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Education as a Social Institution

by kdkasi | Aug 3, 2023 | Social Institutions

Education as a Social Institution: Nurturing Minds and Shaping Societal Progress

Education is a fundamental social institution that plays a pivotal role in shaping individuals’ intellectual, social, and emotional development. In a sociological context, education is studied as a complex system of formal and informal institutions that impart knowledge, skills, and values to successive generations. This article explores the sociological significance of education as a social institution, examining its members, importance in society, roles, structure, impact on society, and essential functions that drive individual growth and contribute to societal progress.

Understanding Education as a Social Institution

• Definition: In sociology, education is defined as the process of acquiring knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes through formal schooling or informal learning experiences. It prepares individuals for active participation in society and the workforce.
• Members: Educational institutions consist of various members, including teachers, students, administrators, parents, and policymakers responsible for shaping educational policies.

Importance of Education in Society

• Human Capital: Education equips individuals with knowledge and skills, transforming them into productive and valuable human capital.
• Social Mobility: Education provides opportunities for social mobility, enabling individuals to improve their socio-economic status.
• Social Cohesion: Education fosters social cohesion by instilling common values and cultural knowledge, promoting social integration. Roles of Education in Society Socialization: Education is a primary agent of socialization, transmitting cultural values, norms, and societal expectations to new generations.
• Skill Development: Education imparts practical skills and knowledge that are essential for personal and professional development.
• Critical Thinking: Education fosters critical thinking, enabling individuals to analyze information and make informed decisions. Structure of Education Formal Education: Formal education takes place in schools, colleges, and universities with structured curricula and defined learning objectives.
• Informal Education: Informal education occurs outside the formal classroom setting, through experiences, interactions, and self-directed learning.
• Lifelong Learning: Lifelong learning emphasizes the continuous pursuit of knowledge and skills throughout one’s life. Impact of Education on Society Economic Growth: Education contributes to economic growth by fostering a skilled and innovative workforce.
• Social Progress: Education advances societal progress, enhancing healthcare, technology, and quality of life.
• Reduced Inequality: Education can reduce social inequalities by providing equal opportunities for all individuals to succeed. Functions of Education in Society Human Development: Education nurtures intellectual, emotional, and social development, empowering individuals to reach their potential.
• Cultural Transmission: Education transmits cultural heritage and knowledge to new generations, preserving societal values.
• Social Change: Education can drive social change by challenging norms, promoting social justice, and advocating for human rights.

In Conclusion , Education as a social institution is a bedrock of human progress, shaping individuals’ minds and driving societal development. In a sociological context, understanding the roles, importance, structure, and functions of education provides valuable insights into the dynamics of human learning and its impact on society.

Sociologists play a vital role in studying education, analyzing its impact on social mobility, cultural transmission, and economic growth. By recognizing the sociological significance of education, we can work towards promoting inclusive and equitable education systems that empower individuals and foster a more enlightened, innovative, and harmonious society.

The enduring role of education as a social institution reflects its profound influence on human civilization, molding future generations and shaping the trajectory of societies. Embracing the complexities of educational processes and advocating for accessible, quality education can contribute to creating more equitable and enlightened societies, where knowledge and learning are valued as tools for personal growth and collective progress.

By Khushdil Khan Kasi

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Social Institutions in Sociology: Definition & Examples

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Key Takeaways

• A social institution is a group or organization that has specific roles, norms, and expectations, which functions to meet the social needs of society. The family, government, religion, education, and media are all examples of social institutions.
• Social institutions are interdependent and continually interact and influence one another in everyday society. For example, some religious institutions believe they should have control over governmental and educational institutions.
• Social institutions can have both manifest and latent functions . Manifest functions are those that are explicitly stated, while latent functions are not.
• Each social institution plays a vital role in the functioning of society and the lives of the people that inhabit them.

What Are Social Institutions?

Social institutions are the organizations in society that influence how society is structured and functions. They include family, media, education, and the government.

A social institution is an established practice, tradition, behavior, or system of roles and relationships that is considered a normative structure or arrangement within a society.

Bogardus – “A social institution is a structure of society that is organized to meet the needs of people chiefly through well-established procedures.”

H. E. Barnes – “Social institutions are the social structure & machinery through which human society organizes, directs & executes the multifarious activities required to society for human need.”

Broadly, they are patterns of behavior grouped around the central needs of human beings in a society. One such example of an institution is marriage, where multiple people commit to follow certain rules and acquire a familial legal status about each other (Miller, 2007).

Social institutions have several key characteristics:

• They are enduring and stable.
• They serve a purpose, ideally providing better chances for human survival and flourishing.
• They have roles that need to be filled.
• Governing the behavior and expectations of sets of individuals within a given community.
• The rules that govern them are usually ingrained in the basic cultural values of a society, as each institution consists of a complex cluster of social norms .

They also serve general functions, including:

• Allocating resources
• Creating meaning
• Maintaining order
• Growing society and its influence

Examples (and Functions)

The five major social institutions in sociology are family, education, religion, government (political), and the economy.

The family is one of the most important social institutions. It is considered a “building block” of society because it is the primary unit through which socialization occurs.

It is a social unit created by blood, marriage, or adoption, and can be described as nuclear, consisting of two parents and their children, or extended, encompassing other relatives. Although families differ widely around the world, families across cultures share certain common concerns in their everyday lives (Little & McGivern, 2020).

As a social institution, the family serves numerous, multifaceted functions. The family socializes its members by teaching them values, beliefs, and norms.

It also provides emotional support and economic stability. Sometimes, the family may even be a caretaker if one of its members is sick or disabled (Little & McGivern, 2020).

Historically, the family has been the central social institution of Western societies. However, more recently, as sociologists have observed, other social institutions have replaced the family in providing key functions, as family sizes have shrunk and provided more distant ties.

For example, modern schools have, in part, taken on the role of socializing children, and workplaces can provide shared meaning.

• Functions of The Family (Marxism)
• Functionalist Perspective of the Family

E. Durkheim – “Education can be conceived as the socialization of the younger generation. It is a continuous effort to impose on the child ways of seeing, feeling and acting which he could not arrived at spontaneously.”

John J. Macionis – “Education is the social institution through which society provides its members with important knowledge, including basic facts, jobs, skills & cultural norms & values .”

As a social institution, education helps to socialize children and young adults by teaching them the norms, values, and beliefs of their culture. It also transmits cultural heritage from one generation to the next. Education also provides people with the skills and knowledge they need to function in society.

Education may also help to reduce crime rates by providing people with alternatives to criminal activity. These are the “manifest” or openly stated functions and intended goals of education as a social institution (Meyer, 1977).

Education, sociologists have argued, also has a number of latent, or hidden and unstated functions. This can include courtship, the development of social networks, improving the ability for students to work in groups, the creation of a generation gap, and political and social integration (Little & McGivern, 2020).

Although every country in the world is equipped with some form of education system, these systems, as well as the values and teaching philosophies of those who run the systems, vary greatly. Generally, a country”s wealth is directly proportional to the quality of its educational system.

For example, in poor countries, education may be seen as a luxury that only the wealthy can afford, while in rich countries, education is more accessible to a wider range of people.

This is because, in poorer countries, money is often spent on more pressing needs such as food and shelter, diminishing financial and time investments in education (Little & McGivern, 2016).

Religion is another social institution that plays a significant role in society. It is an organized system of beliefs and practices designed to fill the human need for meaning and purpose (Durkheim, 1915).

According to Durkheim, “Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.”

According to Ogburn, “Religion is an attitude towards superhuman powers.”

Religion can be used to instill moral values and socialize individuals into a community. Religion plays a significant role in shaping the way people view themselves and the world around them.

It can provide comfort and security to those in need. Large religions may also provide a basis for community support, establishing institutions of their own, such as hospitals and schools.

Additionally, it can be used as a form of political control or as a source of conflict. Different sociologists have commented on the broad-scale societal effects of religion.

Max Weber , for example, believed that religion could be a force for social change, while Karl Marx viewed religion as a tool used by capitalist societies to perpetuate inequality (Little & McGivern, 2016).

The government is another social institution that plays a vital role in society. It is responsible for maintaining order, protecting citizens from harm, and providing for the common good.

The government does this through various sub-institutions and agencies, such as the police, the military, and the courts. These legal institutions regulate society and prevent crime by enforcing laws and policies.

The government also provides social services, such as education and healthcare, ensuring the general welfare of a country or region”s citizens (Little & McGivern, 2016).

The economy is a social institution that is responsible for the production and distribution of goods and services. It is also responsible for the exchange of money and other resources.

The economy is often divided into three sectors: the primary sector, the secondary sector, and the tertiary sector (Little & McGivern, 2016).

The primary sector includes all industries that are concerned with the extraction and production of natural resources, such as agriculture, forestry, fishing, and mining.

The secondary sector includes all industries that are concerned with the processing of raw materials into finished products, such as manufacturing and construction.

The tertiary sector includes all industries that provide services to individuals and businesses, such as education, healthcare, and tourism (Little & McGivern, 2016).

Barnes, H. E. (1942). Social institutions.  New York , 29.

Bogardus, E. S. (1922).  A history of social thought . University of Southern California Press.

