2.  Durkheim: Solidarity and Skills
 Two main functions of education:
 Creating social solidarity
 Teaching specialist skills
Social Solidarity:
 Durkheim argues that society needs a sense of solidarity;
individual members must feel themselves to be part of a single
'body' or community.
 He argues that without social solidarity, social life and
cooperation would be impossible as each individual would
pursue their own selfish desires.
 The education system helps to create social solidarity by
transmitting society's culture (shared beliefs) from one
generation to another.
 School acts as a 'society in miniature', preparing children for life
in wider society. E.g. both in school and work you are taught to
co operate with people who are not related to you.

3. Specialist Skills:
 The cooperation of many different specialists
promotes social solidarity but , for it to be
successful, each person must have the necessary
specialist knowledge and skills to perform their role.
 Durkheim argues that education teaches individuals
the specialist knowledge and skills that they need to
play their part in the social division of labour.

4.  Parsons: Meritocracy
 Meritocracy- The idea that everyone has an equal
opportunity to succeed and where individuals' rewards and
status are achieved by their own efforts rather than
ascribed by their gender, class or ethnic group.
 Acts as a bridge between the family and wider society.
 The bridge is needed because family and society operate on
different principles, so children need to learn a new way of
living if they are able to cope with the wider world.
 Within the family, the child's status is ascribed; particular
rules apply to only that particular child.
 By contrast both school and wider society judge us all by
the same universalistic and impersonal standards. Each
pupil is judged against the same standards e.g. they all sit
the same exam.
 Likewise in both school and wider society, a person's status
is achieved not ascribed e.g. working hard for a promotion.
 Parsons sees school as preparing us to move from the
family to wider society because school and society are both
based on meritocratic principles.

5.  Davis and Moore: Role Allocation
 Like Parson's, Davis and Moore also see education as a
device for selection and role allocation, but they focus on
the relationship between education and social inequality.
 They argue that inequality is necessary so that the most
important roles in society are filled with the most talented
people.
 Not everyone is equally talented, so society has to offer
higher rewards for these jobs thus creating competition as
everyone will now compete for these jobs.
 Education plays a key part in this process as it acts as a
proving ground for ability.
 Education 'sifts and sorts' everyone according to ability.
 The most able gain the highest qualifications, which then
gives them entry to the most important and highly
rewarded positions.

6.  Evaluation of the Functionalist Perspective
 There is evidence that equal opportunities in
education don't exist. E.g. achievement is greatly
influenced by class background rather than ability.
 Marxists argue that education in capitalist society only
transmits the ideology of a minority- the ruling class.
 The interactionalist, Dennis Wrong argues that
functionalists have an 'over-socialised view' of people
as mere puppets of society. Functionalists wrongly
imply that pupils passively accept all they are taught
and never reject the school's values.
 The New Right argue that the state education system
fails to prepare young people adequately for work. This
is because state control of education discourages
efficiency, competition and choice.

7.  The New Right favour the marketisation of education as
schools are run like businesses and have to attract consumers
(parents) by competing with each other. Schools provide
consumers with what they want (good exam results) so that
they 'don't go out of business'.
 The New Right is similar to Functionalism in many ways e.g.
they believe that people are naturally talented.
 However the key difference is that the New Right do not
believe the current education system is achieving these goals.
This is because it is run by the state.
 The state take a 'one size fits all' approach. The local
consumers who use the school such as parents, pupils as well
as employers have no say or input in the educational system.
 Schools in which waste money or have poor results are not
answerable to their consumers. Which means that pupils
potentially have lower standards of achievement.

8.  Chubb and Moe: Consumer choice
 Chubb and Moe argue that the American state education has
failed and they make the case for opening it up to market
forces of supply and demand. They make a number of claims:
 Disadvantaged groups- The lower classes have been badly
served by the state as it has failed to create equal opportunity.
 State education fails to produce pupils needed by the
economy.
 Private schools have higher quality education as they are
answerable to those who are paying- the parents.
 Chubb and Moe based this on the achievements of 60,000
pupils from low income families in 1,015 state and private
schools and parents' surveys. They found that low-income
families do about 5% better in private schools. Chubb and Moe
call for a market system that would put control in the hands of
the consumers (parents) thus allowing them to meet their own
needs. For this to work Chubb and Moe would propose the end
of guaranteed funding to schools and the introduction of
vouchers given to each family to spend on buying education.

9.  Two roles for the State
 The state imposes a framework on schools within which they
have to compete e.g. by publishing league tables of exam
results.
 The state ensures that schools transmit a shared culture.
 Evaluation of the New Right Perspective
 Marxists argue that education doesn't impose a shared
national culture, and argues that it imposes the culture of a
dominant minority ruling class.
 Gewirtz and Ball argue that competition between schools
benefit the middles class.
 Critics would argue that real cause of low educational
standard isn't the state control but social inequality and
adequate funding of state schools.
 There is contradiction between the support of new rights
parents choice on one hand and the state imposing a
compulsory national curriculum all its schools on the other.