What is education for? Three answers

Every perspective on the exam paper begins with the same question and gives a different answer.

• Functionalism. Durkheim argued education transmits society's shared norms and values, creating social solidarity — school is 'society in miniature'. It also teaches the specialist skills a complex division of labour needs. Parsons called school the bridge between the particularistic standards of the family and the universalistic standards of wider society, and saw it as a meritocracy in which status is achieved. Davis & Moore added role allocation: education sifts and sorts people into the jobs they are best suited for.
• Marxism. Althusser placed education in the ideological state apparatus — it reproduces and legitimates class inequality. Bowles & Gintis (Schooling in Capitalist America, 1976) argued for a correspondence principle: the hierarchies, rewards and obedience of school mirror the workplace, so a hidden curriculum produces a docile workforce, while the myth of meritocracy makes inequality look deserved. Willis (Learning to Labour, 1977) used participant observation with twelve working-class 'lads' who rejected school — yet their counter-school culture landed them in exactly the manual jobs capitalism needed.
• The New Right. Chubb & Moe argued state education fails because it has no competition; the answer is to make schools compete for parent-consumers. Note the overlap with functionalism (both value meritocracy and shared culture) but the disagreement about who should run schools.

Evaluation hook: Wrong argues functionalism has an 'over-socialised' view of people, and Willis shows pupils can resist — so neither the functionalist consensus nor the Marxist correspondence principle is the whole story.

The correspondence principle

Why class gaps open outside the school gate

AQA splits achievement differences into external (home, neighbourhood, culture, money) and internal (what schools do). Take the external ones first.

• Cultural deprivation. Douglas found parental interest and attitudes to education were linked to attainment. Bernstein distinguished the working-class restricted code (context-bound, short-hand) from the middle-class elaborated code — and because teachers, textbooks and exams all use the elaborated code, middle-class pupils are already fluent in the language of school. Sugarman described working-class subcultural values of fatalism, collectivism, immediate gratification and present-time orientation.
• Material deprivation. Poor housing, poor diet, no quiet study space, no home computer, the need to work part-time. Callender & Jackson found working-class students were more debt-averse, which shaped university choices.
• Cultural capital. Bourdieu argued the dominant class possesses cultural capital — the tastes, language, confidence and knowledge that schools reward — alongside economic and social capital. Education does not measure ability neutrally; it measures how closely a child's habitus matches the school's. The three capitals are convertible: money buys the house in the catchment area. Sullivan tested this with questionnaires on reading and TV habits and found cultural capital did account for part — but not all — of the class gap.

Careful: cultural deprivation says working-class culture is deficient; cultural capital says it is simply different and the school is biased against it. Keil warns that deprivation theory can slide into blaming the victim.

Bourdieu's three capitals

Inside the school: labelling, self-fulfilling prophecy, subcultures

Interactionists look at the small-scale, everyday processes of the classroom.

• Labelling. Becker interviewed sixty Chicago high-school teachers and found they judged pupils against an image of the 'ideal pupil' — one built out of middle-class appearance, conduct and speech.
• The self-fulfilling prophecy. Rosenthal & Jacobson at 'Oak School' told teachers that certain randomly chosen pupils were 'spurters'. Teachers' changed expectations were followed by changed pupil progress: the prediction made itself come true.
• Streaming and subcultures. Lacey described differentiation (teachers rank pupils) leading to polarisation (pupils split into pro-school and anti-school subcultures). Ball's study of 'Beachside Comprehensive' found that when banding was abolished, anti-school subcultures weakened but teachers still labelled. Willis's lads are the classic anti-school subculture.
• Marketised schools. Gillborn & Youdell found league tables push schools into educational triage — an 'A-to-C economy' where borderline pupils get the resources and those written off as hopeless cases do not.

Evaluation: labelling theory can be deterministic — Fuller's study of black girls in a London comprehensive found they rejected the negative label and channelled it into working harder. A label is not a sentence.

Whose idea is it?

Tap a claim, then tap the perspective that made it. Perspectives are the backbone of every essay.

Gender and ethnic differences in achievement

Gender. Girls now out-attain boys at GCSE across most subjects. Explanations you can use:

• Sue Sharpe re-interviewed girls in the 1970s and again in the 1990s (Just Like a Girl): their priorities shifted from love, marriage and children to careers and self-sufficiency.
• McRobbie compared 1970s girls' magazines celebrating marriage with later ones celebrating independence; her earlier work described a 'bedroom culture'.
• Legal and policy change (equal pay and sex discrimination law), plus more female role models in paid work, raised girls' ambitions.
• Boys: Mitsos & Browne point to declining manual work and a 'crisis of masculinity'; laddish subcultures equate effort with being feminine. Francis found boys were more disruptive but not less confident.
• Archer argues working-class girls' pursuit of a hyper-heterosexual feminine identity earns them symbolic capital among peers but conflicts with the school's ideal pupil.

Ethnicity. Never treat 'ethnic minority' as one group — Chinese and Indian pupils typically out-attain the national average, while Black Caribbean and Gypsy/Roma pupils have historically fallen below it.

• External: Driver & Ballard highlighted the educational ambition of Asian families; Sewell controversially argued that absent fathers and street/gang culture offer some Black Caribbean boys a rival source of respect. Class and material deprivation cut across all of this.
• Internal: Coard argued the ethnocentric curriculum — a curriculum built around white, British culture and history — damages Black children's self-esteem. Gillborn & Youdell found teachers' racialised expectations meant Black pupils were more likely to be seen as threatening and placed in lower sets. Wright observed primary teachers assuming Asian pupils had poor English and leaving them out of discussion.
• Institutional racism (Gillborn) shifts the focus from individual prejudiced teachers to the routine workings of the whole system, including assessment and selection.