Bogardus, E. S. (1960).  development of social thought .

Durkheim, E. (2006).  Durkheim: Essays on morals and education  (Vol. 1). Taylor & Francis.

Durkheim, E. (2016). The elementary forms of religious life. In  Social Theory Re-Wired  (pp. 52-67). Routledge.

Little, W., McGivern, R., & Kerins, N. (2016).  Introduction to sociology-2nd Canadian edition . BC Campus.

Macionis, J. J., & Plummer, K. (2005).  Sociology: A global introduction . Pearson Education.

Meyer, J. W. (1977). The effects of education as an institution .  American Journal of Sociology ,  83 (1), 55-77.

Ogburn, W. F. (1937). The influence of inventions on American social institutions in the future.  American Journal of Sociology ,  43 (3), 365-376.

Miller, S. (2007). Social institutions In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Schotter, A. (2008). The economic theory of social institutions.  Cambridge Books .

Weber, M. (1936). Social actions .

What are Social Institutions in Sociology?

In sociology, social institutions are established norms and subsystems that support each society’s survival. These institutions are a key part of the structure of society. They include the family, education, religion, and economic and political institutions.

These institutions are not just physical structures or organizations but also the norms and rules that govern our behavior and attitudes, shaping our social interactions and society at large.

What is the role of a social institution?

Each social institution serves a specific role and function in society, and they work together to maintain the overall stability and survival of society.

For instance, the family institution is responsible for societal roles related to birth, upbringing, and socialization. The educational institution imparts knowledge and skills to individuals so they can contribute productively to society.

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12.2: Education

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Learning Objectives

• Summarize the key developments in the history of education since the colonial period.
• List the major functions of education.
• Explain the problems that conflict theory sees in education.
• Describe how symbolic interactionism understands education.

Education is the social institution through which a society teaches its members the skills, knowledge, norms, and values they need to learn to become good, productive members of their society. As this definition makes clear, education is an important part of socialization. Education is both formal and informal . Formal education is often referred to as schooling , and as this term implies, it occurs in schools under teachers, principals, and other specially trained professionals. Informal education may occur almost anywhere, but for young children it has traditionally occurred primarily in the home, with their parents as their instructors. Day care in industrial societies is an increasing venue for young children’s instruction, and education from the early years of life is thus more formal than it used to be.

A Brief History of Education in the United States

Historically, compulsory education in public schools is a relatively recent phenomenon. During the colonial period, the Puritans in what is now Massachusetts required parents to teach their children to read and also required larger towns to have an elementary school, where children learned reading, writing, and religion. In general, though, schooling was not required in the colonies, and only about 10% of colonial children, usually just the wealthiest, went to school, although others became apprentices (Urban, Jennings, & Wagoner, 2008).Urban, W. J., Jennings L., & Wagoner, J. (2008). American education: A history (4th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

To help unify the nation after the Revolutionary War, textbooks were written to standardize spelling and pronunciation and to instill patriotism and religious beliefs in students. At the same time, these textbooks included negative stereotypes of Native Americans and certain immigrant groups. The children going to school continued primarily to be those from wealthy families. By the middle 1800s, a call for free, compulsory education had begun, and compulsory education became widespread by the end of the century. This was an important development, as children from all social classes could now receive a free, formal education. Compulsory education was intended to further national unity and to teach immigrants “American” values. It also arose because of industrialization, as an industrial economy demanded reading, writing, and math skills much more than an agricultural economy had.

Free, compulsory education, of course, applied only to primary and secondary schools. Until the mid-1900s, very few people went to college, and those who did typically came from the fairly wealthy families. After World War II, however, college enrollments soared, and today more people are attending college than ever before, even though college attendance is still related to social class, as we shall discuss shortly.

At least two themes emerge from this brief history. One is that until very recently in the record of history, formal schooling was restricted to wealthy males. This means that boys who were not white and rich were excluded from formal schooling, as were virtually all girls, whose education was supposed to take place informally at home. Today, as we will see, race, ethnicity, social class, and, to some extent, gender continue to affect both educational achievement and the amount of learning occurring in schools.

Second, although the rise of free, compulsory education was an important development, the reasons for this development trouble some critics (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Cole, 2008).Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reforms and the contradictions of economic life . New York, NY: Basic Books; Cole, M. (2008). Marxism and educational theory: Origins and issues . New York, NY: Routledge. Because compulsory schooling began in part to prevent immigrants’ values from corrupting “American” values, they see its origins as smacking of ethnocentrism. They also criticize its intention to teach workers the skills they needed for the new industrial economy. Because most workers were very poor in this economy, these critics say, compulsory education served the interests of the upper/capitalist class much more than it served the interests of workers. It was good that workers became educated, say the critics, but in the long run their education helped the owners of capital much more than it helped the workers themselves. Whose interests are served by education remains an important question addressed by sociological perspectives on education, to which we now turn.

Sociological Perspectives on Education

The major sociological perspectives on education fall nicely into the functional, conflict, and symbolic interactionist approaches (Ballantine & Hammack, 2009).Ballantine, J. H., & Hammack, F. M. (2009). The sociology of education: A systematic analysis (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Table 12.1 summarizes what these approaches say.

The Functions of Education

Functional theory stresses the functions that education serves in fulfilling a society’s various needs. Perhaps the most important function of education is socialization . If children need to learn the norms, values, and skills they need to function in society, then education (as Chapter 3 noted) is a primary vehicle for such learning. Schools teach the three Rs, as we all know, but they also teach many of the society’s norms and values. In the United States, these norms and values include respect for authority, patriotism (remember the Pledge of Allegiance?), punctuality, individualism, and competition. Regarding these last two values, American students from an early age compete as individuals over grades and other rewards. The situation is quite the opposite in Japan, where, as we saw in Chapter 3, children learn the traditional Japanese values of harmony and group belonging from their schooling (Schneider & Silverman, 2010).Schneider, L., & Silverman, A. (2010). Global sociology: Introducing five contemporary societies (5th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. They learn to value their membership in their homeroom, or kumi , and are evaluated more on their kumi ’s performance than on their own individual performance. How well a Japanese child’s kumi does is more important than how well the child does as an individual.

A second function of education is social integration . For a society to work, functionalists say, people must subscribe to a common set of beliefs and values. As we saw, the development of such common views was a goal of the system of free, compulsory education that developed in the 19th century. Thousands of immigrant children in the United States today are learning English, U.S. history, and other subjects that help prepare them for the workforce and integrate them into American life. Such integration is a major goal of the English-only movement, whose advocates say that only English should be used to teach children whose native tongue is Spanish, Vietnamese, or whatever other language their parents speak at home. Critics of this movement say it slows down these children’s education and weakens their ethnic identity (Schildkraut, 2005).Schildkraut, D. J. (2005). Press “one” for English: Language policy, public opinion, and American identity . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

A third function of education is social placement . Beginning in grade school, students are identified by teachers and other school officials either as bright and motivated or as less bright and even educationally challenged. Depending on how they are identified, children are taught at the level that is thought to suit them best. In this way they are prepared in the most appropriate way possible for their later station in life. Whether this process works as well as it should is an important issue, and we explore it further when we discuss school tracking shortly.

Social and cultural innovation is a fourth function of education. Our scientists cannot make important scientific discoveries and our artists and thinkers cannot come up with great works of art, poetry, and prose unless they have first been educated in the many subjects they need to know for their chosen path.

Education also involves several latent functions, functions that are by-products of going to school and receiving an education rather than a direct effect of the education itself. One of these is child care . Once a child starts kindergarten and then first grade, for several hours a day the child is taken care of for free. The establishment of peer relationships is another latent function of schooling. Most of us met many of our friends while we were in school at whatever grade level, and some of those friendships endure the rest of our lives. A final latent function of education is that it keeps millions of high school students out of the full-time labor force . This fact keeps the unemployment rate lower than it would be if they were in the labor force.

Education and Inequality

Conflict theory does not dispute most of the functions just described. However, it does give some of them a different slant and talks about various ways in which education perpetuates social inequality (Hill, Macrine, & Gabbard, 2010; Liston, 1990).Hill, D., Macrine, S., & Gabbard, D. (Eds.). (2010). Capitalist education: Globalisation and the politics of inequality . New York, NY: Routledge; Liston, D. P. (1990). Capitalist schools: Explanation and ethics in radical studies of schooling . New York, NY: Routledge. One example involves the function of social placement. As most schools track their students starting in grade school, the students thought by their teachers to be bright are placed in the faster tracks (especially in reading and arithmetic), while the slower students are placed in the slower tracks; in high school, three common tracks are the college track, vocational track, and general track.

