Taclott Parsons’ Perspective on Education

Writing in the 1950s Parsons argued that modern education systems performed two main functions – role allocation and providing value consensus through meritocracy.

The American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1961) outlined what is commonly accepted as the Functionalist view of education as it relates to modern societies in the late 1950s.

Taclott Parsons.png
A typically convoluted quote from Talcott Parsons – He’s basically saying ‘individual ability, not class background is what determines achievement’

Particularistic and Universalistic Values

Parsons argued that, after primary socialisation within the family, the school takes over as the focal socialising: school acts as a bridge between family and society as a whole, preparing children for their adult roles in society.

Within the family, the child is judged by particularistic standards. Parents treat the child as their own, unique, special child, rather than judging him or her by universal standards that are applied to every individual.

However, in the wider society the individual is treated and judged in terms of universalistic standards, which are applied to all members, regardless of their kinship ties.

Within the family, the child’s status is ascribed: it is fixed by birth. However, in advanced industrial society, status in adult life is largely achieved: for example individuals achieve their occupational skills. Thus it is necessary that the child moves from the particularistic standards and ascribed status of the family to the universalistic standards and achieved status of adult society.

The school prepares people for this transition. It establishes universalistic standards, in terms of which all pupils achieve their status. Their conduct is assessed against the yardstick of the school rules; their achievement is measured by performance in examinations. The same standards are applied to all pupils regardless of ascribed characteristics such as sex, race, family background or class of origin. Schools operated on meritocratic principles: status is achieved on the basis of merit (or worth).

Like Durkheim, Parsons argued that the school represents society in miniature. Modern industrial society is increasingly based on achievement rather than ascription, on universalistic rather than particularistic standards, on meritocratic principles which apply to all its members. By reflecting the operation of society as a whole, the school prepares young people for their adult roles.

Education: Meritocracy and Value Consensus

Parsons argued that a further main function of schools was to socialise young people into the basic values of society. Parsons, like many functionalists, maintained that value consensus is essential for society to operate effectively. In American society, school instils two major values

  1. The value of achievement
  2. The value of equality of opportunity.

By encouraging students to strive for high levels of academic attainment, and by rewarding those who succeed, schools foster the value of achievement itself. By placing individuals in the same situation in the classroom and so allowing them to compete on equal terms in examinations, schools foster the value of equality of opportunity.

These values have important functions in society as a whole. Advanced industrial society requires a highly motivated, highly skilled workforce. This necessitates differential reward for differential achievement, a principle which has been established in schools.

Both the winners (the high achievers) and the losers (the low achievers) will see the system as just and fair, since status is achieved in a situation where all have an equal chance. Again, the principles that operate in the wider society are mirrored in the school.

Ultimately Parsons believed that the education system was meritocratic and because of this it created value consensus in an unequal society.

Education and Selection

Finally, Parsons saw the educational system as an important mechanism for the section of individuals for their future role in society. In his words, it ‘functions to allocate these human resources within the role-structure of adult society’. Thus schools by testing and evaluating students, match their talents, skills and capacities to the jobs for which they are best suited. The school is therefor seen as the major mechanism for role allocation.

Evaluations of Parsons

The main criticisms of Parson’s work come from Marxism.

Marxists criticize the idea that schools transmit shared values, rather they see the education system as transmitting the values of the ruling class, as outlined in Bowles and Gintis’ Correspondence Principle.

Marxists have also criticised the idea that schools are meritocratic, arguing that meritocracy is a myth, because in reality, which schools may treat pupils the same, class inequalities result in unequal opportunities.

Signposting and Related Posts 

This post has been written to provide a more in-depth look at the Functionalist Perspective on education, usually taught as part of the education topic within A-level sociology.

This post provides a more in-depth account of the Functionalist Perspective on Education. For a simplified version please see this post.

If you like this in-depth sort of thing then you might also like my post on Durkheim’s view of education.

Please click here to return to the main ReviseSociology home page!

Sources

Part of this post was adapted from Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives 8th Edition.

Seven Transferable Skills Teachers Can Take to Other Professions

  1. Producing engaging written and audio visual resources
  2. Emotional sensitivity
  3. Evaluation and decision making based on standardized criteria
  4. Presentation and communication skills
  5. Facilitating participation
  6. Simultaneous independent and collaborative working
  7. Reflexivity, which incorporates flexibility.

Seven transferable skills which teachers can take with them to kinder careers

Given the depth and breadth of skill which teaching requires, combined with the unbearable amount of stress which teachers are expected to soak up, teaching is without doubt one of the most undervalued professions in the United Kingdom, and I’m fairly sure this is also the case in pretty much every country outside of Scandinavia.

Evidence for this (at least in the UK) lies in the fact that 30% of teachers quit within five years, and the thought of quitting is no doubt at the forefront of the majority of teachers’ minds towards the end of a long summer holiday; and no, a six week summer holiday is not enough compensation.

Just in case you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of undervalued teachers thinking of moving on, here’s a list of transferable skills which you can use to promote yourself to your next employer….

