

Sargent believes that for working-class students, striving to succeed and absorbing the school's middle class values, are accepting their inferior social position as much as if they were determined to fail.

[3] Fitzgerald states that "irrespective of their academic ability or desire to learn, students from poor families have relatively little chance of securing success".

Conflict theorists believe this social reproduction continues to occur because the whole education system is overlain with ideology provided by the dominant group.

[3] Wright agrees, stating that "the effect of the myth is to…stop them from seeing that their personal troubles are part of major social issues".

[3] The duplicity is so successful that many parents endure appalling jobs for many years, believing that this sacrifice will enable their children to have opportunities in life that they did not have themselves.

[25] Conflict theorists believe that the educational system is maintaining the status quo by dulling the lower classes into being obedient workers.

[17] Additionally, conflict theorists including Bowles and Gintis argued that schools directly reproduce social and economic inequalities embedded in the capitalist economy.

They believed that this conflict played out in classrooms where students were marked by larger and highly stratified economic structure.

Whether or not current leaders in sociology agreed with Bowles and Gintis, they all undeniably came to operate in fields guided by these ideas.

[27] However Bourdieu as a social theorist has always been concerned with the dichotomy between the objective and subjective, or to put it another way, between structure and agency.

Coleman inspired many of the current leaders of sociology of education, but his work also led to a heightened focus on empiricism.

The process of social reproduction is neither perfect nor complete,[29] but still, only a small number of less-privileged students achieve success.