Education and society

Education, schooling, and their importance

We use the term education to refer to the process by which we transfer or gain knowledge and skills. While such education can happen in many places (in the workplace, in the family, etc.), the sociology of education tends to focus on schools, those formal sites where education is transmitted.

Decades of research on education has demonstrated the education offers important benefits to individuals.

For example, on average, those with higher levels of education:

• earn higher salaries;

• have better cognitive, problem-solving and critical thinking skills;

• get more desirable jobs;

• suffer lower levels of unemployment;

• divorce at a lower rate; and

• experience better mental and physical health

Theories of education/schools and society

What are theories good for, if anything?

It can be useful to think of social theories are “just ideas about how things fit together.” We can use theories as a way to make sense of the facts that we observe in the world and to make predictions about future outcomes in particular contexts.

The sociology of education offers us a number of theories that can help us see the role that schools play in society and the reasons why we see the particular educational patterns and outcomes that we do.

The major theoretical paradigms

Functionalist theory

This theoretical perspective sees society as one big, complex machine with many inter-connected parts that must work together for the whole to function successfully. From the perspective, the role of education is to prepare people to fulfill the many different roles and occupations needed for society to function smoothly.

Important concepts from the perspective are: sorting and latent and manifest functions

Conflict theory

This theoretical perspective sees society more like a battlefield or a chessboard. Different groups are in competition with one another for access to a range of valued resources that can ensure their class position, their social status, and their life chances.

From this perspective, schools are sites of this larger conflict or competition among social groups.

Important concepts from this perspective are: the achievement ideology, social reproduction, and social and cultural capital.

Social interactionist theory

From this perspective we might look at society as a stage.

Social interactionists pay serious attention to the often taken-for-granted, everyday interactions at school, within the hallways, classrooms, and playgrounds.

Among the important concepts from this perspective are: teacher’s expectations and the ways that everyday interactions shape the identities of students, contribution to the production of “good” and “smart” students, as well as students are are disciplinary “problems.”

Small-group discussion

Break off into small groups.

Debate with one another about what you see as the strengths and weaknesses of each of these three theoretical paradigms in explaining the relationship between schools and society.

Try to appropriately use some of the concepts associated with each theory (sorting, latent functions, achievement ideology, cultural capital, etc.).

(re)Production of inequalities in school

We’ve seen multiple examples of how schools can produce and reproduce prexisting social inequalities, particularly those related to social class, race/ethnicity, and gender and sexuality.

• How is social class reproduced through education and schools?
• Why is segregation even more pronounced today that it was a few decades?
• What are the consequences of the various forms of segregation sociologists have identified (intense segregation, double segregation, etc.)?
• In what ways are inequalities of gender and sexuality (re)produced in schools?