Such tracking does have its advantages; it helps ensure that bright students learn as much as their abilities allow them, and it helps ensure that slower students are not taught over their heads. But, conflict theorists say, tracking also helps perpetuate social inequality by locking students into faster and lower tracks. Worse yet, several studies show that students’ social class and race and ethnicity affect the track into which they are placed, even though their intellectual abilities and potential should be the only things that matter: white, middle-class students are more likely to be tracked “up,” while poorer students and students of color are more likely to be tracked “down.” Once they are tracked, students learn more if they are tracked up and less if they are tracked down. The latter tend to lose self-esteem and begin to think they have little academic ability and thus do worse in school because they were tracked down. In this way, tracking is thought to be good for those tracked up and bad for those tracked down. Conflict theorists thus say that tracking perpetuates social inequality based on social class and race and ethnicity (Ansalone, 2006; Oakes, 2005).Ansalone, G. (2006). Tracking: A return to Jim Crow. Race, gender & class, 13 , 1–2; Oakes, J. (2005). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality (2nd ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Social inequality is also perpetuated through the widespread use of standardized tests. Critics say these tests continue to be culturally biased, as they include questions whose answers are most likely to be known by white, middle-class students, whose backgrounds have afforded them various experiences that help them answer the questions. They also say that scores on standardized tests reflect students’ socioeconomic status and experiences in addition to their academic abilities. To the extent this critique is true, standardized tests perpetuate social inequality (Grodsky, Warren, & Felts, 2008).Grodsky, E., Warren, J. R., & Felts, E. (2008). Testing and social stratification in American education. Annual Review of Sociology, 34 (1), 385–404.

As we will see, schools in the United States also differ mightily in their resources, learning conditions, and other aspects, all of which affect how much students can learn in them. Simply put, schools are unequal, and their very inequality helps perpetuate inequality in the larger society. Children going to the worst schools in urban areas face many more obstacles to their learning than those going to well-funded schools in suburban areas. Their lack of learning helps ensure they remain trapped in poverty and its related problems.

Conflict theorists also say that schooling teaches a hidden curriculum, by which they mean a set of values and beliefs that support the status quo, including the existing social hierarchy (Booher-Jennings, 2008).Booher-Jennings, J. (2008). Learning to label: Socialisation, gender, and the hidden curriculum of high-stakes testing. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29 , 149–160. Chapter 3’s discussion of socialization first presented the concept of the hidden curriculum by having you pretend you were a ruler of a new society who wanted its children to grow up loving their country and respecting your authority. Although no one plots this behind closed doors, our schoolchildren learn patriotic values and respect for authority from the books they read and from various classroom activities.

Symbolic Interactionism and School Behavior

Symbolic interactionist studies of education examine social interaction in the classroom, on the playground, and in other school venues. These studies help us understand what happens in the schools themselves, but they also help us also understand how what occurs in school is relevant for the larger society. Some studies, for example, show how children’s playground activities reinforce gender role socialization. Girls tend to play more cooperative games, while boys play more competitive sports (Thorne, 1993) (see Chapter 8).Thorne, B. (1993). Gender play: Girls and boys in school . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Another body of research shows that teachers’ views about students can affect how much the students learn. When teachers think students are smart, they tend to spend more time with them, to call on them, and to praise them when they give the right answer. Not surprisingly these students learn more because of their teachers’ behavior. But when teachers think students are less bright, they tend to spend less time with them and in other ways act in a way that leads the students to learn less. One of the first studies to find this example of a self-fulfilling prophecy was conducted by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968).Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom . New York, NY: Holt. They tested a group of students at the beginning of the school year and told their teachers which were bright and which were not. They tested the students again at the end of the school year; not surprisingly the bright students had learned more during the year than the less bright ones. But it turned out that the researchers had randomly decided which students would be designated bright and less bright. Because the “bright” students learned more during the school year without actually being brighter at the beginning, their teachers’ behavior must have been the reason. In fact, their teachers did spend more time with them and praised them more often than was true for the “less bright” students. To the extent this type of self-fulfilling prophecy occurs, it helps us understand why tracking is bad for the students tracked down.

Other research focuses on how teachers treat girls and boys. Several studies from the 1970s through the 1990s found that teachers call on boys more often and praise them more often (American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, 1998; Jones & Dindia, 2004).American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. (1998). Gender gaps: Where schools still fail our children . Washington, DC: American Association of University Women Educational Foundation; Jones, S. M., & Dindia, K. (2004). A meta-analystic perspective on sex equity in the classroom. Review of Educational Research, 74 , 443–471. Teachers did not do this consciously, but their behavior nonetheless sent an implicit message to girls that math and science are not for girls and that they are not suited to do well in these subjects. This body of research stimulated efforts to educate teachers about the ways in which they may unwittingly send these messages and about strategies they could use to promote greater interest and achievement by girls in math and science (Battey, Kafai, Nixon, & Kao, 2007).Battey, D., Kafai, Y., Nixon, A. S., & Kao, L. L. (2007). Professional development for teachers on gender equity in the sciences: Initiating the conversation. Teachers College Record, 109 (1), 221–243.

• At least two themes emerge from the history of education. The first is that until very recently in the record of history, formal schooling was restricted to wealthy males. The second is that the rise of free, compulsory education was an important development that nonetheless has been criticized for orienting workers in the 19th century to be disciplined and to obey authority.
• The functions of education include socialization, social integration, social placement, and social and cultural innovation.
• Education is said for several reasons to contribute to social inequality and to involve a hidden curriculum that stifles independent thinking.

For Your Review

• Write a brief essay in which you discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the rise of free, compulsory education.
• Review how the functionalist, conflict, and symbolic interactionist perspectives understand and explain education. Which of these three approaches do you most prefer? Why?

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11.1 An Overview of Education in the United States

Learning objectives.

• Explain why compulsory education arose during the nineteenth century.
• Summarize social class, gender, and racial and ethnic differences in educational attainment.
• Describe the impact that education has on income.
• Explain how the US education system ranks internationally.

Education is the social institution through which a society teaches its members the skills, knowledge, norms, and values they need to learn to become good, productive members of their society. As this definition makes clear, education is an important part of socialization. Education is both formal and informal . Formal education is often referred to as schooling , and as this term implies, it occurs in schools under teachers, principals, and other specially trained professionals. Informal education may occur almost anywhere, but for young children it has traditionally occurred primarily in the home, with their parents as their instructors. Day care has become an increasingly popular venue in industrial societies for young children’s instruction, and education from the early years of life is thus more formal than it used to be.

Education in early America was only rarely formal. During the colonial period, the Puritans in what is now Massachusetts required parents to teach their children to read and also required larger towns to have an elementary school, where children learned reading, writing, and religion. In general, though, schooling was not required in the colonies, and only about 10 percent of colonial children, usually just the wealthiest, went to school, although others became apprentices (Urban & Wagoner, 2008).

To help unify the nation after the Revolutionary War, textbooks were written to standardize spelling and pronunciation and to instill patriotism and religious beliefs in students. At the same time, these textbooks included negative stereotypes of Native Americans and certain immigrant groups. The children going to school continued primarily to be those from wealthy families. By the mid-1800s, a call for free, compulsory education had begun, and compulsory education became widespread by the end of the century. This was an important development, as children from all social classes could now receive a free, formal education. Compulsory education was intended to further national unity and to teach immigrants “American” values. It also arose because of industrialization, as an industrial economy demanded reading, writing, and math skills much more than an agricultural economy had.

Free, compulsory education, of course, applied only to primary and secondary schools. Until the mid-1900s, very few people went to college, and those who did typically came from fairly wealthy families. After World War II, however, college enrollments soared, and today more people are attending college than ever before, even though college attendance is still related to social class, as we shall discuss shortly.

An important theme emerges from this brief history: Until very recently in the record of history, formal schooling was restricted to wealthy males. This means that boys who were not white and rich were excluded from formal schooling, as were virtually all girls, whose education was supposed to take place informally at home. Today, as we will see, race, ethnicity, social class, and, to some extent, gender continue to affect both educational achievement and the amount of learning occurring in schools.

In colonial America, only about 10 percent of children went to school, and these children tended to come from wealthy families. After the Revolutionary War, new textbooks helped standardize spelling and pronunciation and promote patriotism and religious beliefs, but these textbooks also included negative stereotypes of Native Americans.

Wikimedia Commons – public domian.

Education in the United States Today

Education in the United States is a massive social institution involving millions of people and billions of dollars. More than 75 million people, almost one-fourth of the US population, attend school at all levels. This number includes 40 million in grades pre-K through eighth grade, 16 million in high school, and 20 million in college (including graduate and professional school). They attend some 132,000 elementary and secondary schools and about 4,200 two-year and four-year colleges and universities and are taught by about 4.8 million teachers and professors (US Census Bureau, 2012).

Correlates of Educational Attainment

About 65 percent of US high school graduates enroll in college the following fall. This is a very high figure by international standards, as college in many other industrial nations is reserved for the very small percentage of the population who pass rigorous entrance exams. They are the best of the brightest in their nations, whereas higher education in the United States is open to all who graduate high school. Even though that is true, our chances of achieving a college degree are greatly determined at birth, as social class and race and ethnicity substantially affect who goes to college. They affect whether students drop out of high school, in which case they do not go on to college; they affect the chances of getting good grades in school and good scores on college entrance exams; they affect whether a family can afford to send its children to college; and they affect the chances of staying in college and obtaining a degree versus dropping out. For all these reasons, educational attainment —how far one gets in school—depends heavily on family income and race/ethnicity (Tavernise, 2012). Family income, in fact, makes a much larger difference in educational attainment than it did during the 1960s.

