Powered By Blogger

Search My Blog

Wednesday 24 March 2010

Explain The Marxist View Of Education And Give An Evaluation Of It

Explain The Marxist View Of Education And Give An Evaluation Of It

As a society we are led to believe that education is fair and equal, but if you look deeper into it you find that there are many factors that affect a child's achievement in education.

Emile Durkheim states “Education has two main functions for society; creating social solidarity and teaching specialist skills”. Durkheim, also said that education was the bridge between affective relationships (family) and instrumental relationships (society) and that education teaches you skills such as manners, norms, values, uniforms and rules.

Talcott Parsons says that education teaches you to value achieved status rather than ascribed status and that it teaches children universalistic standards. He also believes that meritocracy is still alive, where every child is given an equal opportunity, and that individuals achieve rewards through their own effort and ability. The Correspondence Theory reflects this as the teachers are like bosses, the students are like workers and pupils who conform rise above those who challenge the system.

Unfortunately this is not always the case. A common misconception about Marxism is that it is "economic determinist." That is, everything that happens in society is determined by the means of production in some kind of automatic way. In their writings, Marx and Engels showed the relation between the base of society and the superstructure which arose upon that foundation. While they emphasized the underlying role that the productive forces played in any process of social change, all their writings are based on an understanding that political change could only occur through the conscious intervention of human beings.
Another problem with education is the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a teacher pays less attention to a certain pupil or labels them, that student may then accept that label and carry it out. These labels are normally brought on whether the pupil is working class or middle class, as the middle class are seen as better, or of more value and worthy of reward.

Willis rejects the view that school simply 'brainwashes' pupils into passively accepting their fate. Morrow and Torres criticize Marxists for taking a class first approach that sees class as the key inequality and ignores all other kinds. Instead Morrow and Torres argue that society is more diverse. They see no class inequalities such as ethnicity, gender and sexuality as equally important.

No comments:

Post a Comment