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

Using material from item A and elsewhere quantify the contribution of Marxism to our understanding of the intent of breeding. As menti integrityd in Item A, Marxists engineer a critical view of the role of education. They see society as based on sept divisions and capitalistic exploitations. The capitalist society is a two distinguish outline as mentioned in Item A and it consists of a ruling descriptor, the bourgeoisie and the get into ining class, the proletariat. The bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat harmonize to Marxists and they believe that the education system only serves the needs and interests of the ruling class, as mentioned in Item A.Marxists also education as constituenting to continue revolution and preserve capitalism.According to Louis Althusser, the ordain tongue to consists of two elements or apparatuses, some(prenominal) which name to keep the bourgeoisie in power. Firstly, the repressive state apparatuses (RSAs), which maintain the rules of th e bourgeoisie by force or the threat of it. The RSAs include the police, courts and army. When indispensable 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 imperative hatfuls 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 take a shits class dissimilarity by transmitting it from generation to generation, by failing each sequential generation of working class pupils in turn, as mentioned in Item A. secondly it legitimates class inequality by producing ideologies that disguise its true cause. The function of ideology is to persuade workers to feature that inequality is inevitable and that they deserve their subject position in society.If they accept these ideas, they argon less(prenominal) promising to dispute or threaten capitalism, as mentioned in Item A. Other Marxists such(prenominal) as Bowles and Gintis develop these ideas further. They suggest that capitalism requires a workforce with the flesh of attitudes, behavior and in-personity type suited to their role as alternated and put-upon workers get outing to accept hard work, low pay and orders from above. In this view, the role of the education system in capitalist society is to re establish an tame workforce that will accept inequality as inevitable.From their own studies of 237 untried York high teach students and their findings of other(a) studies, Bowles and Gintis concluded that rails reward precisely the human body of personality traits that throw off for a submissive, complaint worker. For instance, they found that students who showed independence and creativeness tended to gain low grades, while those who showed characteristics linked to obedience and discipline such as punctuality, tended to gain h igh grades.From this evidence they concluded that schooling helps to produce the obedient workers that capitalism needs. They do non believe that education fosters personal development. Rather, it stunts and distorts students developments. Bowles and Gintis argue that schooling takes place 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 check off to those of work, hence known as the residual regulation.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 similarly in a body of work there is the head of company followed by department managers and workers. The correspondence principle is seen to operate go intoe the confidenti al curriculum, which refers to all the things that students learn at school without being formally taught those things.For example, punctuality, conformity and obedience atomic number 18 taught through the hidden curriculum. This is different from the formal curriculum, which refers to the knowledge and skills pupils atomic number 18 taught explicitly in lessons such as math and science. The hidden curriculum whence consists of ideas, beliefs, norms and values which are often taken for granted and transmitted as part of the rule 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 rebellion from those disadvantaged by the inequalities of capitalism, it is obligatory to produce ideologies that explain and justify inequality as fair, natural and inevitable. If people think inequality is just ified then they are less alike(p)ly to challenge the capitalist system. According to Bowles and Gintis, the education system plays a aboriginal role in producing such ideologies. They describe the education system as a giant myth making machine and focus on how education promotes the myth of meritocracy.Meritocracy refers to a system where e veryone 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. license showed that the main factor determining whether or not soulfulness 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(a) 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 override capitalism. The education system also justifies poverty, through what Bowles and Gintis describe as the poor-and-dumb opening of failure. It does so by blaming poverty on the individual rather 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 poorly paid and alienating.However, whereas Bowles and Gintis see education as a moderately straightforward process of indoctrination into the myth of meritocracy, Paul Willis study shows that working class p upils can resist such attempts to indoctrinate them. As a Marxist, Willis is raise in the modality schooling 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 scornful of the conforming boys who they call the earoles. The lads find school boring and meaningless and they fit its rules and values, for example by smoking and drinking, disrupting classes and playing truant. These acts are a way of resisting school. They excrete 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 substructure culture of male manual workers. Both cultures see manual work as superior and int ellectual ork as inferior and effeminate and this explains wherefore they see themselves as superior both to girls and effeminate earoles to target 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 expect satisfaction from work and are good at finding diversions to cope with the tedium of unskilled labour. Marxist approaches are efficacious 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 todays post-Fordist economy requires schools to produce a very different kind of labour force from the one described by M arxists. Postmodernists argue that education now reproduces diversity, not inequality. Marxists differ 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 free 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 may 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, word picture 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 moder nists such as Raymond Morrow and Carlos Torres criticise Marxists for taking a class first approach that sees class as the 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 seek into how education reproduces and legitimates other inequalities.