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The sociology of education is the study of how social and acquiring wealth and Status for all. Sargent, M. (1994) The New Sociology for Australians, Third Edition, Longman Chesire, Melbourne Education is perceived as a place where children can develop according to their unique needs and potentialities. Ideally, it is also perceived as one of the best means of achieving greater equality in society. The purpose of education then, must be to develop every individual to their full potential and grant them a chance to achieve as much in life as their natural abilities allow. This promising vision, however, does not unfold into reality. The reality, according to many sociologists, is that education works towards a larger goal than that of the individual and its purpose is to maintain social stability, through the Social Reproduction of inequality. What the goal of this stability is differs depending on which Sociological Perspective one uses to approach the issue. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES A number of theoretical perspectives participate in the sociology of education. The work of each theoretical perspective is presented below. Structural Functionalism Structural Functionalists believe that society tends towards Equilibrium and social order. They see society like a human body, where key institutions work like the body’s organs to keep the society/body healthy and well & Watts, 2002 . Social health means the same as social order, and is guaranteed when nearly everyone accepts the general moral Values of their society. Hence structural functionalists believe the purpose of key institutions, such as education, is to socialise young members of society. Socialisation is the process by which the new generation learns the knowledge, attitudes and values that they will need as productive Citizens . Although this purpose is stated in the formal curriculum Board of Studies , it is mainly achieved through ''"the hidden curriculum"'' 1997 , a subtler, but nonetheless powerful, Indoctrination of the Norms and values of the wider society. Students learn these values because their behaviour at school is regulated in until they gradually internalise them and so accept them. Education must, however perform another function to keep society running smoothly. As various jobs in society become vacant, they must be filled with the appropriate people. Therefore the other purpose of education is to sort and rank individuals for placement in the labour market 1997 . Those with the greatest achievement will be trained for the most important jobs in society and in reward, be given the highest incomes. Those who achieve the least, will be given the least demanding jobs, and hence the least income. According to Sennet and Cobb however, “to believe that ability alone decides who is rewarded is to be deceived”. Meighan agrees, stating that large numbers of capable students from working class backgrounds fail to achieve satisfactory standards in school and therefore fail to obtain the status they deserve. Jacob [2001 believes this is because the middle class cultural experiences that are provided at school may be contrary to the experiences they’ve had at home. In other words led educational failures, “was a necessary activity which one part of the social system, education, performed for the whole”. Yet the structural functionalist perspective maintains that this social order, this Continuity , is what most people desire & Watts, 2002 . The weakness of this perspective here becomes evident. Why would the working class wish to stay the working class? Such an inconsistency demonstrates that another perspective may be more useful in examining the issue further. Conflict Theory Education and Social Reproduction The perspective of Conflict Theory , contrary to the structural functionalist perspective, believes that society is full of vying social groups who have different aspirations, different access to life chances and gain different social rewards & Healy, 1997 . Relations in society, in this view, are mainly based on Exploitation , Oppression , Domination and Subordination . This is a considerably more cynical picture of society than the previous idea that most people accept continuing inequality. Some conflict theorists believe education is controlled by the State which is controlled by those with the power, and its purpose is to reproduce the inequalities already existing in society as well as legitimise ‘acceptable’ ideas which actually work to reinforce the privileged positions of the dominant group & Healy, 1997 . Connell and White [1989] state that the education system is as much an arbiter of social Privilege as a transmitter of Knowledge . Education achieves its purpose by maintaining the status quo, where Lower Class children become lower class adults, and middle and upper class children become middle and upper class adults. This cycle occurs because the dominant group has, over time, closely aligned education with middle class values and aspirations, thus alienating people of other classes & White, 1997 . Many teachers assume that students will have particular middle class experiences at home, and for some children this assumption isn’t necessarily true 2001 . Some children are expected to help their parents after school and carry considerable domestic responsibilities in their often single-parent home & Wyn, 1987 . The