The Relation of School to Society: Three School of Thought

1. The Relation of School to Society: Three School of Thought • Functionalism • Schools socialize and adopt students to the economic, political and social institutions of the particular society. • The school is an “organ” of society, like a heart or a lung, functioning properly to keep the “body politic” going. • Conflict Theory • Schooling is a social practice supported and utilized by those in power to maintain their dominance in the social order. • The school is an instrument of class domination serving to reproduce the workforce and maintain class relationships. • Interpretation Theory • The social world is a world made up of purposeful actors who acquire, share, and interpret a set of meanings, rules, and norms that make social interaction possible. • In the school, children acquire a sense of society’s way of life by learning its traditions, history, and its norms of cooperation and public service. School & Society: 3 Perspectives

2. Functionalism • To understand a social practice or institution, you need to see how it contributes in the survival of the social system as a whole (like the organs of the body) • TWO PRIMARY REQUIREMENTS OF SOCIAL LIFE: role differentiation (jobs, even unpleasant and demanding, get done) and social solidarity (development of a shared value system and cognitive orientation) School & Society: 3 Perspectives

3. Marxist Theory • The relationship between the way we think and the way we live: the way people think, perceive, and feel--their "consciousness"--is related to the basic mode of economic production in their society • Conceptual-Ethical-Aesthetic worlds: truth, moral and ethical value they all depend on the concepts that one's culture makes available to them. Conceptual changes may occur in a culture. However, the changes follow changes in the mode of production. • class consciousness: whenever people are related in different ways to the means of production, we have a class society. In such cases people who belong to a class see the world and understand their position in it in a certain way. This constitutes the class consciousness. School & Society: 3 Perspectives

4. Marxist Theory and Schools • Two ways the state serves the ruling class: (i) through the use of repressive powers -- courts, police, army (ii) through developing false consciousness in those who are members of the subordinate class. • Ideological State Apparatuses: mass media, the arts, sports, the church, the family, political parties, trade unions, and above all the schools. They provide people with compelling reasons for doing that which they otherwise might not be inclined to do and which is essential for maintaining the current system of production relations and power. • In a capitalist society schools will serve to reproduce the relations of production that are essential to maintaining the dominance of the capitalist class. But schools do not reproduce the relations of production by (only) reproducing the skills that workers need to be laborers. • While the school in a capitalist system reproduces the relations of production, it also provides people with the belief that they have been given equal chance to succeed--therefore they accept their position in the system. School & Society: 3 Perspectives

5. Interpretative Theories BASIC IDEAS The social world is a world made up of purposeful actors who acquire, share, and interpret a set of meanings, rules, and norms that make social interaction possible. In the school, children acquire a sense of society’s way of life by learning its traditions, history, and its norms of cooperation and public service. School & Society: 3 Perspectives

6. Interperetive scholarship in education • Interpretation involves a reading of some kind of “human text.” It is like a hypothesis, a sophisticated guess that things will turn out a certain way, if tested against the facts of the social “text.” As more of the social “text” is “read,” the interpretation becomes more, or less, “validated” (during this reading one should remain within the social “text”). • Two forms of scholarship in education: • looking at the intentions and reasons of individuals in classroom contexts • looking at the shared system of meanings found within a school • Ethnographic research in education: educational researchers should avoid imposing their own theories on those who are the object of their studies – we should try to understand the various meanings and rules of the game. • classroom is a place where status and meaning are always negotiated – success and failure are the results of the politics of everyday classroom; • the proper unit of analysis for what people do together is what people do together – social rules that structure individual behavior in a particular group setting; • a student may be competent in a whole range of activities except the ones that the school defines as significant – we must explore the meaning which a behavior has for the actor School & Society: 3 Perspectives