  1. Producing written and audio visual resources that engage a differentiated audience for a sustained period (over month or years) – teachers are required not only to produce quality written ‘work sheets’ which are clearly written and structured, they also have to incorporate a range of audio visual (video/ podcast/ websites/ online tests) within these in order to engage learners. A related benefit is that teachers tend to have both sound levels of knowledge in their specific fields and excellent spelling, grammar and punctuation.*
  2. Emotional Sensitivity – working with vulnerable children requires teachers to pick up on the special needs of students early on, which may not be communicated verbally by the students themselves. An extremely useful skill when working with a range of colleagues and clients in any profession.
  3. Judgement and decision making – the ability to evaluate students’ work according to standardized criteria and provide constructive oral and written feedback to help students/ colleagues/ clients improve their performance in a timely fashion
  4. Presentation skills – teaching requires the ability to present complex information in clear, concise and accessible manner, communicating the goals of lessons clearly to participants at the beginning of a particular session. It also involves the use of humor, analogies, examples, metaphors, stories, and delivery methods other than lecture or PowerPoint to engage an audience.
  5. Facilitating participation through small and large group discussions – teaching involves doing a range of pair-work and discussion work in groups of 3-6, with feedback being given to the whole class. Teachers are experts in making sure everyone feels like they are participating and having a voice.
  6. Independent and Collaborative working – teaching involves both working independently to plan lessons/ mark students work, while simultaneously working collaboratively with colleagues to share information about students in  order to deliver the best outcome for students.
  7. Reflexivity – The ability to continually reflect on one’s own performance and respond to constructive criticism based on feedback from peers and supervisors in order to improve one’s own performance. All of this has to be done within the context of shifting parameters of educational policy, so one also has to pick up new skills and knowledge in order to respond to systemic changes.

Sources and comments on other people’s lists of teaching transferable skills 

I derived this list from the two lists below. Mine is better, but thanks to those who gave me a leg up!

Gina Smith from Branden University suggests the following list Of Top 20 Transferable-Skills:

  1. Active Listening
  2. Complex Problem Solving
  3. Coordination
  4. Critical Thinking
  5. Diagnostic Tests
  6. Grading
  7. Instructing
  8. Judgment and Decision Making
  9. Learning Strategies
  10. Lesson Plan Development
  11. Problem solving
  12. Management
  13. Monitoring
  14. Multitasking
  15. Reading Comprehension
  16. Relationship Management
  17. Service Orientation
  18. Speaking
  19. Social Perceptiveness
  20. Time Management
  21. Writing

How useful is this list?

To be blunt, I don’t find this particularly useful – somehow the list manages to include too much information and not enough specificity both at the same time. If you were going to write a new C.V. in order to transition out of teaching, you would probably include all of the above words, but you’d be better off re categorizing them so you had fewer key-skills.

Whoever it is who writes the ‘Life after Teaching Blog’ provides the following five basic transferable skills for teachers:

1. strong written and oral communication skills

2. strong interpersonal skills

3. demonstrated ability to work independently

4. demonstrated problem solving skills/ability to learn new things quickly

5. demonstrated ability to work under pressure/in a fast paced, deadline-driven environment

How useful is this list? 

Well it’s better than the above list because they’ve thought about the key ‘skill sets’ better – personally I think this is a nice, general list, and full disclosure, this guy also has another list of ’12 skills which teachers have’ which helped me a lot with writing the above post!

If, like me, you’re also thinking about quitting teaching, do get in touch.

*If you call me out on my own slightly dodgy grammar it WILL NOT be appreciated, in fact, regard yourself as having received a virtual slap if you’re one of the smug.

Why Intelligence Doesn’t Explain Success

A summary of Malcom Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’ chapter 3: The Trouble With Genius, Part 1.

Over the past Decade, Chris Langan has become the public face of genius in American life. He has an IQ of 195, compared to Einstein who had an IQ of 150 and the average of 100.

Langan was a ‘child genius’ – he was speaking at 6 months of age, and taught himself to read at three. He didn’t attend school very much but could ace any test after cramming a semester’s worth of text books for 2 days.

He was also something of a polyglot – he was interested in maths and physics, but also languages, philosophy and he could sketch a picture of something for fun which ‘looked like a photograph’ according to his brother.

2

Just after WW1, Lewis Terman, a young professor of psychology met a remarkable boy named Henry Cowell, who, although unschooled since 7, achieved an IQ score of above 140, near genius level.  This made Terman wonder how many other undiscovered geniuses there were out there.

In 1921 Terman decided to make the study of the gifted his lifes work. Through a series of 1Q tests administered in elementary schools to 250 000 students, he identified 1470 children whose IQs were above 140, and who became known as the ‘Termites’ and were to be the subjects of the most famous psychological study in history.

For the rest of his life, Terman watched over his charges – they were tracked and tested, measured and analysed and pretty much every milestone of their future educational and professional lives were recorded in thick red volumes entitled ‘Genetic Studies of Genius’.  Terman even wrote his ‘Termites’ letters of recommendation for jobs, and as his subjects grew older he issued updates on their progress – pointing out that in pretty much every field of expertise, you would find a Termite heading to the top of it – he fully believed that these 1470 would be the future elite of America.

‘There is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals’ Terman once wrote, believing that identifying IQ-based talent and nourishing it was the best way to find our future leaders.

Today, many of Terman’s ideas remain central to the way we think about success – schools measure IQ, we have gifted programmes and tech companies also measure cognitive ability.