Family Income and Race/Ethnicity

Government data readily show the effects of family income and race/ethnicity on educational attainment. Let’s first look at how race and ethnicity affect the likelihood of dropping out of high school. Figure 11.1 “Race, Ethnicity, and High School Dropout Rate, Persons Ages 16–24, 2009 (Percentage Not Enrolled in School and without a High School Degree)” shows the percentage of people ages 16–24 who are not enrolled in school and who have not received a high school degree. The dropout rate is highest for Latinos and Native Americans and lowest for Asians and whites.

Figure 11.1 Race, Ethnicity, and High School Dropout Rate, Persons Ages 16–24, 2009 (Percentage Not Enrolled in School and without a High School Degree)

Source: Aud, S., Hussar, W., Kena, G., Bianco, K., Frohlich, L., Kemp, J., et al. (2011). The condition of education 2011 . Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.

Now let’s look at how family income affects the likelihood of attending college, a second benchmark of educational attainment. Figure 11.2 “Family Income and Percentage of High School Graduates Who Attend College Immediately after Graduation, 2009” shows the relationship between family income and the percentage of high school graduates who enroll in college immediately following graduation: Students from families in the highest income bracket are more likely than those in the lowest bracket to attend college. This “income gap” in college entry has become larger in recent decades (Bailey & Dynarski, 2011).

Figure 11.2 Family Income and Percentage of High School Graduates Who Attend College Immediately after Graduation, 2009

Finally, let’s examine how race and ethnicity affect the likelihood of obtaining a college degree, a third benchmark of educational attainment. Figure 11.3 “Race, Ethnicity, and Percentage of Persons Ages 25 or Older with a Four-Year College Degree, 2010” shows the relationship between race/ethnicity and the percentage of persons 25 or older who have a bachelor’s or master’s degree. This relationship is quite strong, with African Americans and Latinos least likely to have a degree, and whites and especially Asians/Pacific Islanders most likely to have a degree.

Figure 11.3 Race, Ethnicity, and Percentage of Persons Ages 25 or Older with a Four-Year College Degree, 2010

Explaining the Racial/Ethnic Gap in Educational Attainment

Why do African Americans and Latinos have lower educational attainment? Four factors are commonly cited: (a) the underfunded and otherwise inadequate schools that children in both groups often attend; (b) the higher poverty of their families and lower education of their parents that often leave children ill prepared for school even before they enter kindergarten; (c) racial discrimination; and (d) the fact that African American and Latino families are especially likely to live in very poor neighborhoods (Ballantine & Hammack, 2012; Yeung & Pfeiffer, 2009).

The last two factors, racial discrimination and residence in high-poverty neighborhoods, need additional explanation. At least three forms of racial discrimination impair educational attainment (Mickelson, 2003). The first form involves tracking. As we discuss later, students tracked into vocational or general curricula tend to learn less and have lower educational attainment than those tracked into a faster-learning, academic curriculum. Because students of color are more likely to be tracked “down” rather than “up,” their school performance and educational attainment suffer.

The second form of racial discrimination involves school discipline. As we also discuss later, students of color are more likely than white students to be suspended, expelled, or otherwise disciplined for similar types of misbehavior. Because such discipline again reduces school performance and educational attainment, this form of discrimination helps explain the lower attainment of African American and Latino students.

The third form involves teachers’ expectations of students. As our later discussion of the symbolic interactionist perspective on education examines further, teachers’ expectations of students affect how much students learn. Research finds that teachers have lower expectations for their African American and Latino students, and that these expectations help to lower how much these students learn.

Turning to residence in high-poverty neighborhoods, it may be apparent that poor neighborhoods have lower educational attainment because they have inadequate schools, but poor neighborhoods matter for reasons beyond their schools’ quality (Kirk & Sampson, 2011; Wodtke, Harding, & Elwert, 2011). First, because many adults in these neighborhoods are high school dropouts and/or unemployed, children in these neighborhoods lack adult role models for educational attainment. Second, poor neighborhoods tend to be racially and ethnically segregated. Latino children in these neighborhoods are less likely to speak English well because they lack native English-speaking friends, and African American children are more likely to speak “black English” than conventional English; both language problems impede school success.

Third, poor neighborhoods have higher rates of violence and other deviant behaviors than wealthier neighborhoods. Children in these neighborhoods thus are more likely to experience high levels of stress, to engage in these behaviors themselves (which reduces their attention and commitment to their schooling), and to be victims of violence (which increases their stress and can impair their neurological development). Crime in these neighborhoods also tends to reduce teacher commitment and parental involvement in their children’s schooling. Finally, poor neighborhoods are more likely to have environmental problems such as air pollution and toxic levels of lead paint; these problems lead to asthma and other health problems among children (as well as adults), which impairs the children’s ability to learn and do well in school.

For all these reasons, then, children in poor neighborhoods are at much greater risk for lower educational attainment. As a recent study of this risk concluded, “Sustained exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods…throughout the entire childhood life course has a devastating impact on the chances of graduating from high school” (Wodtke et al., 2011, p. 731). If these neighborhoods are not improved, the study continued, “concentrated neighborhood poverty will likely continue to hamper the development of future generations of children” (Wodtke et al., 2011, p. 733).

Gender also affects educational attainment. If we do not take age into account, slightly more men than women have a college degree: 30.3 percent of men and 29.6 percent of women. This difference reflects the fact that women were less likely than men in earlier generations to go to college. But today there is a gender difference in the other direction: Women now earn more than 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, up from just 35 percent in 1960 (see Figure 11.4 “Percentage of All Bachelor’s Degrees Received by Women, 1960–2009” ). This difference reflects the fact that females are more likely than males to graduate high school, to attend college after high school graduation, and to obtain a degree after starting college (Bailey & Dynarski, 2011).

Figure 11.4 Percentage of All Bachelor’s Degrees Received by Women, 1960–2009

Source: Data from US Census Bureau. (2012). Statistical abstract of the United States: 2012 . Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab .

Impact of Education on Income

On the average, college graduates have much higher annual earnings than high school graduates. How much does this consequence affect why you decided to go to college?

Merrimack College – Commencement 2012 – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Have you ever applied for a job that required a high school degree? Are you going to college in part because you realize you will need a college degree for a higher-paying job? As these questions imply, the United States is a credential society (Collins, 1979). This means at least two things. First, a high school or college degree (or beyond) indicates that a person has acquired the needed knowledge and skills for various jobs. Second, a degree at some level is a requirement for most jobs. As you know full well, a college degree today is a virtual requirement for a decent-paying job. The ante has been upped considerably over the years: In earlier generations, a high school degree, if even that, was all that was needed, if only because so few people graduated from high school to begin with. With so many people graduating from high school today, a high school degree is not worth as much. Then too, today’s society increasingly requires skills and knowledge that only a college education brings.

A credential society also means that people with more formal education achieve higher incomes. Annual earnings are indeed much higher for people with more education (see Figure 11.5 “Educational Attainment and Median Annual Earnings, Ages 25–34, 2009” ). As earlier chapters indicated, gender and race/ethnicity affect the payoff we get from our education, but education itself still makes a huge difference for our incomes.

Figure 11.5 Educational Attainment and Median Annual Earnings, Ages 25–34, 2009

Impact of Education on Mortality

Beyond income, education also affects at what age people tend to die. Simply put, people with higher levels of education tend to die later in life, and those with lower levels tend to die earlier (Miech, Pampel, Kim, & Rogers, 2011). The reasons for this disparity are complex, but two reasons stand out. First, more highly educated people are less likely to smoke and engage in other unhealthy activities, and they are more likely to exercise and to engage in other healthy activities and also to eat healthy diets. Second, they have better access to high-quality health care.

How the US Education System Compares Internationally

The United States has many of the top colleges and universities and secondary schools in the world, and many of the top professors and teachers. In these respects, the US education system is “the best of systems.” But in other respects, it is “the worst of systems.” When we compare educational attainment in the United States to that in the world’s other democracies, the United States lags behind its international peers.

Differences in the educational systems of the world’s democracies make exact comparisons difficult, but one basic measure of educational attainment is the percentage of a nation’s population that has graduated high school. A widely cited comparison involves the industrial nations that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Of the twenty-eight nations for which OECD has high school graduation data, the United States ranks only twenty-first, with a graduation rate of 76 percent (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2011). In contrast, several nations, including Finland, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom have graduation rates of at least 90 percent. If we limit the comparison to the OECD nations that compose the world’s wealthy democracies (see Chapter 2 “Poverty” ) to which the United States is most appropriately compared, the United States ranks only thirteenth out of sixteen such nations.

OECD also collects and publishes data on proficiency in mathematics, reading, and science among 15-year-olds in its member nations (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2010). In reading and science, the United States ranks only at the average for all OECD nations, while the US score for mathematics ranks below the OECD average. Compared to their counterparts in other industrial nations, then, American 15-year-olds are only average or below average for these three important areas of study. Taking into account high school graduation rates and these proficiency rankings, the United States is far from the world leader in the quality of education. The Note 11.8 “Lessons from Other Societies” box examines what the United States might learn from the sterling example of Finland’s education system.