The ethnocentric curriculum

Policy: selection, comprehensives, marketisation

• 1944 · the tripartite system. The Butler Act used the eleven-plus to allocate children to grammar, secondary modern or technical schools. Intended as meritocratic, it in practice reproduced class inequality and legitimated it as ability.
• 1965 · comprehensivisation. Local authorities were asked to abolish selection and merge schools. Functionalists saw greater integration and a fairer contest; Marxists (Ford) replied that streaming inside the comprehensive simply reproduced the old divisions, and the myth of meritocracy now worked even better.
• 1988 · the Education Reform Act. The pivot of the whole topic. It introduced the National Curriculum, national testing, league tables, formula funding and open enrolment — creating an education market in which schools compete for pupils. This is marketisation.
• Parentocracy. Marketisation claims to hand power to parents as consumers. Gewirtz found parents fall into privileged-skilled choosers (middle-class, capital-rich, able to work the system), disconnected-local choosers (constrained by cost and distance) and semi-skilled choosers (ambitious but lacking cultural capital). Ball therefore calls parentocracy a myth — choice benefits those already advantaged. Whitty concludes marketisation reproduces, rather than reduces, inequality.
• Later policy. New Labour combined marketisation with compensatory measures (Sure Start, Education Maintenance Allowance, Aim Higher); the Coalition expanded academies and free schools and introduced the pupil premium.
• Privatisation and globalisation. Ball analyses endogenous privatisation (schools run like businesses) and exogenous privatisation (private firms selling services into education), plus the 'cola-isation' of schools by brands. Policy also travels: international league tables push governments to copy one another.

Marketisation

Policy match-up

Match each policy or concept on the left to what it did on the right.

Two ways of knowing society

• Positivism. Durkheim treated society as made of social facts — external, measurable forces that shape behaviour. Positivists want objectivity, quantitative data, patterns and correlations, and prefer surveys, structured interviews, experiments and official statistics. The model is the natural sciences.
• Interpretivism. Following Weber, interpretivists want verstehen — empathetic understanding of the meanings people give their actions. They prefer qualitative, high-validity methods: unstructured interviews, participant observation, personal documents.

The three criteria you must be able to apply:

• Reliability — could another researcher repeat this exactly and get the same result? (Strength of structured, standardised methods.)
• Validity — does it give a true, authentic picture of what it claims to measure? (Strength of qualitative, in-depth methods.)
• Representativeness — is the sample typical, so we can generalise to the population?

PET factors — the exam's skeleton key. Every choice of method is a compromise between Practical (time, money, access, funding), Ethical (informed consent, confidentiality, harm, deception, vulnerable groups) and Theoretical (positivist vs interpretivist; reliability, validity, representativeness) factors. In a 'methods in context' question, apply all three to the specific educational setting.

Reliability or validity?

Choosing a method — and researching education

• Social surveys and questionnaires — cheap, large samples, quantifiable, reliable; but low response rates, and no chance to probe meaning. In schools, pupils may not understand the wording, and teachers may give socially desirable answers.
• Interviews — structured (reliable, standardised, positivist) versus unstructured (valid, flexible, interpretivist). Watch for interviewer bias and the power inequality between an adult researcher and a pupil.
• Observation — participant or non-participant, overt or covert. Willis used overt participant observation with the lads. Covert work raises serious ethical problems (no informed consent, deception) and is near-impossible in a school, since an adult cannot pass as a pupil. All observation risks the Hawthorne effect and going native.
• Experiments — laboratory experiments are high in reliability and control but low in validity and hard to do ethically with children. Field experiments like Rosenthal & Jacobson's deceive participants but happen in a real setting.
• Official statistics — free, large-scale, collected over time, ideal for spotting patterns; but they are the state's categories, not the sociologist's, and schools have an incentive to massage them.
• Documents — school records, pupil work, Ofsted reports and diaries; Scott judges them on authenticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning.

Methods in context: schools are hierarchical, gate-kept institutions. Gatekeepers (heads, governors) can refuse access or steer you to the best classes; children are a vulnerable group so parental consent is required; and pupils may see the researcher as another teacher.

A study of pupil subcultures

Is sociology a science? And should it take sides?

• Is it a science? Popper says science advances by falsification — a theory must make risky predictions that could be proved wrong. He judged much of Marxism unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific. Kuhn replies that a science is defined by a shared paradigm, and sociology, with its warring perspectives, is pre-paradigmatic. Realists (Sayer) point out that sociology studies an open system, like meteorology — unpredictable in detail but still scientific in method.
• Value freedom. Weber distinguished the sociologist's values (which legitimately guide the choice of topic and the use of findings) from the research process itself, which must be objective. Gouldner attacked the idea of value-free sociology as a myth used by 'spiritless technicians' who sell their services. Becker, in 'Whose side are we on?', argued sociologists inevitably take a side and should take the side of the underdog.
• Sociology and social policy. Positivists and functionalists offer expertise to government; social democratic sociologists (Townsend) want research to drive redistribution; Marxists see policy as an ideological sticking plaster that props up capitalism; feminists have driven policy on domestic violence and equal pay; the New Right uses research to argue for less state intervention. Whether research shapes policy also depends on funding, ideology and 'electoral popularity'.

Exam craft: in a 10-mark or 20-mark Theory and Methods answer, always name the position (positivist, interpretivist, Marxist, feminist), then a named sociologist, then a criticism. Perspective + name + critique is the mark scheme in miniature.

Value freedom

The big ideas to know

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