We tend to be in awe of Geniuses – they seem to be the purest of ‘outliers’ – so far ahead of the rest of us genetically that nothing can hold them back, and we tend to listen to people like Terman who suggest that sheer brute intelligence is the most significant thing in determining the success of the individual.

However, Gladwell suggests that Terman was wrong about his termites – he made an error because he didn’t understand what a real outlier was.

3

Over the years an enormous amount of research has been done in an attempt to determine how a person’s performance in an IQ test translates to real life success.

People at the bottom, who get a score of 7, are considered mentally disabled. A score of 100 is average, and in order to handle a college graduate programme, you’ll probably need a score of 1115.

In general the higher your IQ score then the more education you’ll get and the more money you’ll make.

However, there is also such a thing as an ‘IQ threshold’ – it has been amply proved that someone who has an IQ of 120 can think better than someone with an IQ of 100, and the person with higher IQ will, on average, be more successful in education and life more generally, but once you get to the 130 threshold, the relationship breaks down – A scientist with an IQ of 180 is just as likely to win a Nobel Prize as one whose IQ is 130.

In other words, if you have an IQ of 130, you have reached the ‘threshold’ where you are good enough to excel in your field – someone with an IQ 50% higher than yours will not be ‘50%’ more successful, and you basically have an equal chance of excelling as your peers with slightly, or significantly (but not significantly!) higher IQs than yours.

Unfortunately, the idea that IQ has a threshold goes against our intuition, we tend to think that the Nobel Prize Winners are the ones like Chris Langan, the exclusive people who have very high IQs – but this is simply not the case, someone with an IQ of 130 is just as likely to become the top of their field as someone with an IQ of 180.

With this knowledge in mind, the psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admissions processes and simply hold a lottery for everyone above ‘the threshold’ – create two categories: those who are good enough and those who are not, and put the names of the former into a hat.

Schwartz accepts the fact that his idea will probably never be accepted, but Gladwell thinks he’s right.

This section ends by making the case for affirmative action – the University of Michigan relaxes its entry criteria for minority students, which brings their ethnic intake up to 10% (it’s estimated that without the affirmative action, the figure would be 3%.

The University conducted a study to see how successful these students were years after graduating, and found that they were just as successful as their white peers. The reason: because even though they had lower high-school scores than their white peers, those scores were still above the threshold.

5.

Given that there is a threshold for intelligence, it must be other things that determine which of those with IQs over 130 go on to be remarkably successful – one such thing may well be their ability to think ‘divergently’.

One type of divergence test is to get people to think of as many different uses of an object as possible, which is a measure of creativity, and some people with high IQs are very good at this, others are very bad at it.

This might well explain why some of those with high IQs do better than others.

Another analogy Gladwell uses here is taken from Basketball – once you’re 6,2, you’re tall enough to make it to major league basketball, after that, it’s things like agility that determine who the very best are.

5.

To go back to Terman’s Termites, by the time they reached adulthood, his early predictions about their future success had been proved wrong – some had gone on to be successful, most had good, but not outstanding careers, while others were stuck in pretty average jobs.

By volume 4 of his study, Terman concluded that the link between intelligence and success was not at all clear.

In a damming study by sociologists Pitirim Sorokin, Sorokin argued that if Terman had selected a group of children at random and followed them through to adulthood, then you’d have exactly the same distribution of successful  adults and those in ordinary careers.

So what all of this tells us is that having a large IQ is no sufficient to explain why people do well in life, we need to know a lot more about them than that.

Comments

On the selection process to elite education institutions

A question you might want to consider is this: If such rigid selection by ability is not necessary for students to benefit from an elite education, then why do elite institutions spend so much effort ‘selecting’?

Could it be that having control over the selection process allows them to select out people ‘not like them’ – i.e. the working classes who are ‘intelligent enough’ but haven’t been hot-housed by independent schools to get the very top grades???

On being ‘good enough’

It’s interesting to hear talk of ‘being good enough’ to benefit from an certain level of education given that you hardly ever hear the phrase ‘good enough’ in the context of education – the discourse is much more about aspiring to be better, it’s as if, in a marketised system, there is no such thing as ‘good enough’, possibly because the very concept of settling for ‘good enough’ would stifle competition.

Durkheim’s Perspective on Education

Emile Durkheim argued that schools were essential for ‘imprinting’ shared social values into the minds of children. He believed schools would play a central role in forming modern societies.

Functionalist sociologist Emile Durkheim saw Education as performing two major functions in advanced industrial societies – transmitting the shared values of society and simultaneously teaching the specialised skills for an economy based on a specialised division of labour.

Durkheim, a French sociologist, was writing at the turn of the twentieth century (late 19th and early 20th) and he believed that schools were one of the few institutions uniquely poised to assist with the transition from traditional society, based on mechanical (face to face) solidarity, to modern society, which was much larger in scale and based on organic (more abstract) solidarity.

Durkheim Education

Education and the Transmission of Shared Values

According to Durkheim ‘Society can survive only if there exists among its members a sufficient degree of homogeneity: education perpetuates and reinforces this homogeneity by fixing in the child from the beginning the essential similarities which collective life demands’ (Durkhiem, quoted in Haralambos 2013). 

Education does this by instilling a sense of social solidarity in the individual – which involves instilling a sense of belonging to wider society, a sense of commitment to the importance of working towards society’s goals and a feeling that the society is more important than the individual.

