'Assess the Contribution of Marxism to Our Understanding of the Role of Education Essay\r'

'Using natural from tip A and elsewhere assess the portion of Marxism to our understanding of the government agency of precept. As menti stard in Item A, Marxists lend a critical view of the determination of reading. They see golf-club as based on family line divisions and capitalist exploitations. The capitalist ordination is a two crystalise scheme as mentioned in Item A and it inmatesists of a judgment circle, the middle class and the running(a)s class, the p office stafftariat. The bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat according to Marxists and they trust that the grooming system only serves the needs and interests of the ruling class, as mentioned in Item A. Marxists to a fault education as functioning to prevent revolution and accommodate capitalist economy.\r\n correspond to Louis Althusser, the state consists of two elements or apparat habituates, both(prenominal) which name to keep the bourgeoisie in power. Firstly, the repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) , which main(prenominal)tain the formulas of the bourgeoisie by blackmail or the threat of it. The RSAs include the police, courts and army. When necessary they use physical force to repress the chokeing class. Secondly, the ideologic state apparatuses (ISAs), as mentioned in Item A, maintains the rule of the bourgeoisie by controlling people’s ideas and beliefs.\r\nThe ISAs include religion, the mass media and the education system. In Althusser’s view, the education system is an distinguished ISA and it performs two important functions. Firstly, it re amazes class inequality by transmitting it from times to generation, by failing each successive 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 take workers to induce that inequality is inevit able and that they deserve their rate position in lodge.\r\nIf they con sume these ideas, they argon little(prenominal) likely to challenge or threaten capitalism, as mentioned in Item A. Other Marxists such(prenominal) as Bowles and Gintis develop these ideas further. They point that capitalism requires a hands with the kind of attitudes, behaviour and personality type suited to their role as alternated and exploited workers willing to deport hard work, upset turn over and orders from above. In this view, the role of the education system in capitalist night club is to manifold an obedient workforce that will deport inequality as inevitable.\r\nFrom their own studies of 237 New York high g ear instruct students and their findings of new(prenominal) studies, Bowles and Gintis reason out that teachs reward hardly the kind of personality traits that make for a submissive, illness worker. For instance, they put up that students who showed independence and creativity tended to march on low grades, while those who showed characteristics l inked to obedience and discipline such as punctuality, tended to gain high grades.\r\nFrom this evidence they concluded that breeding helps to produce the obedient workers that capitalism needs. They do not believe that education fosters personal development. Rather, it stunts and distorts students’ developments. Bowles and Gintis bespeak that schooling takes place in ‘the long touch of work’ i. e. work influences education, resulting in close parallels surrounded by schooling and work in capitalist society. Relationships and structures found in education mirror or go over to those of work, hence known as the correspondence principle.\r\nFor example, in school in a capitalist society reflects work in a capitalist society by distinguishing between the authority and where people shot in the hierarchy; the hierarchy in the school is with the head teacher at the top and thus teacher and students and similarly in a work there is the head of company followed by plane section managers and workers. The correspondence principle is seen to operate by the mystical curriculum, which refers to all the things that students learn at school without creation formally taught those things.\r\nFor example, punctuality, conformity and obedience be taught through and through the hidden curriculum. This is different from the formal curriculum, which refers to the knowledge and skills pupils argon taught explicitly in less(prenominal)ons such as mathematics and science. The hidden curriculum therefore consists of ideas, beliefs, norms and values which ar often taken for granted and transmitted as air division 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.\r\nBowles and Gintis also argue that in order to prevent mutiny from those disadvantaged by the inequalities of capitalism, it is necessary to produce ideologies that explicate and disengage inequality as fair, natural and inevitable. If people think inequality is sightlyified then they are less likely to challenge the capitalist system. According to Bowles and Gintis, the education system plays a key role in producing such ideologies. They describe the education system as a giant ‘ invention do machine’ and focus on how education promotes the ‘myth of meritocracy’.\r\nMeritocracy refers to a system where everyone has an equal opportunity to achieve, where rewards are based on cleverness 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.\r\nBy distinguishing this fact, th e myth of meritocracy serves to justify the privileges of the higher classes, making it seem that they gained them through adequate to(p) and fair competition at school. This helps persuade the working class to swallow up inequality as legitimate, and makes it less likely that they will seek to overthrow 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 rather than blaming capitalism.\r\nIt 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 a lienating.\r\nHowever, whereas Bowles and Gintis see education as a fairly straightforward move of indoctrination into the myth of meritocracy, Paul Willis’ study shows that working class pupils can resist such attempts to indoctrinate them. As a Marxist, Willis is interested in the way schooling serves capitalism. However, he combines this with an interactionist mount that focuses on the meanings pupils give to their touch 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 fence to the school.\r\nThey are scornful of the conformist boys who they call the ear’oles. The lads find school boring and meaningless and they discount 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 school’s 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 person manual workers. Both cultures see manual work as lord and intellectual ork as wanting(p) and effeminate and this explains why they see themselves as superior both to girls and effeminate ear’oles 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 ennui and to finding ways of amusing themselves in school, they sham’t expect satisfaction from work and are good at finding diversions to cope with the tiresomeness of unskilled childbed. Marxist approaches are useful in exposing the myth of meritocracy.\r\nThey show the role that education plays as an ideological state apparatus, serving the interests of capitalism by reproducing and legiti mating class inequality. However, postmodernists ping Bowles and Gintis’ correspondence principle on the grounds that today’s 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.\r\nThat is, they assume that pupils take aim no free will and passively accept indoctrination. This approach fails to explain why pupils ever reject the school’s values. By contrast, Willis rejects the view that school simply ‘brainwashes’ pupils into passively accepting their fate. By combination Marxists and interactionist approaches he shows how pupils may resist the school and til now how this still leads them into working class jobs. However, critics argue that Willis’ circular of t he lads romanticizes them, portraying them as working class heroes in spite of their anti social behaviour and sexist attitudes.\r\nHis pocket-sized scale study of only 12 boys in one school is also unlikely to be representative of other pupils’ experience and it would e unsteady 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 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.\r\nThey 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 sch ools reproduce not only capitalism, but patriarchy excessively as females are largely absent from Willis’ study. However, Willis’ work has stimulated a great deal of inquiry into how education reproduces and legitimates other inequalities.\r\n'