Lessons from Other Societies

Successful Schooling in Finland

Finland is widely regarded as having perhaps the top elementary and secondary education system in the world. Its model of education offers several important lessons for US education. As a recent analysis of Finland’s schools put it, “The country’s achievements in education have other nations doing their homework.”

To understand the lessons to be learned from Finland, we should go back several decades to the 1970s, when Finland’s education system was below par, with its students scoring below the international average in mathematics and science. Moreover, urban schools in Finland outranked rural schools, and wealthy students performed much better than low-income students. Today, Finnish students rank at the top in international testing, and low-income students do almost as well as wealthy students.

Finland’s education system ranks so highly today because it took several measures to improve its education system. First, and perhaps most important, Finland raised teachers’ salaries, required all teachers to have a three-year master’s degree, and paid all costs, including a living stipend, for the graduate education needed to achieve this degree. These changes helped to greatly increase the number of teachers, especially the number of highly qualified teachers, and Finland now has more teachers for every 1,000 residents than does the United States. Unlike the United States, teaching is considered a highly prestigious profession in Finland, and the application process to become a teacher is very competitive. The college graduates who apply for one of Finland’s eight graduate programs in teaching typically rank in the top 10 percent of their class, and only 5–15 percent of their applications are accepted. A leading Finnish educator observed, “It’s more difficult getting into teacher education than law or medicine.” In contrast, US students who become teachers tend to have lower SAT scores than those who enter other professions, they only need a four-year degree, and their average salaries are lower than other professionals with a similar level of education.

Second, Finland revamped its curriculum to emphasize critical thinking skills, reduced the importance of scores on standardized tests and then eliminated standardized testing altogether, and eliminated academic tracking before tenth grade. Unlike the United States, Finland no longer ranks students, teachers, or schools according to scores on standardized tests because these tests are no longer given.

Third, Finland built many more schools to enable the average school to have fewer students. Today the typical school has fewer than three hundred students, and class sizes are smaller than those found in the United States.

Fourth, Finland increased funding of its schools so that its schools are now well maintained and well equipped. Whereas many US schools are decrepit, Finnish schools are decidedly in good repair.

Finally, Finland provided free medical and dental care for children and their families and expanded other types of social services, including three years of paid maternity leave and subsidized day care, as the country realized that children’s health and home environment play critical roles in their educational achievement.

These and other changes helped propel Finland’s education system to a leading position among the world’s industrial nations. As the United States ponders how best to improve its own education system, it may have much to learn from Finland’s approach to how children should learn.

Sources: Abrams, 2011; Anderson, 2011; Eggers & Calegari, 2011; Hancock, 2011; Ravitch, 2012; Sahlberg, 2011

Key Takeaways

• Until very recently in the record of history, formal schooling was restricted to wealthy males.
• Students from low-income backgrounds tend to have lower educational attainment than students from wealthier backgrounds.
• African Americans and Latinos tend to have lower educational attainment than non-Latino whites and Asians.
• Gender influences educational attainment in a complex fashion; older women have lower educational attainment than older men, but younger women have greater educational attainment than younger men.
• The United States ranks behind many other industrial nations in the quality of the education its citizens receive.

For Your Review

• Do you think the government should take steps to try to reduce racial and ethnic differences in education, or do you think it should take a hands-off approach? Explain your answer.
• Should the government require that children receive a formal education, as it now does, or should it be up to parents to decide whether their children should receive a formal education? Explain your answer.

Abrams, S. E. (2011, January 28). The children must play: What the United States could learn from Finland about education reform. The New Republic. Retrieved from http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/82329/education-reform-Finland-US .

Anderson, J. (2011, December 13). From Finland, an intriguing school-reform model. New York Times , p. A33.

Bailey, M. J., & Dynarski, S. (2011). Gains and gaps: Changing inequality in US college entry and completion . Ann Arbor, MI: Population Studies Center.

Ballantine, J. H., & Hammack, F. M. (2012). The sociology of education: A systematic analysis (7th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Collins, R. (1979). The credential society: An historical sociology of education and stratification . New York, NY: Academic Press.

Eggers, D., & Calegari, N. C. (2011, May 1). The high cost of low teacher salaries. New York Times , p. WK12.

Hancock, L. (2011, September). Why are Finland’s schools successful? Smithsonian . Retrieved from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html?c=y&story=fullstory .

Kirk, D. S., & Sampson, R. J. (2011). Crime and the production of safe schools. In G. J. Duncan & R. J. Murnane (Eds.), Whither opportunity?: Rising inequality, schools, and children’s life chances (pp. 397–418). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

Mickelson, R. A. (2003). When are racial disparities in education the result of racial discrimination? A social science perspective. Teachers College Record, 105, pp. 1052–1086.

Miech, R., Pampel, F., Kim, J., & Rogers, R. G. (2011). Education and mortality: The role of widening and narrowing disparities. American Sociological Review, 76 , 913–934.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2011). How many students finish secondary education? Retrieved November 10, 2011, from http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/62/3/48630687.pdf .

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2010). PISA 2009 results: What students know and can do—Student performance in reading, mathematics and science (Vol. 1). Paris, France: Author.

Ravitch, D. (2012, March 8). Schools we can envy. The New York Review of Books . Retrieved from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/schools-we-can-envy/ .

Sahlberg, P. (2011). Finnish lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Tavernise, S. (2012, February 10). Education gap grows between rich and poor, studies say. New York Times , p. A1.

Urban, W. J., & Wagoner, J. L., Jr. (2008). American education: A history (4th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

US Census Bureau. (2012). Statistical abstract of the United States: 2012 . Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab .

Wodtke, G. T., Harding, D. J., & Elwert, F. (2011). Neighborhood effects in temporal perspective: The impact of long-term exposure to concentrated disadvantage on high school graduation. American Sociological Review, 76 (5), 713–736.

Yeung, W.-J. J., & Pfeiffer, K. M. (2009). The black-white test score gap and early home environment. Social Science Research, 38 (2), 412–437.

Social Problems Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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• Published: 13 October 2017

Rethinking higher education and its relationship with social inequalities: past knowledge, present state and future potential

• Theocharis Kromydas 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  3 , Article number:  1 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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The purposes and impact of higher education on the economy and the broader society have been transformed through time in various ways. Higher education institutional and policy dynamics differ across time, but also between countries and political regimes and therefore context cannot be neglected. This article reviews the purpose of higher education and its institutional characteristics juxtaposing two, allegedly rival, conceptual frameworks; the instrumental and the intrinsic one. Various pedagogical traditions are critically reviewed and used as examples, which can potentially inform today’s policy making. Since, higher education cannot be seen as detached from all other lower levels of education appropriate conceptual links are offered throughout this article. Its significance lies on the organic synthesis of literature across social science, suggesting ways of going forward based on the traditions that already exist but seem underutilized so far because of overdependence in market-driven practices. This offers a new insight on how theories can inform policy making, through conceptual “bridging” and reconciliation. The debate on the purpose of higher education is placed under the context of the most recent developments of increasing social inequalities in the western world and its relation to the mass model of higher education and the relevant policy decisions for a continuous increase in participation. This article suggests that the current policy focus on labor market driven policies in higher education have led to an ever growing competition transforming this social institution to an ordinary market-place, where attainment and degrees are seen as a currency that can be converted to a labour market value. Education has become an instrument for economic progress moving away from its original role to provide context for human development. As a result, higher education becomes very expensive and even if policies are directed towards openness, in practice, just a few have the money to afford it. A shift toward a hybrid model, where the intrinsic purpose of higher education is equally acknowledged along with its instrumental purpose should be seen by policy makers as the way forward to create educational systems that are more inclusive and societies that are more knowledgeable and just.

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Introduction

The mainstream view in the western world, as informed by the human capital theory sees education, as an ordinary investment and the main reason why someone consumes time and money to undertake higher levels of education, is the high returns expected from the corresponding wage premium, when enters the labour market (Becker, 1964 , 1993 ). Nevertheless, things in practice are more complicated and this sequence of events is unlikely to be sustained, especially in recession periods like the one we currently live in. On the contrary, one notion of education, related somewhat to the American liberal arts tradition, is the intrinsic notion, which interprets that the purpose of education is to ‘equip people to make their own free, autonomous choices about the life they will lead’ (Bridges, 1992 : 92). There might be an economic basis underpinning this individual choice, but the intrinsic notion permits more subjective motivations, which are not necessarily affected by economic circumstances.

Robinson and Aronica ( 2009 ) argue that education, have become an impersonal linear process, a type of assembly line, similar to a factory production. They challenge this view and call for a less standardised pedagogy; more personalised to students needs as well as talents. Education is not similar to a manufacturing production-line, since students are highly concerned about the quality of education they receive as opposed to motor cars, which are indifferent to the process by which they are manufactured. Along these lines, Waters ( 2012 ), following Weber’s ( 1947 , 1968 ) rationale on the role of bureaucracy in modern societies, adds that this manufacturing process is achieved through rigid, rationalised and productively efficient but totally impersonal bureaucracy, operated in a way that sees children as raw materials for the creation of adults, which is the final product properly equipped to reproduce “itself” by being a parent to a new born “raw material” and so forth. Durkheim ( 1956 , 2006 ) sees this as a mechanism where adults exercise their influence over the younger in order to maintain the status quo they desire. However, since education entails ontological as well as epistemological implications, primary focus should be given to learning in such a way that educative and social functions could be amalgamated, rather than solely focusing on the delivery of existing knowledge per se, which becomes a reiterated process and an unchallenged absolute truth (Freire, 1970 ; Heidegger, 1988 ; Dall’ Alba and Barnacle, 2007 ).