Durkheim argued that ‘to become attached to society, the child must feel in it something that is real, alive and powerful, which dominates the person and to which he owes the best part of himself’ (Durkheim, quoted in Haralambos 2013). 

Education, and in particular the teaching of history, provides this link between the individual and society. If history is taught effectively, it ‘comes alive’ for children, linking them to their social past and developing in them a sense of commitment to the social group.

Education and Social Rules 

Durkheim argued that, in complex societies, school serves a function which cannot be fulfilled by either the family, which is based on kinship or friendship, which is based on personal choice, whereas being a member of wider society involves learning to get on with and co-operate with people who are neither our kin or our friends.

School is the only institution capable of preparing children for membership in wider society – it does this by enforcing a set of rules which are applied to all children, and children learn to interact with all other children on the basis of these shared rules – it thus acts like a society in miniature.

Durkhiem argued that school rules should be strictly enforced – with a series of punishments for those who broke the school rules which reflected the seriousness of the damage done to the social group by the child who broke the rules. Durkheim also believed that by explaining why punishments were given for rule breakers, children would come to learn to exercise self-discipline not only because of fear of punishment, but also because they could see the damage their deviant behaviour did to the group as a whole.

According to Durkheim social sciences such as sociology could play a role in making it clear to children the rational basis of social rules:

‘It is by respecting the school rules that the child learns to respect rules in general, that he develops the habit of self-control and restraint simply because he should control and restrain himself. It is a first initiation into the austerity of duty. Serious life has now begun’. (Durkhiem, Quoted in Haralambos, 2013). 

Education and the Division of Labour 

Durkheim argued that a second crucial function for education in an advanced industrial economy is the teaching of specialised skills required for a complex division of labour.

In traditional, pre-industrialised societies, skills could be passed on through the family, or through direct apprenticeships, meaning formal education in school was not necessary. However, factory based production in modern industrial society often involves the application of advanced scientific knowledge, which requires years of formal education to learn, thus schools become much more necessary.

Another factor which makes school necessary in modern societies (according to Durkheim) is that  social solidarity in industrial societies is based largely on the interdependence of specialised skills – the manufacture of a single product requires the combination of a variety of specialists. In other words, solidarity is based on co-operation between people with very different skill sets – and school is the perfect place for children to learn to get on with people with different backgrounds.

Taking the above two points together, Durkheim argues that schools provide ‘the necessary homogeneity for social survival and the ‘necessary diversity for social co-operation’.

Evaluations of Durkheim

  1. Postmodernists might criticise Durkheim for his assumption that society needs shared values – Britain has become much more multicultural in recent decades, and the extent to which there is a single British culture is debatable – there are whole communities which are largely cut off from mainstream culture, as evidenced in the case of ethnic segregation in Oldham.
  2. Marxists would be a bit more cynical about the relationship between school and work – according to Durkheim school is a neutral institution which simply transmits values and skills to individuals which enable the economy to run smoothly – according to Bowles and Gintis’ Correspondence Principle, this is a much darker process – school teaches working class kids to be passive, making them easier to exploit in later life.
  3. Ken Robinson in his ‘changing education paradigms‘ talk makes a number of criticisms of the contemporary education system – he argues it’s failing too many kids.
  4. Liberals such as Ivan Illich would even question the view that we need schools to transmit complex skills – In ‘Deschooling Society‘ he suggested that we could learn work related skills in a much more decentralised way, something which is even more possible today in the age of online learning.

Signposting and Related Posts 

This material is relevant to the Education topic within the sociology of education. It is really extension work to explore the The Functionalist view of Education in more depth.

Talcott Parsons is the second main Functionalist sociologist who wrote about education, in the 1940s and 1950s, so half a century later than Durkheim – Education and Universalistic Values

You might also like the following related post: Evaluating the Functionalist View of Education.

Please click here to return to the main ReviseSociology home page!

Sources/ Find out more

Durkheim first outlines aspects of his views on the role of education in society in his classic text: The Division of Labour in Society.

This WikiPedia article on Durkheim is quite useful

Do exam results matter?

So it’s A level result’s day and you’ve stuffed up. But do exam results actually matter?

IF you wish to pursue success through what Robert Merton would have called the ‘legitimate opportunity structure’ then they probably do matter, but if you have access to to ‘alternative opportunity structures’ or if you ‘reject the ordinary success goals of society’, then they probably matter a whole lot less.

In this post, I’ll go through some of the conditions which might make exam results matter to an individual, and some of the conditions which mean they might matter less…

A-Levels, Degrees, ‘Success’ and the Legitimate Opportunity Structure 

Writing in the 1940s, Robert Merton broadly defined the legitimate success goals of American society  as those of material wealth, and the legitimate means to achieving these goals as being through education and a career which paid an income. In the USA and UK Today, most people still aspire to the goals of achieving material success, and most people still try to do so through the legitimate opportunity structure – basically through hard work and legal means, rather than crime.

As a general rule, if you wish to achieve the ‘legitimate success goals of society’ through ‘legitimate opportunity structures’ then getting a good set of A-levels and a degree is still the surest way of achieving these goals for most people.

In 2015 (UK stats) graduates, on average, earned 45% more than non-graduates, that’s about £10 000 pounds a year more than non-graduates.

