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Intro to Sociology Ch 12 Notes
Introduction to Sociology (SOC 110)
Des Moines Area Community College
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Chapter 12: Understanding
Institutions: Education
12 Is Education as an Institution?
Education comprises roles, rules, and routines that provide consistency across time and place and are slow to change. These patterns help individuals—students, staff, and parents —move one from one organization to another within the institution and limit the influence of individual personalities on the functioning of organizations.
12 Key Terms
education: The process through which a society transmits its culture and history and teaches social, intellectual, and specific work skills that result in productive works and citizens
12 and Modes of Production
Education reflects the mode of production across time and place. In preindustrial societies, parents had their children work alongside them, learning the skills and modeling the behaviors necessary to meet basic needs. Formal schooling emerged with the industrial system of manufacturing that separated workers from their homes and required new skills to meet the needs of a growing and diverse economic system. Production required basic reading, writing, and math skills and benefited from a system that socialized workers to show up on time and conform to authority. Compulsory public schooling emerged to meet these needs. In a service and knowledge economy, soft skills, including communication, depth of knowledge, and problem solving, are essential. Today's economy requires strong critical thinking, collaborative work habits, and creative innovation.
12 Education
Functionalists note that education provides children with secondary socialization, which helps young people learn to interact with organizations, with peers, and in nonfamily group settings. Schools play an important role in developing a national identity, a qualified workforce, and an educated citizenry. Schools also serve latent functions of providing universal childcare for children ages five to eighteen years and regulating entry into the labor force. Conflict theorists point out that in the United States, school structures, resources, and the content of the curriculum all reflect larger systems of social inequality. Schools tend to favor middle-class norms and values. Educators perceive and treat children on the basis of elements of behavior that are largely reflective of parents’ income and education. From physical structures and course offerings to tracking and discipline, education systems favor those with more power and higher status. Symbolic interactionists focus on interactions within schools and how they lead to cultural reproduction. Schools transmit a hidden curriculum of cultural values and beliefs. The hidden curriculum supports and promotes dominant ideologies about the economy and system of governance but may also reflect inequalities embedded in stereotypes tied to race, class, gender, and other social characteristics. These messages shape students’ perceptions of others, their self- esteem, and their behaviors and thus produce outcomes that reflect the social norms, rules, and stereotypes of the culture.
12 Key Terms
hidden curriculum: Implicit messages learned in school secondary socialization: Teaching us how to behave appropriately in small groups and structured situations
12 the Playing Field: Public Policy and
Education in the United States
Childcare and preschool, a high-quality public school system for all, and publicly supported higher education all work to provide equal opportunity to all citizens. Market-based approaches, such as charter schools and vouchers, rely on citizens to be actively engaged critical consumers, which may leave students with fewer resources behind. Current approaches to pre-K and higher education place quality programs out of reach for many. Current policy debates revolve around how to pay for and hold accountable an education system that needs to meet the changing needs of a diverse population in a knowledge-based economy. Moves to privatization are counter to traditional understandings of the public goods provided by education, including its role in producing an educated electorate. The U. public education system has a vital role to play in teaching citizens to think critically, engage in civil society, and discern between facts and fake news or propaganda. Without a high-quality public education system, the health of democratic institutions is at risk.
12 Key Terms
school choice: Can include the ability to attend the public school of the family’s choosing, attend a charter school, or use a voucher to subsidize attendance at a private school charter schools: Publicly funded schools, established under a charter, and governed by parents, educators, community groups, or private organizations. The charter details the school’s mission, curriculum, or philosophy; students to be served; performance goals; evaluation plans; and commitments vouchers: Certificates of government funding that make each pupil’s state funds portable, allowing parents to choose
to use their child’s fund at a public or private school of their choice
Intro to Sociology Ch 12 Notes
Course: Introduction to Sociology (SOC 110)
University: Des Moines Area Community College
