F soc usic lecture eight

Effective from September 2015 | F_Soc USIC Sociology week 8– Society
Contents
1.Review from Lecture Seven
2.Education in Contemporary England
3.Education and social mobility
4.Gender and Education
5.Ethnicity and Education
6.Conclusion
7.Homework
sheffield.ac.uk/international-college 2

Review from Lecture Seven
 Last week we learned about the significance of identity in
explaining why people act the way they do and reviewed forms of
socialisation.
 In the next two weeks we will be introducing two major social
institutions that contribute to the formation of human identities.
These are education and media.

Education and Schooling
(Giddens and Sutton 2015: 870):
):
Education is one of the sociology’s founding subjects and crucial for the
transmission of society’s values and moral rules to new members.
•Education: a social institution which enables and promotes the
acquisition of skills, knowledge and the broadening of personal horizons
which can take place in many social settings .
• Schooling: the formal process through which certain types of skill and
knowledge are delivered normally via a pre-designed curriculum in
specialised setting -schools.
Question:
What Mark Twain (1835-1910) means by his note ‘I never let my
schooling get in the way of my education’?

 As a significant social institution, education has strong
connections with other social structures such as social class,
gender, religion and ethnicity.
 Durkheim who was concerned with increasing individualism in
the 19th
century French society viewed education as a place to
transmit society’s norms and values and essential to establish
social solidarity.
 The school is a society in miniature where children learn to
interact with other members of the school community and to
follow a set of rules and social norms/values.

 Taking Durkheim's view further, Parsons believed that education
acts as a bridge between the family and society. It helps the
young members of the society to make a transition into the world
of adults.
 Different from the family context, in school a child’s status is
achieved through assessments designed to measure
performance according to universal standards. Therefore, schools
operate on a meritocratic basis where children achieve their
status according to their merits.

History of Education in England
In the early 19th
century the Church of England was responsible for
most education until the establishment of free, compulsory education
towards the end of that century.
The education system has followed a similar path, resulting in the
development of two separate education streams:
1.State schools – came about in 1833 when Parliament voted to
allocate sums of money each year towards the construction of
schools for poor children
2.Independent schools – funded by charities and run by
independent school boards. Open to the public regardless of
religious beliefs, later termed public schools.

As a result of Foster Act of 1870 school attendance became
compulsory for children between the ages of 5-10 years with
exceptions for illness, if children worked or lived too far from school.
In 1880 the Elementary Education became compulsory for all children
within that age range.
While this shift was made with good intentions it also created
difficulties for poor families who relied on their children’s paid or unpaid
work.

 In contemporary England state schools are free to all children
between the ages of 4 -16 years and funded by government.
 Independent or private schools are fee based and less common in
the UK with 7% of children enrolled. They are available from
nursery to secondary school (16 years of age).
 93% of children in England and Wales attend state schools.
 State schools are managed by Local Authorities; organisations that
are officially responsible for all the public services and facilities in a
particular area.
 In state schools most of the child’s specialised educational
equipment (e.g. books, examination fees) are paid through taxes.
Education in Contemporary England

 Social Mobility is the movement—usually of individuals but
sometimes of whole groups—between different positions within
the system of social stratification in any society (Oxford
Dictionary of Sociology ).
 Social mobility rate in each society signifies the ability to move
up or down the class structure. It is concerned with the changes
people from different backgrounds have on attaining
different social positions.
Education & Social Mobility

There are two main ways to measure social mobility:
1.Inter-Generational – refers to the movement between generations,
such as the difference between a parent and their adult child’s
occupational position.
2.Intra-Generational – refers to an individual’s mobility over the
course of their life, comparing the position of someone’s starting
occupation with their occupation upon retirement.

The relationship between education and social mobility is argued by
some to be directly related to state and independent streams of
education . The type of education an individual obtains can determine
their degree of social mobility. Statistics from the British Social
Attitudes Survey of 2013 support this argument indicating that:
 34% of privately educated people have fathers whose jobs were
professional or managerial, compared with 14% of those who were
state educated.
 Over half of those who were privately educated had a professional or
managerial job compared to 29% who were state educated.
One in five people who attended fee-paying schools are placed in the
top 10 percentile of the income distribution.

Functionalist view on the relationship between education and the
economy:
Regards education as a bridge between family and the economy.
A vehicle for social mobility: believe that it is necessary for people to be
allowed to move up or down the occupational social structure.
This guarantees that important social positions are filled by those that
are more qualified.
Upward mobility is believed to be earned through individual merit and
attainment of educational qualifications.
Functionalist view on Education

 Meritocracy : Educational institutions in modern industrial
societies empower individuals to demonstrate their
differences in objective ways. The system rewards individual
abilities and efforts and is competitive but competition must be
based on equal opportunity.
 In other words, everyone, regardless of social class,
race/ethnicity and gender start at the same point in the
education system.
 Under Functionalist views social inequality is inevitable and
necessary because incentive systems are required to
motivate and reward the best-qualified people for occupying
the most important positions within a social system.