This trend is even more marked if we were to make the comparison between non-graduate jobs and the very highest paying ‘professional careers such as Medicine, Law or Engineering, and all of these professions require a degree, which typically require A-levels to get onto an appropriate degree-level course.

So, if you want a ‘conformist’ lifestyle – a decent paying job, then getting A levels and then a degree is the most obvious way to get one, in which case your A-level exam results matter.

However, fortunately, this is pretty much where the ‘A-levels are important to your success’ line ends, mainly thanks to a certain expansion in the legitimate opportunity structure.

The Legitimate Opportunity Structure has Expanded

Simply put, there are are loads of alternative routes to achieving the ‘ordinary success goals of society’.

For starters, there are access courses, through which you qualify for the ‘access to higher education diploma – over 40 000 people enroll on them every year, and you can do them in a lot of subjects.

access higher education.png

Secondly, apprenticeships are by far the largest growth area within the ‘legitimate opportunity structure’ in recent years. There were over 500 000 apprenticeship starts in 2015-16, and 190 000 of them were level 3 apprenticeships, so if you’ve really stuffed up your A-levels, there’s plenty of opportunity to start again here.

Thirdly, you could try your hand at becoming an ‘entrepreneur’. While I don’t believe there is unlimited opportunity for everyone to make millions through inventing things or just having ideas, you certainly don’t need a degree to try. NB – if you have a great idea, but lack capital, then crowdfunding is an increasingly popular way of funding a new business venture, that you can basically start from your bedroom.

And don’t forget, that these days you can always become an ‘entrepreneur of yourself’ – by blogging or vlogging your way to success – as many make-up artists, personal trainers, or vanilla-spreaders have done. Although just as with entrepreneurship more generally, there isn’t unlimited opportunity for everyone who wants to to make big (or even sufficient) money doing this. This strategy is maybe one for the pretty, pretty vacant, and extreme types among us….

Fourthly, you might be able to exploit your cultural and/ or social capital and network your way into a decent job, or internship… although this probably only applies if your parents are screamingly middle-class, still, for the top 5% or so it’s an option.

Rejecting the Legitimate Opportunity Structure 

A final set of reasons why A level results may not matter is if you simply don’t want to pursue an ‘ordinary life’. There are plenty of alternative lifestyles which don’t require A-levels or degrees, and offer a very alternative ‘educational experience’ in themselves. NB I covered many of these in this post last year: ‘alternative lifestyles – or how to avoid ‘working’ for a living‘, below is just  a briefer summary of that post:

Firstly – you could try ‘living off the land’ – admittedly you’d need to buy the land first, which is quite an investment, and if you’re doing it in the UK you’d need to negotiate the archaic planning laws, but once you’ve got the land, it’s possible to grow or rear most of your food, and to live very rich life, very money-cheaply indeed. I recently visited Lammas eco-village in West Wales, and the guys there all live of a few thousand pounds a year only. You might also like to check out my other suggestions for experiments in alternative living –

Secondly, you could become a perpetual traveler – you don’t need much money to get you started, and if you do this you could just earn as you go. You might even be able to combine it with earning some money from a travel blog, although as with vlogging more generally, I suggest you only try this if your pretty sexy.

Finally, and most hardcore of all, you could learn to live without money. Hardcore I know, but there are people doing it! As a softer alternative, you could just try to access as much stuff as possible without money, by skip diving for food or just living off hand-me down clothes, for example. If you want some further inspiration on how you might transition to fully money-less, you might like to check out my earlier blog post on Freeganism.

In Conclusion 

A-level results matter a lot less if you’re prepared to ‘think outside the box’ about what you want out of life.

Do bad exam results matter?

Results day tomorrow, and I predict that Social Media will be full of comments by celebrities telling students that exam results don’t matter that much because ‘I failed my exams, but I still found success’.

This happened last year during The Guardian’s live chat following the release of  the 2016 GCSE results. The chat even supplied a link to a list of ‘famous school flops‘, which include the big three examples of ‘success despite educational failure’ – Alan Sugar, Richard Branson and Simon Cowell, but I can’t really see the relevance of these examples to today’s youth – all they demonstrate is that white men born before 1960 had a chance of being successful if they failed their exams, hardly representative.

There are a few comments from younger celebrities who claim that getting bad exam results are not the end of the world, because despite bad exam results, they have managed to build successful careers. 

From radio presenter Darryl Morris (no, I’d never heard of him either, although I do recognise him):

Daryll Morris.jpg
Darryl Morris – with 10 year’s of hobby-experience, a cheeky-chappy personality and a lot of luck, you too can be successful, even if you failed your exams!

I missed out on my desired GCSE results because I spent most of my revision time practising at the school radio station. I have no English qualifications and dropped out of a college that reluctantly accepted me to pursue a radio career – now I am a presenter and writer….You don’t need anybody’s permission to be successful – it comes from your passion, commitment and ambition.

From Ben Fogle, presenter of every outdoor program the BBC has made this century:

‘Exams left me feeling worthless and lacking in confidence. The worse I did in each test, the more pressure I felt to deliver results that never came. When I failed half my A-levels, and was rejected by my university choices, I spiralled into a depression.

The wilderness rescued me. I have been shaped by my experiences in the great outdoors. Feeling comfortable in the wild gave me the confidence to be who I am, not who others want me to be… it strengthened my character and set me back on track.’