demands of this domestic labour often make it difficult for them to find time to do all their homework and thus affects their performance at school. Where teachers have reduced the formality of regular study and integrated student’s preferred way of working into the curriculum, they noted that particular students displayed strengths they had not been aware of before & Wyn, 1987 . However few teacher deviate from the traditional is made possible. Conflict theorists believe this Social Reproduction continues to occur because the whole education system is overlain with Ideology provided by the dominant group. In effect, they perpetuate the myth that education is available to all to provide a means of achieving wealth and status. Anyone who fails to achieve this goal, continues the myth, has only themself to blame. Wright agrees, stating that “the effect of the myth is to…stop them from seeing that their personal troubles are part of major social issues”. The duplicity is so successful that many parents endure appalling jobs for many years, believing that this sacrifice will enable their children to have opportunities in life that they did not have themselves & Wyn, 1987 . These people who are poor and disadvantaged are victims of a societal confidence trick. They have been encouraged to believe that a major goal of schooling in to increase equality while, in reality, schools reflect society’s intention to maintain the previous unequal distribution of status and power cited in . This perspective has been criticised for being deterministic, pessimistic and allowing no room for the agency of individuals to improve their situation. Structure and Agency Bourdieu and Cultural Capital This theory of Social Reproduction has been significantly theorised by Pierre Bourdieu . However Bourdieu as a social theorist has always been concerned with the dichotomy between the objective and subjective, or to put it another way, between Structure And Agency . Bourdieu has therefore built his theoretical framework around the important concepts of Habitus , field and Cultural Capital . These concepts are based on the idea that objective structures determine the probability of individuals' life chances, through the mechanism of the habitus, where individuals internalise these structures. However, the habitus is also formed by, for example, an individual's position in various fields, their family and their everyday experiences. Therefore one's class position does not determine one's life chances although it does play an important part alongside other factors. Bourdieu employed the concept of Cultural Capital to explore the differences in outcomes for students from different classes in the French Educational System . He explored the tension between the conservative reproduction and the innovative production of knowledge and experience 1990:87 . He found that this tension is intensified by considerations of which particular cultural past and present is to be conserved and reproduced in schools. Bourdieu argues that it is the culture of the dominant groups, and therefore their cultural capital, which is embodied in schools, and that this leads to social reproduction 1990:87 . The cultural capital of the dominant group, in the form of practices and relation to culture, is assumed by the school to be the natural and only proper type of cultural capital and is therefore legitimated. It thus demands “uniformly of all its students that they should have what it does not give” in Swartz, 2000:209 . This legitimate cultural capital allows students who possess it to gain educational capital in the form of qualifications. Those students of less privileged classes are therefore disadvantaged. To gain qualifications they must acquire legitimate cultural capital, by exchanging their own (usually working-class) cultural capital 1984:172 . This process of exchange is not a straight forward one, due to the class ethos of the less privileged students. Class ethos is described as the particular dispositions towards, and subjective expectations of, school and culture. It is in part determined by the objective chances of that class 1980:226 . This means, that not only is it harder for children to succeed in school due to the fact that they must learn a new way of ‘being’, or relating to the world, and especially, a new way of relating to and using language, but they must also act against their instincts and expectations. The subjective expectations influenced by the objective structures located in the school, perpetuate social reproduction by encouraging less-privileged students to eliminate themselves from the system, so that fewer and fewer are to be found as one progresses through the levels of the system 1990:155 . The process of social reproduction is neither perfect nor complete 1990:87 , but still, only a small number of less-privileged students make it all the way to the top. For the majority of these students who do succeed at school, they have had to internalise the values of the dominant classes and take them as their own, to the detriment of their original habitus and cultural values. Therefore Bourdieu's perspective reveals how objective structures play a large role in determining the achievement of individuals at school, but allows for the exercise of an individual's agency to overcome these obstacles, although this choice is not without its penalties. 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