Marxist perspective takes the opposite approach to the Functionalists’
argument on meritocracy.
They argue that education is not a source of social mobility in modern
industrial societies but a means for the ruling or wealthy classes to
cement their privileged social position.
Marxists argue that this happens by ensuring that social inequality
persists through a system that appears to be fair but which is actually
biased in the favour of those already in power.
For Marxists the role of education is to educate most people, just
enough to create useful employees and a small number to take up the
high-powered elite working roles.
As a result , education becomes a means of reproducing the social
inequalities found in Capitalist societies.
Marxist View on Education: reproduction of social
inequality

 Even when children of lower-class families are able to attain
higher education, Marxists argue that as a population becomes
‘more educated’ powerful groups simply raise the entry
requirements for elite occupations.
 Thus, while children may gain more and better educational
qualifications than their parents or grandparents, the economic
value of these qualifications declines.

 The structures of social relations in education develops the types of personal
demeanours, modes of self-presentation, self-image, and social class identifications
and social relationships … all replicate the hierarchical divisions of labour in
capitalist societies.
 Through hidden curriculum pupils learn to accept discipline, hierarchy and passivity
towards the status quo.
 Correspondence principle: Schools help to produce the right kind of workers for
capitalist businesses. The structure of school life corresponds to the
structure of working life in terms of rewards, punishments, tasks, hierarchy… etc.
 Therefore education is not a ‘great leveller’ which treats people equally and widens
opportunities to all classes, but in fact ‘great divider’ which reproduces social
inequality.
Critics: a. Regards pupils as passive agents. B. not based on empirical research.
Schooling for Capitalism, Bowles and Gintis 1976
(adopted from Giddens and Sutton 2015:873)

 Throughout the 20th
century girls tended to outperform boys in terms
of school results – until they reached the middle years of
secondary education. At that point they would begin to fall behind
where boys outperformed girls from the age of 16 years through
university.
 A series of sociological studies discovered that school curricula and
teachers were focusing more on boys education than girls.
 However, in recent years, underachieving boys are one of the main
subjects of conversation among educators and policy-makers.
 Since the early 1990s girls have been outperforming boys in all
levels of education and more likely to pursue higher education.
Gender & Education

 Despite this, ‘maleness’ still carries significant economic and
cultural advantages which are denied to women.
 While more girls are pursuing higher education they are still
less likely than boys to choose subjects in school leading to
careers in technology, science and engineering.
 So while females continue to enter into higher education in
greater numbers, they also continue to be disadvantaged in the
job market in comparison with boys who hold the same level of
qualification.
Gender & Education

 The educational trajectories of ethnic minorities have been
investigated in great detail. A report in 1985 from the Swann
Committee in the UK found significant differences in average
levels of educational success between groups from different
ethnic backgrounds.
 By the mid-1990’s the picture had changed suggesting that
young people from all minority ethnic backgrounds were more
likely than white British children continue into full-time
education from the ages of 16-19 years.
 Student record statistics from 1995-1996 and 2007-2008
school years demonstrated that students from minority ethnic
groups in UK higher education rose by about 8.3% or one in six
students.
Ethnicity & Education

There are some large differences between minority groups
British Bangladeshi and Pakistani students were under-
represented in the 1990s and remained so in 2007-2008.
Black, Asian and other minority ethnic groups found it more
difficult in the labour market, with 56 percent in work within a
year of graduation compared with 66 percent of white students.
Despite their greater rates of enrolment in higher education the
ethnic minorities are not benefitting as much from their education
than their white peers.
Ethnicity & Education

 Research suggest that forms of education i.e private
versus state schools, play an important role in creating
and maintaining social inequality in the UK.
 Functionalist and Marxist perspectives offer contrasting
views on the impact of education on social mobility.
 Research also suggest that children from minority
ethnic backgrounds tend not to do as well in their
education and/or job market as their white peers.
 Research also suggest that despite females’ higher
admission rate to higher education , they also continue to
be disadvantaged in the job market in comparison with
boys who hold the same level of qualification.
Conclusion

•Review lecture slides and prepare questions for seminar
one.
•For this week’s seminars , please review Giddens and
Sutton 2015 ’ pp.868-873 & pp 887 – 891 & pp 893-898
[all available on MOLE] and take notes.
Homework

F soc usic lecture eight

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