Ben Fogle.jpg
Ben Fogle – If you’re independently schooled, screamingly middle class and very lucky, then you could also network your way into a TV presenting career, even if you fail your exams

Finally, Jeremy Clarkson tweeted: “If your A-level results are disappointing, don’t worry. I got a C and two Us, and I’m currently on a superyacht in the Med.”

The problem with the above is that every single one of the above examples may well be talented and passionate about what they do, as well as hard-working, but IN ADDITION, they either exploited what you might call ‘alternative opportunity structures’, they networked their way to success, or they were just plain lucky, in the sense of being in the right place at the right time: 

Morris was presenting radio from a very young age, so already had lots of experience by the time he was snapped up by the BBC at 16 – so this guy’s ‘alternative opportunity structure’ was through school and local community radio – a very niche way to success.

TBH I don’t know whether Clarkson networked himself onto Top Gear – but he went to the same fee-paying private school (Repton School) as the executive producer of the program, so even if the old-school tie wasn’t part of it, he would’ve oozed cultural and social capital because of his class background.

As for Fogle not only was he independently schooled (so culturally well prepared for his future at the BBC which is chock-full of the privately schooled), -he was also lucky enough to have been at the right age/ fitted the profile for the BBC’s Castaway 2000 series, which catapulted him into fame, he’s also quite charming, which no doubt helps!

So all these case studies show us is that if you want to be successful, then exam results don’t matter IF you have alternative opportunity structures to exploit, AND/ OR you have sufficient social and cultural capital to be able to be able network your way into a job. 

This important qualification (excuse the pun) to the ‘exam results don’t matter argument’ is backed up by Frances Ryan who points out that such comments tend to come from upper middle class adults, for whom as teenagers, poor exam results mattered less because their parents’ wealth and their higher levels cultural and social capital opened up other opportunities for them.

However, Ryan argues that for teenagers from poorer backgrounds, getting good exam results may well be the only realistic opportunity  they have of getting into university and getting a graduate job, which, on average, will still pay you more over the course of a life time than a non-graduate job.

A classic way in which this inequality of opportunity manifests itself is that wealthy parents are able to support their 19-20 year old teenagers to either do another year of A levels, or an access course, or an unpaid internships for a few months or a year to give them a second chance, poorer kids don’t have these options, not unless they want to go into crippling levels of debt.

So – do bad exam results matter? Judging by the analysis above, it matters more if you’re from a working class background because education and qualifications provide the most likely path way to social mobility…..but less so from an upper middle class background.

Having said all of that, if you’ve woken up to the idea that a normal life is basically just a bit shit, then exam results don’t really matter at all. Trust me, jobs aren’t all that! Why not try one of the following alternatives instead:

  • Do voluntary work
  • Become an eco-anarchist
  • Become an artist
  • Go travelling
  • Go homeless
  • Become a monk
  • Live with your parents for the rest of your life.
  • Learn to live without money.

For more ideas about alternative career paths, you might like this post: alternative careers: or how to avoid working for a living.

Why IQ Tests May not Measure Intelligence

The American psychologist Arthur Jensen (1973) defines intelligence as ‘abstract reasoning ability’ – the ability to discover the rules, patterns and logical principles underlying objects and events and the ability to apply these discoveries to solve problems.

Intelligence is measured by intelligence tests such as IQ (Intelligence Quotient) tests which are designed to measure abstract reasoning ability. As such they try avoid questions which ask about factual knowledge – such as ‘what is the capital of the USA?’ but instead ask questions such as – ‘what is the next number in the following sequence – 1,8,27, 64, __’

Despite their widespread use, there is a large body of evidence which suggest that IQ tests are not a valid measure of intelligence, because abstract reasoning is only one facet of the full range of mental abilities.

Culture and Intelligence

The Canadian psychologist Otto Klineberg (1971) gave an IQ test to Yakima Native American children living in Washington State, USA. The test involved timing how long it took the children to place different shaped wooden blocks in the appropriate shaped holes in a wooden frame. The children achieved only low scores, but Klineberg argued that this was because their culture, unlike Western culture, did not place a high value on speed.

yakima.jpg

This suggests that it is inappropriate to compare the intelligence of people from different cultures, as any speed-based test favours some cultures over others.

Other researchers have pointed out that cultural variations between classes within a society mean that IQ tests are biased towards the middle classes, because such tests are largely constructed by and standardised on this group. If we accept the fact that there are cultural differences between social classes, and that the working classes have lower levels of deferred gratification and higher levels of fatalism, as well as a ore negative experience of education generally, then it is likely that they will do less well in IQ tests compared to middle class children.

Further reasons why IQ tests may not measure intelligence 

Klineberg argues that at least the following factors influence how well an individual does in an IQ test:

  • The previous experience and education of the person tested
  • His degree of familiarity with the subject matter of the test
  • His motivation or desire to achieve a good score, in the appropriate time frame.
  • His rapport with the tester
  • his knowledge of the language in which the test is conducted
  • his physical health and well-being.

 

Changing Education Paradigms

In this TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson argues that our current educational systems are still based on a industrial paradigm of education – education is increasingly standardised and about conformity, and kids, who are living in the most stimulating age in history, fail to see the point of going to school, which is about ‘finding the right answers to pass the tests’ rather than about stimulating divergent thinking.

