Assess the Contribution of Marxism to Our Understanding of the Role of Education Essay

Using material from Item A and elsewhere assess the contribution of Marxism to our understanding of the utilization of education. As menti hotshotd in Item A, reds take a critical view of the role of education. They check out union as based on variant divisions and capitalist exploitations. The capitalist society is a two class body of rules as mentioned in Item A and it consists of a ruling class, the middle class and the extending class, the proletariat. The bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat according to Marxists and they believe that the education system except serves the involve and interests of the ruling class, as mentioned in Item A.Marxists alike education as functioning to prevent revolution and honor capitalism.According to Louis Althusser, the reconcile consists of two elements or apparatuses, both which work to keep the bourgeoisie in power. Firstly, the repressive affirm apparatuses (RSAs), which maintain the rules of the bourgeoisie by military group o r the threat of it. The RSAs include the police, courts and army. When necessary they use physical force to repress the working class. Secondly, the ideological state apparatuses (ISAs), as mentioned in Item A, maintains the rule of the bourgeoisie by controlling peoples ideas and beliefs.The ISAs include religion, the mass media and the education system. In Althussers view, the education system is an important ISA and it performs two important functions. Firstly, it re affirms class diversity by transmitting it from generation to generation, by failing each successive generation of working class pupils in turn, as mentioned in Item A. secondly it legitimates class contrariety by producing ideologies that disguise its true cause. The function of ideology is to persuade workers to pick out that disparity is inevitable and that they deserve their subordinate position in society.If they accept these ideas, they are less possible to dispute or threaten capitalism, as mentioned i n Item A. Other Marxists such as Bowles and Gintis develop these ideas further. They cope that capitalism requires a workforce with the kind of attitudes, behaviour and genius type suited to their role as alternated and exploited workers willing to accept gravid work, low pay and orders from above. In this view, the role of the education system in capitalist society is to reproduce an obedient workforce that will accept inequality as inevitable.From their own studies of 237 New York heights school students and their findings of other(a) studies, Bowles and Gintis concluded that schools reward precisely the kind of personality traits that make for a submissive, complaint worker. For instance, they found that students who showed independence and creativity tended to gain low grades, while those who showed characteristics conjugated to obedience and discipline such as punctuality, tended to gain high grades.From this evidence they concluded that schooling helps to produce the o bedient workers that capitalism needs. They do not believe that education fosters personal development. Rather, it stunts and distorts students developments. Bowles and Gintis argue that schooling takes induct in the long shadow of work i. e. work influences education, resulting in close parallels between schooling and work in capitalist society. Relationships and structures found in education mirror or correspond to those of work, hence cognise as the correspondence commandment.For example, in school in a capitalist society reflects work in a capitalist society by distinguishing between the authority and where people fit in the hierarchy the hierarchy in the school is with the head teacher at the top and then teacher and students and too in a workplace there is the head of company followed by department managers and workers. The correspondence principle is seen to operate through the hidden plan, which refers to all the things that students learn at school without being forma lly taught those things.For example, punctuality, conformance and obedience are taught through the hidden curriculum. This is different from the formal curriculum, which refers to the knowledge and skills pupils are taught explicitly in lessons such as math and science. The hidden curriculum therefore consists of ideas, beliefs, norms and values which are often interpreted for granted and transmitted as part of the normal routines and procedures of school life. Bowles and Gintis argue that it is through the hidden curriculum that the education system prepares us for our future as workers in capitalist society.Bowles and Gintis also argue that in order to prevent developlion from those disadvantaged by the inequalities of capitalism, it is necessary to produce ideologies that explain and justify inequality as fair, natural and inevitable. If people think inequality is justified then they are less likely to challenge the capitalist system. According to Bowles and Gintis, the educati on system plays a key role in producing such ideologies. They describe the education system as a giant myth fashioning machine and boil down on how education promotes the myth of meritocracy.Meritocracy refers to a system where everyone has an equal opportunity to achieve, where rewards are based on ability and effort. This means that those