This article focus on higher education; since it is the last stage before somebody enters the labour market and thus the instrumental view becomes more dominant over the intrinsic view, compared to the lower levels of education. Higher education, is being traditionally offered by universities. The first established university in Europe is the University of Bologna, where the term “academic freedom” was introduced as the kernel of its culture (Newman, 1996 ). Graham ( 2013 ) distinguishes between three different models of higher education. These are: the university college, the research and the technical university. He provides a historical review of the origins of these three models. The university college is the oldest one, where Christian values were the core values. Later on, when scientific knowledge questioned the universal theological truth, another type of university has been established, where research was the ultimate goal of the scholarship. This type of university has subsequently transformed by the introduction of the liberal arts tradition, flourished in the US. The research university model, originated circa 16 th century in Cambridge and established in Berlin by the introduction of the Humboldian University, shared a common aim: the pursuit of knowledge and its dissemination to the greater society. The third model of university is the technical one. It has been established in an industrial revolution context in Scotland and particularly in Glasgow in the premises of what is currently known as the University of Strathclyde. While the introduction of capitalism changed radically the structure and the format of labour relations, the technical model was based on the idea that industrial skills had to be acquired by formal education and somehow verified institutionally in order to be applied to the broader society. This is the first time where the up to then distinct fields of education and industry, started to be conceived as inextricably tight in a rather linear way.

These different models of higher education cultures and traditions still exist, but in reality, Universities worldwide follow a hybrid approach, where all traditions collaborate with each other. However, there are some universities that still carry the reputation and tradition of a specific model and to some extent this tradition differentiates them from all others. It is not the scope of this research to analyse this in detail, as the main aim is to offer an institutional and policy narrative, exploring the purpose of higher education and its relationship with social inequalities, focusing primarily on the western world.

Nowadays, in a rapidly changing word, the major debate is placed under the forms of institutional transformation of higher education. Brennan ( 2004 ), based on Trow ( 1979 , 2000 ), allocates three forms of higher education. The first one is the elite form, which main aim is to prepare and shape the mind-set of students originated from the most dominant class. The second is the mass form of higher education, which transmits the knowledge and skills acquired in higher education into the technical and economic roles students subsequently perform in the labour market. Lastly, the third is the universal form, which main purpose is to adapt students and the general population to the rapid social and technological changes.

This article reviews the contemporary trends in higher education and its widespread diffusion as interacted with the evolutions in western economies and societies, where social inequalities persist and even become wider (Dorling and Dorling, 2015 ). The narrative used in this article is more suitable to conceptualise higher education in a western world context, though we acknowledge that via globalisation, the way education and particularly higher education is delivered in the rest of the world seems to follow similar to the Western worlds paths, despite the apparent differences in culture, social and economic systems as well as writing systems. Footnote 1

An interdisciplinary and critical synthesis of the relevant literature is conducted, presenting two stances that are largely considered as rival: The instrumental one that treats higher education as an ordinary investment with particular financial yields in the labour market and the more intrinsic one which sees higher education as mainly detached from the logic of economic costs and benefits. The theoretical rivalry is apparent since in the former approach higher education is an inevitable property of labour market and thus an indispensable part of the mainstream economic neoliberal regime, whereas the latter sees no logical link between higher education and labour market purposes and therefore the content and substance of learning and knowledge acquisition in education and specifically in higher education should not be market-driven or aligned to the functions of specific economic regimes. However, this article argues that educational systems, and particularly their higher levels, are amalgamated parts of contemporary societies and therefore theories and practices need to move away from rather futile binary rationales.

The remainder of this paper explains why both the intrinsic and instrumental approaches are doomed to fail in practice when used in isolation. In a rapidly diverging and polarised world, where social inequalities rise within as well as between countries, common sense dictates social theories and practices to move towards reconciliation rather than stubborn rivalry. In that spirit, this paper argues that the intrinsic and instrumental approach are in fact complementary to each other. Such view can inform policy making towards building more inclusive educational systems; organically tight with the broader society. The narrative this article uses departs and expands on the rationale of eminent critical pedagogists such as Freire, Bronfenbrenner, Bourdieu and Kozol in order to challenge the current instrumental world-view of education, at least as this is apparent in the western world. Then the article moves into offering a reasoning for an organic synthesis of existing knowledge in order the two rival theories to be actualised in practice as a unified and reconciled pedagogical strategy. This reasoning builds on the research conducted by Durst’s ( 1999 ), Payne ( 1999 ) and Lu and Horner ( 2009 ). Durst ( 1999 ) suggests a “reflective instrumentalism”, where student’s pragmatic view that education is just a way of finding a well-paid job, operated in tandem with critical pedagogical canons, is indeed possible. Payne ( 1999 ) proposes a similar approach, where students are equipped with the necessary tools to find a job in the labour market; however educators should engage students with this knowledge in a critical way in order to be able to produce something new. Likewise Lu and Horner ( 2009 ) note that educators and students need to work together in such a way that perceptions of both are amenable to change and career choices are critically discussed in a constantly changing social context.

The purpose of higher education in western societies

Mokyr ( 2002 ) suggests that education should be integrated by both inculcation and emancipation in order to serve individual intellectual development as well as social progression. Shapiro ( 2005 ) emphasizes the need for the higher education institutions to serve a public purpose moving beyond narrow self-serving concerns, as well as to enforce social change in order to reflect the nature of a society that its members desire. More recently, in philosophical terms Barnett ( 2017 , p 10) calls for a wider conceptual landscape in higher education where “The task of an adequate philosophy of higher education…is not merely to understand the university or even to defend it but to change it”. )

The purpose of education and its meaning in the contemporary western societies has been also criticised by Bo ( 2009 ), suggesting that education has become a contradictory notion that leaves no space for emancipation since it gives no opportunity for improvisation to students. Thus, the students feel encaged within the system instead of being liberated. Bo agrees with Mokyr, who highlighted the need for recalling the basic notions of education from ancient philosophies: that education should be integrated by both inculcation and emancipation in order to serve individual intellectual development as well as social progression (Mokyr, 2002 ; Bo, 2009 ).

Not all individuals and societies agree on the purposes and roles of higher education in the modern world. However, in any case, it is a place where teaching and research can be accommodated in an organised fashion for the promotion of various types of knowledge, applied and non-applied. It is a place where money and moral values compete and collaborate simultaneously, where the development of labour market skills and competences coexist with the identification and utilisations of people’s skills and talents as well as the pursuit of employment, morality and citizenship.

The post-WWII era has been characterised by the mass model of higher education. Before this, higher education was for those belonging to higher social classes (Brennan, 2004 ). This model became the kernel of educational policies in Europe and generally, in the western world (Shapiro, 2005 ). Such policies have been boosted by the advent of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which enhance commercial and non-commercial bonds between countries and higher education institutions, transforming the role of higher education even further, making it rather universal (Jongbloed et al., 2008 ). Higher education’s boundaries have become vague and the predefined “social contract” between its institutions and those participated in them, is more complicated to be defined in absolute terms. Higher education institutions are now characterised by economic competition in a strict global market environment, where governments are not the key players anymore (Brennan, 2004 ).

Moreover, student demographics in higher education are constantly changing. Higher education is now an industry operating in a global market. Competition to attract talents from around the world is growing rapidly as an increasing number of countries offer additional graduate and post graduate positions to non-nationals, usually at a higher cost compared to nationals (Barber et al., 2013 ). Countries such as China or Singapore that are growing economically very rapidly are investing huge amounts of money to develop their higher education system and make it more friendly to talented people from around the world. The advent of new technologies have changed the traditional model of higher education, where physical presence is not a necessary requirement anymore (Yuan et al., 2013 ). Studying while working is much easier and therefore more mature students have now the opportunity to study towards a graduate or post-graduate degree. All these developments have increased the potential for profit; however it also requires huge amount of money to be invested in new technologies and all kinds of infrastructures and resources. The need for diversification in funding sources is simply essential and therefore all other industries become inevitably more engaged (Kaiser et al., 2014 ). On top of all these, climate change, the rise of terrorism, the prolonged economic uncertainty and the automazation of labour will likely increase cross-national and intraoccupational mobility and therefore the demand for higher education, especially in the recipient countries of the economically developed western world will inevitably rise. Summing up, higher education institutions operate under a very fluid and unpredictable environment and therefore approaches that are informed by adaptability and flexibility are absolutely crucial. The hybrid approach we propose where instrumental and intrinsic values are reconciled is along these lines.