One of our major solutions to the plague of distracted kids (alienated by a system the don’t identify with) is to medicate them to get them through school, whereas what really needs to change is the system itself – we need a paradigm shift, rather than mere reform.

Current Education systems are not fit for the future 

Every country on earth is in the process of reforming its education system. There are two reasons for this:

  • The first is economic – countries are trying to figure out how to prepare children for work when we simply don’t know what work will look like in the future.
  • The second is cultural – countries are trying to figure out how to pass on their ‘cultural genes’ while at the same time having to respond to globalisation.

The problem with current processes of educational reform is that we are trying to tackle the future by doing what we did in the past and we are alienating millions of kids in the process, who simply can’t see the point of going to school.

When generation X when to school, we were motivated by a particular story: that if we worked hard and got good grades, we could get to college, get a degree and get a good job. Today’s children do not believe this, and they are right not to: getting a degree means you will probably get a better job, but is no longer guaranteed to get you a decent job!

The education system is rooted in an industrial paradigm 

The problem with the current education system is that it was conceived in the cultural context of the Enlightenment and the economic context of the industrial revolution. It emerged in the nineteenth century, which was the first time which compulsory public education, freely available to all and paid for by taxes was established.

The Modern education system was originally founded on an ‘us and them’ mentality as many thinkers in the 19th century seriously believed that ordinary street kids could not cope with it, and it is also founded on an Enlightenment concept of the mind – which favours a knowledge of the classics and deductive reasoning, what we might call ‘academic knowledge’.

The system thus divides people into ‘smart people’ (academics) and ‘non-smart people’ (non-academics) and while this has been great for some, most people have not benefited from this system, in fact Ken Robinson argues that the main effect is that it has caused chaos.

We medicate our kids to get them through education

Statistics on prescriptions for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) suggest that America is suffering from an ADHD epidemic – we are drugging our kids with Ritalin as a matter of routine. However, Robinson suggests that this cannot be an epidemic as the rates of prescription vary from West to East – they are much higher in the East of America, which suggests that this is a fictitious epidemic – it’s the system that’s choosing to medicate a ‘problem’ which is only a problem because the system has labelled it thus.

What’s really happening is that our kids are living through the most information rich age in history – they are bombarded with information from many sources through T.V. and the Internet – they are in a way, hyper-stimulated, and yet our response is to punish them for getting distracted from ‘boring stuff’ in school.

Robinson suggests that it is no coincidence that the incidents of prescriptions for ADHD corresponds closely to the rise in standardised testing.

The increasing use of drugs such as Ritalin to medicate kids means that we are effectively getting our kids through school by anaesthetising them.

The school system is run for the benefit of industry, and in many senses along industrial lines, mirroring a factory system of production in at least the following ways:

  1. Ringing bells
  2. Separate facilities
  3. Specialised subjects
  4. We still educate children by batches (‘as if the most important thing about them is the date of their manufacture’).

Increasingly education is about conformity, and you see is in the growth of standardised curricula and standardised testing. The current paradigm is mainly to do with standardisation, and we need to shift the paradigm and go in the other direction.

factory-model-education.jpg
The factory model of education

The education system kills creativity 

There was a great study done recently on divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is an essential capacity for creative thinking – it is the ability to see lots of possible ways of interpreting and answering a question; to think laterally and to see many possible answers, not just one.

An example of this simply to give someone a paper clip and to get them to think of as many different uses for the paper clip as possible – someone whose good at this will be able to think of hundreds of uses for the paper clip by imagining that it can be all sorts of sizes and made out of all sorts of different materials.

Cites a Longitudinal study (taken from a book called ‘Break Point and Beyond) in which Kindergarten children were tested on their ability to think divergently, and 98% of them scored at ‘genius level’; the same children were retested at ages 8-10, but only 50% of them scored at genius level, and again at 13-15, where hardly any of them scored at genius level.

This study shows two things: firstly, we all have the inherent capacity for divergent thinking and secondly it deteriorates as children get older.

Now lots of things happen to these kids as they grow up, but the most important thing is that they have become educated – they’ve spent 10 years being told ‘that there’s one answer and it’s at the back, and don’t look and don’t copy’.

The problem we have is that the industrial-capitalist mode of education is deep in the gene-pool of the education system, it is an educational paradigm which will be hard to shift.

Shifting the Education Paradigm

We need to do the following to shift the industrial-capitalist education paradigm:

Firstly, destroy the myth that there is a divide between academic and non academic subjects, and between the abstract and the theoretical.

Secondly, recognize that most great learning takes place in groups – collaboration is the stuff of growth, rather than individualising people which separates them from their natural learning environment.

Finally, we need to change the habitual ways of thinking of those within the education system and the habitats which they occupy.

Relevance to A-Level Sociology 

This can be used to criticise New Right approaches to education, as well as New Labour, The Coalition and the present Tory government – because all of them have kept in place the basic regime of testing introduced in 1988.

There’s also something of a link here to Bowles and Gintis’ Correspondence Principle – in which the Hidden Curriculum mirrors the work place, because the system is still based an industrial model.

Robinson seems to be suggesting we have a more post-modern approach to education – freeing schools and teachers up so they can encourage more creativity in the classroom rather than being constrained by the tyranny of standardised testing.