who gain the highest rewards and status deserve it because they are the most able and hardworking. Bowles and Gintis argue that meritocracy does not actually exist. Evidence showed that the main factor determining whether or not someone has a high income is their family and class background, not their ability or educational achievement.By distinguishing this fact, the myth of meritocracy serves to justify the privileges of the higher classes, making it seem that they gained them through open and fair competition at school. This helps persuade the working class to accept inequality as legitimate, and makes it less likely that they will seek to o verthrow capitalism. The education system also justifies poverty, through what Bowles and Gintis describe as the poor-and-dumb theory of failure. It does so by blaming poverty on the individual quite an than blaming capitalism.It therefore plays an important part in reconciling workers to their exploited position, making them less likely to rebel against the system. All Marxists agree that capitalism cannot function without a workforce that is willing to accept exploitation. Likewise, all Marxists see education as reproducing and legitimating class inequality. That is, it ensures that working class pupils are slotted into and learn to accept jobs that are mischievously paid and alienating.However, whereas Bowles and Gintis see education as a fairly straightforward process of indoctrination into the myth of meritocracy, capital of Minnesota Willis have shows that working class pupils can decline such attempts to indoctrinate them. As a Marxist, Willis is provoke in the way school ing serves capitalism. However, he combines this with an interactionist approach that focuses on the meanings pupils give to their situation and how these enable them to resist indoctrination. Through his study, Willis found that the lads (12 working class boys), form a distinct counter-culture opposed to the school.They are lordly of the conformist boys who they call the earoles. The lads find school boring and meaningless and they flout its rules and values, for example by smoking and drinking, disrupting classes and playing truant. These acts are a way of resisting school. They reject a con the schools meritocratic ideology that working class pupils can achieve middle class jobs through hard work. Willis notes the similarity between this anti school counter-culture and the shop floor culture of male manual workers. two cultures see manual work as superior and intellectual ork as inferior and effeminate and this explains why they see themselves as superior both to girls and effe minate earoles to aspire to non manual jobs. Their resistance explains why they end up in these very jobs themselves- inferior in terms of pay and conditions- that capitalism needs someone to perform. For example, having been accustomed to boredom and to finding ways of amusing themselves in school, they dont await satisfaction from work and are good at finding diversions to cope with the tedium of unskilled labour. Marxist approaches are useful in exposing the myth of meritocracy.They show the role that education plays as an ideological state apparatus, serving the interests of capitalism by reproducing and legitimating class inequality. However, postmodernists criticise Bowles and Gintis correspondence principle on the grounds that nows post-Fordist economy requires schools to produce a very different kind of labour force from the one described by Marxists. Postmodernists argue that education now reproduces diversity, not inequality. Marxists disagree with one another as to how reproduction and legitimation take place. Bowles and Gintis take a deterministic view.That is, they assume that pupils have no exonerate will and passively accept indoctrination. This approach fails to explain why pupils ever reject the schools values. By contrast, Willis rejects the view that school simply brainwashes pupils into passively accepting their fate. By combining Marxists and interactionist approaches he shows how pupils whitethorn resist the school and yet how this still leads them into working class jobs. However, critics argue that Willis account of the lads romanticizes them, portraying them as working class heroes despite their anti social behaviour and sexist attitudes.His small scale study of only 12 boys in one school is also unlikely to be representative of other pupils experience and it would e risky to generalize his findings. Critical modernists such as Raymond Morrow and Carlos Torres criticise Marxists for taking a class first approach that sees class as t he key inequality and ignores other all other kinds. Instead, like postmodernists, Morrow and Torres argue that society is now more diverse. They see non-class inequalities, such as ethnicity, gender and sexuality, as equally important.They argue that sociologists must explain how education reproduces and legitimates all forms of inequality, not just class, and how the different forms of inequality are inter-related. Feminists make a similar point. For example, as Madeleine Macdonald argues, Bowles and Gintis ignore the fact that schools reproduce not only capitalism, but patriarchy too as females are largely absent from Willis study. However, Willis work has stimulated a great deal of research into how education reproduces and legitimates other inequalities.