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EDUCATION
A process and a social institution
Training Handout
Education is more than just about learning
Education differs from socialisation
in that it is, or is supposed to be, planned, with clear goals set out
for what students learn. See my rant on
Education and Socialization.
Education, as well as a processm, is a social
institution.
It is a set of organisations
designed to educate young people in society.
When children first go to pre school,
kindergarten, elementary and secondary school, they learn new ways of operating,
interacting with other students and staff in a new community, and necessarily
must be socialised.
As with other secondary socialisation,
this aspect of education is not usually planned, is not particularly part
of the curriculum, and tends to be spontaneous and ad hoc.
The experience can produce some anxiety
among pupils, and many schools have councillors who assist children in
the required adjustment.
As among other institutions of where
socialisation takes place, schools contribute to gender socialisation,
with separate bathrooms for boys and girls, dress codes, and encouragement
to take one course or another.
Fifty years ago girls were not expected
to do well in maths and sciences, and were urged to take home economics
rather than industrial arts.
Now there is more emphasis on encouraging
girls to do well in the sciences, and more tolerance for aggressive and
unrestrained behaviour by boys, reducing their saleable skills in society
after they leave school.
An educational institution is one which creates and magnifies
inequality.
Children of wealthy parents tend
to go to “better” schools which have bigger budgets and more
services.
The principle of "equal opportunity"
really means the opportunity to compete and its result is always inequality.
It does not produce equality.
Students are evaluated and graded
and higher grades mean greater access to further educational opportunities,
and later to more and better paid jobs.
In a complex post industrial society
like ours, as in industrial societies, people usually are not known as
whole people, but as the various roles they play.
This is a product and symptom of
gesellschaft.
Many employers, therefore, offer
jobs on the basis of applicants having certificates of education, even
if the content of that education is not directly related to the skills
and knowledge needed for the offered job.
We say, then, that we have a credential society.
This means some persons who can do
a better job, are not hired while persons with the needed certificates,
perhaps not the same level of ability, get the job.
Education performs a role of “gate
keeping,” filtering some people out of access to some jobs, and letting
in others.
See the lecture notes
on Social
Promotion.
We often distinguish between education and training.
Education is the acquisition of knowledge
while training is the acquisition of skills, although there is considerable
overlap between them.
In the Community Empowerment site,
the training provided goes much further than the usual definition of training.
See “Training as
Mobilisation.”
As we would expect, sociologists
looking at education tend to look at different things according to the
perspective
they favour.
Functionalists usually look at how
education contributes to the functioning of society, providing training
in skills and education in knowledge which help society to
operate.
Gate keeping is seen as a necessity
to the functioning of a meritocracy. Education helps in integrating individuals
into complex society.
Education is seen as available for any needed
social
change.
Conflict sociologists, in contrast,
see the role of education in maintaining inequality, and therefore privilege
to some but not others.
They see IQ tests as culturally biased,
and see unequal funding of schools, both contributing to inequality and
maintenance of the vertical mosaic, serving the purposes of the
power elite.
They describe the “hidden curriculum”
as things taught in schools but not written in the curricula, obedience
to authority, conformity to mainstream or bourgeois values, and norms,
the Protestant work ethic, and other things which maintain the support
by the middle class for the upper classes.
As usual, the symbolic interactionists
examine at the micro level, looking at interactions between pupils, teachers,
and any others in the classroom.
They find, for example, that teachers
often make judgements in the first week or so, based on subtle hints such
as dress, skin and hair, body language and dialect, and categorise pupils
by ethnicity, class and family background.
On these they base expectations about
how and how well the pupils will do in school. They then spend much
of the remainder of their time ensuring that these were self justifying
prophesies.
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2011.08.16
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