FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH Argues that education has three broad

FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH Argues that education has three broad functions: 1. Role Allocation: education allocates people to the most appropriate job based on qualifications and their talents. This is seen to be fair as there is equality of opportunity, where everyone has the chance of success. Critics consider the ideas of equality of opportunity and meritocracy as a myth and question the correspondence between occupational status and talent. 2. Skills Provision: education teaches skills required by a modern industrial society. General skills including literacy and numeracy skills needed for a particular occupation. 3. Socialisation: maintain society by socialising young people into key cultural values Achievement, competition and equality of opportunity.

FUNCTIONALISTS Durkheim: education should emphasize the moral responsibilities that members of society had towards each other and wider society. Parson: education forms a bridge between the family and wider society by socialising children to adapt to a meritocratic view of achievement. Criticisms Functionalists are criticised for failing to recognize the diversity of values in modern society and the extent to which the norms and values of the middle class are promoted through the education system.

MARXIST APPROACH Education is seen as an important part of the super-structure of society. Along with other institutions, it serves the need of the economic base-everything to do with production in society. This base shapes the super-structure, with the super-structure maintaining and justifying the base. Therefore education performs two main functions in a capitalist society: 1. Reproduces the inequalities and social relations of production of capitalist society. 2. Serves to legitimate these inequalities through the myth of meritocracy.

CORRESPONDENCE THEORYBOWLES AND GINTIS (1976) Argues that education system serves to reproduce directly the capitalist relations of production with the appropriate skills and attitudes. =workplace have corresponding features in the education system Teachers are like the bosses, pupils are like the workers who work for success (wages/exam success) However, they point out that success is not entirely related to intellectual ability. Pupils who fit in and conform rise above, than those who express attitudes or display behaviour which challenge the system. Education system disguises injustice through myth of meritocracy, as for those denied success blame themselves rather than the system. Hidden curriculum not only reproduces the relations of production, it makes inequality in society appear legitimate and fair.

CRITICISMS OF BOWLES AND GINTIS Reynolds (1989): curriculum doesn't seem designed to teach either the skills needed by employers or uncritical passive behaviour that makes workers easy to exploit. Survival of liberal humanities based subjects and limited emphasise on science and applied knowledge suggests a lack of correspondence. § Paul Willis (1977): research ‘Learning to Labour’ showed that working class ‘lads’ learned to behave at school in way quite at odds with capitalisms’ supposed need for a docile workforce. However, he supported the principle that schools reproduce the relations of production by demonstrating that the boys in the anti-school subculture shared a similar outlook to the worker in the factories they were likely to end up in. Working class boys accepted the inevitability of educational failure so they developed strategies (‘havin a laff’) to deal with the boredom of school which would serve them well in the boring jobs they were destined for. §