Marbury Education

AQA AS Sociology

Unit 2

Introduction to Sociological Perspectives on Education

This will give you an understanding about the role and purpose of education from a Marxist perspective.

For Marxists, education is all about supporting the existing distribution of power and wealth, commonly referred to as the status quo. Education is about maintaining order, control and ensuring that the dominant culture is passed on to the dominant class. So education isn’t a meritocracy, it is a cyclical process whereby the working class are failed by the system and the bourgeoisie succeed. The working class are manipulated into thinking that the system is fair through what Marxists call ‘false class consciousness.’ Exams appear fair but the wealthy have an economic and cultural advantage over the working class so the results are actually quite predictable. The wealthy can afford to go to elite public schools where the classes are small, the facilities first rate and the cultural experiences from frequent trips abroad all contribute to exam success. By contrast, the working class often experience overcrowded schools and classrooms, frequent changes of supply teacher, poor resources and institutions that have to deal with a range of socio-economic problems affecting students and their parents. Some understanding of the work of Marx himself would be useful as he argued that whoever dominated the economy would also dominate institutions like the religion, family, law, mass media and education. Although Marx didn’t single out education for specific analysis, if asked, he would have said that because the bourgeoisie own the means of production, the land the factories and the machinery, they will also dominate institutions like the education system. This doesn’t mean that the factory owners actually have to get involved in teaching or managing the system, it means that the culture of the system is biased, the values are bourgeois ones, assessment is designed to reflect existing power relationships and of course, the rich can buy a whole range of educational advantages. There are many criticisms of this general view and one of the main ones might be that it assumes the working class to helpless, unable to improve their educational standing and thus unable to achieve upward social mobility. I’m sure you know of people who came from quite modest circumstances who then went of to be successful through the opportunities education offered them.

The work of Boudon would also be useful as he argues that educational success is mostly dependent on the ‘secondary effects of stratification,’ namely how much money our family has. He calls this positional theory; so it’s your position in the class structure that largely determines what level of educational success you enjoy. One might criticise this by saying that Higher Education has undergone a long process of democratisation and far more working class people go to University than they ever did in the 1970’s. Furthermore, EMA, student loans, hardship funds and bursaries all help the economically disadvantaged. However, many of these things seem under attack by Government due to their very significant spending cuts across all areas of service provision.

Bourdieu is also another neo Marxist who was writing in the 1970’s and he had quite a bit to say which was interesting. For him, education is all about a cyclical process whereby the well off pass on cultural capital to their children and they use this in the education system to achieve high grades and entry to the best schools and this in turn leads to secure economic capital or high salaries. So what is cultural capital? This might include sophisticated language skills and a broad vocabulary, aspirational values and the valuable cultural experiences associated with the dominant social class like going to the theatre, ballet and museums. A child soaks this up like a sponge from being with their parents. Bourdieu refers to this as familial transmission of cultural capital. This all has implications for the notion of meritocracy in that educational achievement isn’t so much about intelligence and application but the possession of a culture which the education system is biased towards. So bourgeoisie culture has utility whilst working class culture is viewed as second rate, at least as far as the education system is concerned. Bourdieu has been criticised for appearing to say that one culture is better than the other but he’s not really saying that. He’s simply saying that our society is a capitalist one and that as a consequence the education system reflects the values and culture of the dominant class. If have this cultural capital you will be at an advantage and if not, the educational odds are stacked against you. However, one might criticise Bourdieu for being deterministic and for ignoring the fact that there is nothing stopping the working class from learning to develop cultural capital; if not from their parents, then from school, free libraries, free museums, galleries and the like. Cultural deprivation theorists would just say the opportunities are there to acquire cultural capital and the only reason why the working class don’t acquire it is because they either don’t have the motivation or the intelligence to do so. 

Bowles and Gintis, two American neo Marxists wrote Schooling in Capitalist America published in 1976. This was also a critical study in that they saw a covert learning process going on in schools. This was referred to as the hidden curriculum. Education moulded the working class into docile compliant but motivated workers who accepted their subordinate place in the factory and society. So breaking classes up into small groups and keeping the students on the move throughout the day helped to make them malleable. In short, the lessons weren’t the important thing, it was learning compliant attitudes and learning to accept authority which was the key purpose of the education system. One might argue that Bowles and Gintis have a point. Education is where we learn to obey those other than our parents because of the position they hold, not because of who they are. We have to obey the rules, defer to authority and generally go along with what is expected of us if we are to be rewarded with a paper qualification. Bowles and Gintis remarked that it wasn’t so much your intelligence or independence that led to good grades, it was you willingness to comply with rules and instructions. However, whilst this may have been true to an extent in the 1970’s, no employer wants an unthinking robot. Many of the skills required by employers today actually don’t fit the model of education described by Bowles and Gintis very well at all. Additionally, Bowles and Gintis appear to view educational authority as all powerful and the individual as weak, something in keeping with macro structural theories but if one looks the work of Paul Willis 1977 in his Learning to Labour, it is clear that many working class students, especially boys, break the rules and reject authority altogether.

So we’ve covered quite a bit and you will now have a good understanding about how Marx, Boudon, Bourdieu and Bowles and Gintis saw the role and purpose of education in a capitalist society. 

Tutorial enquiries to: studentsupport@marburyeducation.co.uk