Limitations of Ken Robinson’s Perspective

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Illusion of the Equality of Opportunity

Marxist sociologists Bowles and Gintis argue that capitalist societies are not meritocratic. Against Functionalists, they argue that it is not the amount of ability and effort an individual puts into their education that determines how well they do, but rather their class background.

The simple reality is that being born into a middle class family means that middle class children benefit from material and cultural capital which give them an advantage in both school, and in the job application process, which gives them an unfair advantage compared to working class children.

However, the education system disguises this fact by spreading the ‘myth of meritocracy‘ – the idea that it is solely the ability and effort of the individual which determines the qualifications and the job they get, rather than their class background, and thus individuals end up blaming themselves for their failures rather than inequality of opportunity in the education system.

Intelligence, Educational Attainment and Meritocracy

Bowles and Gintis base their argument on an analysis of the relationship between intelligence (measured by IQ), educational attainment and occupational reward. They argue that IQ accounts for only a small part of educational attainment.

Bowles Gintis Myth Meritocracy

They examined a sample of individuals with a wide range of IQs and within this sample, they found a wide variation of educational attainment within that sample and concluded that there was hardly any relationship between the two variables.

Bowles and Gintis found a direct relationship between class background and educational achievement – the higher and individual’s class background, the higher their level of educational achievement.

So how do we explain the fact that individuals with higher IQs tend to have higher qualifications? they explain this as a by-product of length of stay in education – the longer an individual stays in education, they more their IQ develops. However, it is still family background which mainly determines educational attainment.

Bowles and Gintis also apply a similar analysis to the relationship between occupational reward and IQ – again, in their sample of average IQ individuals, there was a wide variety of incomes, which suggested there was no significant relationship between IQ and income.

As with educational success, what explains high income is family background – the combination of an individual’s class, gender and ethnicity are much better predictors of someone’s income rather than their IQ – educational qualifications are of much more value to the white, middle class male, than to the black, working class female.

Bowles and Gintis conclude that ‘education reproduces inequality by justifying privilege and attributing poverty to personal failure’. The education system effectively disguises the fact that economic success runs in the family, and that privilege breeds privilege. Bowles and Gintis thus reject the functionalist view that education is a meritocracy.

Related Posts 

The other major contribution Bowles and Gintis made to the sociology of education was their work on the hidden curriculum and the correspondence principle.

This is a summary post of the Marxist perspective on education which includes a briefer version of what’s in this post, and the one in the link above.

Paul Willis’ ‘Learning to Labour’ is often used to criticize the determinism found in Bowles and Gintis.

Sources used to write this post 

Haralmabos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives

 

Sociology of Education – Good Resources

Useful sources of quantitative and qualitative data for teaching and learning about the sociology of education… with a focus on the United Kingdom. The point of this post is to provide a range of links to resources and ‘hub sites’ which are updated on a regular basis.

This page will be gradually populated with more links as I get the time to update it! Last update April 2018! 

Best Hub Sites (IMO)

The Institute for Education (IOE) – 25% of research into the UK education system takes place through the IOE. The link just above takes you to their research page where you can access details of a range of research on pretty much every aspect of education within in the UK.

institute for education

The Sutton Trust – established in 1997 the Sutton Trust’s main aim is to improve social mobility through evidence based research, programmes and advocacy. Most of its thorough, mixed-methods research is focused on the causes, consequences and experience of inequality of education opportunity.

Quantitative Sources of Data on Education

Official Statistics

Education and Training Statistics for the UK, Department for Education (link to 2016 Publication) – this document provides ‘the basic’ information on the UK education system – the number of schools, teachers, qualifications, basic info about levels of attainment and education expenditure. Published annually in November.

School Workforce in England – covers teacher numbers and pupil-teacher ratios in primary and secondary schools in England and Wales. Published annually in June.

Special Education Needs in England – details of children with special education needs, by type of need, and broken down by school type and gender (statistics derived from the ‘schools census’).

Participation in Education, Training and Employment by 16-18 year olds in England – produced by the DFS focusing on 16-18 education and training.

Other statistical sources of information about education

Education Datalabs – In their own words they are  ‘a group of expert analysts who produce independent research on education policy and practice’. The main pages (and thus the main topics under investigation) are devoted to school accountability, exams and assessment, pupil demographics, admissions, post-16 education and teacher careers.

Education Datalabs provides a number of excellent infographics on many of the above topics, and seems to be committed to open source research – they make their data and code available so that others can develop their research. BIG THUMBS UP for this site!

Education Infographics – A hub site for lots of useful infographics summarising stats on numerous aspects of education, especially the future of elearning.

The Association of Colleges produces a useful document of infographics focusing on colleges –‘Key Further Education Statistics’

Qualitative Sources of Data on Education

Some of the sources below also draw on and generate quantitative data, but to mind they mainly focus on using and generating qualitative data. 

TED Talks on Education – There seems to be something of a consensus within the TED community that education systems around the world are broken, and that the concepts of education and school need re-imagining somehow. The link just above takes you to ten talks from different speakers which all re-imagine school in some way… there’s lots to think about here, and plenty to criticise too.

Youth Employment UK – An organisation set up to help tackle youth unemployment in the UK. They work mainly with 14-24 year olds and aim to give every young person a voice. They produce their own research on what young people think about how well education is preparing them for work, and link to the latest research on youth employment produced by other, similar agencies.