Modern views of higher education place its function under a digital knowledge-based society, where economy dominates. Labour markets demand for skills such as technological competence and complex problem-solving by critical thinking and multitasking, which increases competition and in turn, accelerates the pace of the working day (Westerheijden et al., 2007 ). Haigh and Clifford ( 2011 ) argue that high competency, in both hard and soft skills, is not enough, as higher education needs to go deeper into changing attitudes and behaviours becoming the core of a globalised knowledge-based-economy. However, the trends of transferring knowledge and skills by universities, which “increasingly instrumentalize, professionalize, vocationalize, corporatize, and ultimately technologize education” (Thomson, 2001 : 244), have been extensively criticised in epistemological as well as in ontological terms (Bourdieu, 1998 ; Dall’ Alba and Barnacle, 2007 ). Livingstone ( 2009 ) argues that education and labour market have different philosophical departures and institutional principles to fulfill and therefore conceptualising them as concomitant economic events, with strong causal conjunctions, leads to logical fallacies. Livingstone sees the intrinsic purposes of education and contemporary labour market as rather contradictory than complimentary and any attempt to see them as the latter, leads to arbitrary and ambiguous outcomes, which in turn mislead rather than inform policy making. The current article, building on the arguments of Durst’s ( 1999 ), Payne ( 1999 ) and Lu and Horner ( 2009 ) challenges this view introducing a “bridging” rationale between the two theories, which can be also actualized in practice and inform policy making.

When education, and especially higher education, is considered as a public social right that everyone should have access to, human capital, as solely informed by the investment approach, cannot be seen as the most appropriate tool to explain the benefits an individual and society can gain from education. Citizenship can be regarded as one of these tools and perhaps concepts, such as the social and c ultural capital or habitus , which contrary to human capital acknowledge that students are not engaged with education just to succeed high returns in the labour market but apart from the economic capital, should be of equal importance when we try to offer a better explanation of the individuals’ drivers to undertake higher education. (Bourdieu, 1986 ; Coleman, 1988 ). Footnote 2 For example, Bourdieu ( 1984 ) thinks that certificates and diplomas are neither indications of academic or applied to the labour market knowledge, nor signals of competences but rather take the form of tacit criteria set by the ruling class to identify people from a particular social origin. Yet, Bourdieu does not disregard the human capital theory as invalid; however he remains very sceptical on its narrow social meaning as it becomes a property of ruling class and used as a mechanism to maintain their power and tacitly reproduce social inequalities.

Higher education attainment cannot be examined irrespectively of someone’s capabilities, as its conceptual framework presupposes a social construction of interacting and competing individuals, fulfilling a certain and, sometimes common to all, task each time. Capabilities, certainly, exist in and out of this context, as it includes both innate traits and acquired skills in a dynamic social environment. Sen ( 1993 : 30) defines capability as “a person’s ability to do valuable acts or reach valuable states of being; [it] represents the alternative combinations of things a person is able to do or be”. Moreover, Sen argues that capabilities should not be seen only as a means for succeeding a certain goal, but rather as an end itself (Sen, 1985 ; Saito, 2003 ; Walker and Unterhalter, 2007 ).

Capabilities are a prerequisite of well-being and therefore, social institutions should direct people into fulfilling this aim in order to feel satisfied with their lives. However, since satisfaction is commonly understood as a subjective concept, it cannot be implied that equal levels of life satisfaction, as these perceived by people of different demographic and socio-economic characteristics, mean social and economic equality. Usually, the sense of life satisfaction is relative to future expectations, aspirations and past empirical experiences, informed by the socio-economic circumstances people live in (Saito, 2003 ).

According to the capability approach, assessing the educational attainment of individuals or the quality of teachers and curriculum are not such useful tasks, if not complemented by the capacity of a learner to convert resources into capabilities. Sen’s ( 1985 , 1993 ) capability approach, challenges the human capital theory, which sees education as an ordinary investment undertaken by individuals. It also remains sceptical towards structuralist and post-structruralist approaches, which support the dominance of institutional settings and power over the individual acts. According to Sen ( 1985 , 1993 ), educational outcomes, as these are measured by student enrolments, their performance on tests or their expected future income, are very poor indicators for evaluating the overall purpose of education, related to human well-being. Moreover, the capability approach does not imply that education can only enhance peoples’ capabilities. It also implies that education, can be detrimental, imposing severe life-long disadvantages to individuals and societies, if delivered poorly (Unterhalter, 2003 , 2005 ).

From Sen’s writings, it is not clear whether the capability approach imply a distinction between instrumental and intrinsic values. Even if someone attempts an interpretation of the capability approach by arguing that it is only means that have an instrumental value, whereas ends only an intrinsic one, it is still unclear how can we draw a line between means and ends in a rather objective way. Escaping from this rather dualistic interpretation, a common-sense argument seems apparent: Capabilities have both intrinsic and instrumental value. Material resources can be obtained through people’s innate talents and acquired skills; however through the same resources transformed into capabilities a person who does not see this as an end but rather as a means, can also become a trusted member of the community and a good citizen, given that some kind of freedom of choice exists. Thus, resources apart from their instrumental value can also have an intrinsic one, with the caveat that the person chooses to conceive them as means towards a socially responsible end.

The American tradition in student development goes back to the liberal arts tradition, which main aim is to build a free person as an active member of a civic society. The essence of this tradition can be found in Nussbaum ( 1998 : 8)

“When we ask about the relationship of a liberal education to citizenship, we are asking a question with a long history in the Western philosophical tradition. We are drawing on Socrates’ concept of ‘the examined life,’ on Aristotle’s notions of reflective citizenship, and above all on Greek and Roman Stoic notions of an education that is ‘liberal’ in that it liberates the mind from bondage of habit and custom, producing people who can function with sensitivity and alertness as citizens of the whole world.”

Nowadays, liberal arts tradition is regarded as the delivery of interdisciplinary education across the social sciences but also beyond that, aiming to prepare students for the challenges they are facing both as professionals and as members of civic society. However, as Kozol notes in reality things are quite different (Kozol, 2005 , 2012 ). Kozol devoted much of his work examining the social context of schools in the US by focusing on the interrelationships that exist, maintained or transformed between students, teachers and parents. He points out that segregation and local disparities in the US schools are continuously increasing. The US schools and especially urban schools are seen as distinctive examples of institutions where social discrimination propagates while the US educational system currently functions as a mechanism of reproducing social inequality. Kozol is very critical on the instrumental purpose of market-driven education as this places businesses and commerce as the “key players”, since they shape the purpose, content and curriculum of education. At the same time, students, their parents as well as teachers, whose roles should have been essential, are displaced into some kind of token participants.

Hess ( 2004 ) might agree that US schools have become vehicles of increasing social inequalities but he suggest a very different to Kozol’s approach. Since schools are social institutions that operate and constantly interact with the rest of economy they have to become accountable in the way that ordinary business are, at least when it comes to basic knowledge delivery. Hess insists that all schools across the US should be able to deliver high quality basic knowledge and literacy. Such knowledge can be easily standardised and a national curriculum, equal and identical to all US school can be designed. By this, all schools are able to deliver high quality basic knowledge and all pupils, irrespective of their social background, would be able to receive it. Then, each school, teacher and pupil are held accountable for their performance and failure to meet the national standards should result in schools closed down, teachers laid off and pupils change school environment or even lose their chance to graduate. Hess distinguishes between two types of reformers; the status quo reformers who do not challenge the state control education and the common-sense reformers who are in favour of a non-bureaucratic educational system, governed by market competition, subjected to accountability measures similar to those used in the ordinary business world.

While Hess presents evidence that the problem in higher education is not underfunding but efficiency in spending, the argument he makes that schools can only reformed and flourish through the laws of market competition is not adequately backed up as there are plenty of examples in many industrial sectors, where the actual implementation of market competition instead of opening up opportunities for the more disadvantaged, has finally generated huge multinationals corporations, which operate in a rather monopolistic or at best oligopolistic environment, satisfying their own interests on the expense of the most deprived and disadvantaged members of the society. The ever growing increasing competition in the financial, pharmaceutical or IT software and hardware (Apple Microsoft, IOS and Android software etc.) sectors have not really helped the disadvantaged or the sector itself but rather created powerful “too big to fail” corporations that dominate the market if not own it.

Hess indeed believes that the US educational system apart from preparing students for the labour market has a social role to fulfil. When the purpose of higher education is solely labour market-oriented teaching and learning become inadequate to respond to the social needs of a well-functioned civic democracy, which requires active learners and critical thinkers who, apart from having a job and a profession, are able “ to frame and express their thoughts and participate in their local and national communities”(p. 4) . Creating rigorous standards for basic knowledge in all US schools is a goal that is sound and rather achievable. However, when such goals are based on a Darwinian like competition and coercion where only the fittest can survive they become rather inapplicable for satisfying the needs of human development, equity and sustainable social progress.

Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory ( 1979 , 2005 , 2009 ) (subsequently named from Bronfenbrenner himself as bioecological systems theory) is also an example of schools as organic ingredients of a single concentric system that includes four sub systems; the micro, the meso, the exo and the macro as well as the chronosystem that refers to the change of the other four through time. The Micro system involves activities and roles that are experienced through interpersonal relationships such as the family, schools, religious or social institutions or any interactions with peers. The meso system includes the relationships developed between the various microsystem components, such as the relationship between school and workplace or family and schools. The exosystem comprises various interactions between systems that the person who is in the process of development does not directly participates but influence the way microsystems function and impact on the person. Some examples of exosystems are the relationships between family and peers of the developing person, family and schools, etc. The macrosystem incorporates all these things that can be considered as cultural environment and social context in which the developing person lives. Finally, the chronosystem introduces a time dimension, which encompasses all other sub-systems, subjecting them to the changes occurred through time. All these systems constantly interact, shaping a dynamic, complex but also natural ecological environment, in which a person develops its understanding of the world. In practical terms, this theory has found application in Finland, gradually transforming the Finish educational system to such a degree that is now considered the best all over the world (Määttä and Uusiautti, 2014 ; Takala et al., 2015 ). Finally, Bronfenbrenner is also an advocate that poverty and social inequalities are developed not because of differences in individual characteristics and capabilities but because of institutional constraints that are insurmountable to those from a lower socio-economic background.

Freire ( 1970 , 2009 ) criticizes the way schooling is delivered in contemporary societies. The term he uses to describe the current state of education is “banking education”, where teachers and students have very discrete roles with the former to be perceived as depositors of knowledge and the latter as depositories. This approach sees the knowledge acquired within the institutional premises of formal education as an absolute truth, where reality is perceived as something static aiming to preserve the status quo in education and in turn in society and satisfy the interests of the elite. This actual power play means that those who hold knowledge and accept its acquiring procedure as static, become the oppressors whereas those who either lack knowledge or even hold it but challenge it in order to transform it, the oppressed. From the one side the oppressors achieve to maintain their dominance over the oppressed and on the other side the oppressed accept their inferior role as an unchallenged normality where their destiny is predetermined and can never be transformed. Therefore, through this distinction of social roles, social inequalities are maintained and even intensified through time. Freire sees the “banking education” approach as a historical hubris since social reality is a process of constant transformation and hence, it is by definition dynamic and non-static. What we actually know today cannot determine our future social roles, neither can prohibit individuals from challenging and transforming it into something new (Freire, 1970 ; Giroux, 1983 ; Darder, 2003 ).

The banking education approach resembles very much the ethos of the human capital theory, where individuals utilise educational attainment as an investment instrument for succeeding higher wages in the future and also climb the levels of social hierarchy. The assumption of linearity between past individual actions and future economic and social outcomes is at the core of banking education and thus human capital theory. However, this assumption introduces a serious logical fallacy that surprisingly policy makers seem to value very little nowadays, at least in the Western societies. Freire ( 2009 ) apart from criticizing the current state of education argues that a pedagogical approach that “demythologize” and unveils reality by promoting dialogue between teachers and students create critical thinkers, who are engaged in inquiry in order to create social reality by constantly transforming it. This is the process of problem-posing education , which aligns its meaning with the intrinsic view of education that regards human development as mainly detached from the acquisition of material objects and accumulation of wealth through increased levels of educational attainment.

Originated in Germany, the term Bildung —at least as this was interpreted from 18 th century onwards, after Middle Ages era where everything was explained in the prism of a strict and theocratic society- shaped the philosophy by which the German educational system has been functioning even until nowadays (Waters, 2016 ). Bildung aims to provide the individual education with the appropriate context, through which can reach high levels of professional development as well as citizenship. It is a term strongly associated with the liberation of mind from superstition and social stereotypes. Education is assumed to have philosophical underpinnings but it needs, as philosophy itself as a whole does too, to be of some practical use and therefore some context needs to be provided Footnote 3 (Herder, 2002 ).

For Goethe ( 2006 ) Bildung , is a self-realisation process that the individual undertakes under a specific context, which aims to inculcate altruism where individual actions are consider benevolent only if they are able to serve the general society. Although Bildung tradition, from the one hand, assumes that educational process should be contextualised, it approach context as something fluid that is constantly changing. Therefore, it sees education as an interactive and dynamic process, where roles are predetermined; however at the same time they are also amenable to constant transformation (Hegel, 1977 ). Consequently, this means that Bildung tradition is more closely to what Freire calls problem-posing education and therefore to the intrinsic notion of education. Weber ( 1968 ), looked on the Bildung tradition as a means to educate scientists to be involved in policy making and overcome the problems of ineffective bureaucracy. Waters ( 2016 ) based on his experiences with teaching in German higher education argue that the Bildung tradition is still apparent today in the educational system in Germany.

However, higher education, as an institution, involves students, teachers, administrators, policy makers, workers, businessmen, marketers and generally, individuals with various social roles, different demographic characteristics and even different socio-economic backgrounds. It comes natural that their interests can be conflicting and thus, they perceive the purpose of higher education differently.

Higher education expansion and social inequalities: contemporary trends

Higher education enrolment rates have been continuously rising for the last 30 years. In Europe, and especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, policies are directed towards widening the access to higher education to a broader population (Bowl, 2012 ). However, it is very difficult for policy-makers to design a framework towards openness in higher education, mainly due to the heterogeneity of the population the policies are targeted upon. Such population includes individuals from various socio-economic, demographic, ethnic, innate ability, talent orientation or disability groups, as well as people with very different social commitments and therefore the vested interests of each group contradict each other, rendering policy-making an extremely complicated task (CFE and Edge Hill University, 2013 ).

A collection of essays, edited by Giroux and Myrsiades ( 2001 ), provided valuable insights to the humanities and social sciences literature regarding the notion of corporate university and its implications to society’s structure. As Williams ( 2001 : 18) notes in one of this essays:

“Universities are now being conscripted directly as training grounds for the corporate workforce…university work has been more directly construed to serve not only corporate-profit agendas via its grant-supplicant status, but universities have become franchises in their own right, reconfigured to corporate management, labor, and consumer models and delivering a name-brand product”.

Chang et al. ( 2013 ) argues that institutional purposes do not always coincide with the expectations students have from their studies. In most cases, students hold a more pragmatic and instrumental understanding towards the purpose of higher education, primarily aiming for a better-paid and high quality jobs.

Arum and Roksa ( 2011 ) claim that students during their studies in higher education make no real progress in critical thinking and complex problem-solving. Nonetheless, it is notable that those who state that they seek some “deeper meaning” in higher education, looking at a broader picture of things, tend to perform better than those who see university through instrumental lenses (Entwistle and Peterson, 2004 ). These findings question the validity of the instrumental view in higher education as it seems that those that are intrinsically motivated to attend higher education, end up performing much better in higher education and also later on in the labour market. Therefore, in practice, the theoretical rivalry between the intrinsic and instrumental approach operate in a rather dialectic manner, where interactions between social actors move towards a convergence, despite the focus given by policy makers on the instrumental view.

Bourdieu ( 1984 , 1986 , 1998 , 2000 ) based on his radical democratic politics, argued that education inequalities are just a transformation of social inequalities and a way of reproduction of social status quo. Aronowitz ( 2004 ) acknowledged that the main function of public education in the US is to prepare students to meet the changes, occurred in contemporary workplaces. Even if this instrumental model involves the broad expansion of educational attainment, it also fails to alleviate class-based inequalities. He is in line with Bourdieu’s argument that social class relations are reproduced through schooling, as schools reinforce, rather than reduce, class-based inequalities. More recently, similar findings from various countries are very common in the literature (Chapman et al., 2011 ; Stephens et al., 2015 )

Apple ( 2001 ) argues that despite neoliberalism’s claims that privatisation, marketization, harmonisation and generally the globalisation of educational systems increase the quality of education, there are considerable findings in numerous studies that show that the expansion of higher education happens in tandem with the increase of income inequality and the aggravation of racial, gender and class differences. Gouthro ( 2002 ) argues that there has been a misrepresentation of the basic notions that characterise the purpose of education, such as critical thinking, justice and equity. Ganding and Apple ( 2002 ) went one step further by suggesting an alternative solution, which lies on the decentralisation of educational systems, using the “Citizen School” as an example of an educational institution, which prioritises quality in education and its provision to impoverished people. Finally, they call for a radical structural reform on educational systems worldwide, where the relationship between various social communities and the state is based on social justice and not on power.

Brown and Lauder ( 2006 ) investigated the impact of the fundamental changes on education, as related to the influence that various socio-economic and cultural factors have on policy making. Remaining sceptical against the empirical validity of human capital theory, they conclude that it cannot be guaranteed that graduates will secure employment and higher wages. Contrary to Card and Lemieux’s ( 2001 ) findings, the authors argue that when the wage-premium is not measured by averages, but is split in deciles within graduates, it is only the high-earning graduates that have experienced an increasing wage-gap during this period. Increasing incidences of over-education, due to an ever-increasing supply of graduates compared to the relatively modest growth rates of high-skilled jobs, have also been observed. Any differences in pay, between graduates and non-graduates, can be ascribed more to the stagnation of non-graduates' pay, rather than to graduates’ additional pay, because of their higher educational attainment. More recently, Mettler ( 2014 ) argues that the focus on corporate interests in policy making in the US has transformed higher education into a caste system that reproduces and also intensifies social inequalities.

There are evidence, which illustrate that families play a distinctive role in encouraging children’s abilities and traits through a warm and friendly family environment. As higher education requires a significant amount of money to be invested, families with high-income have more chances and means to promote their children’s abilities and traits as well as their career prospects, when compared with the low-income ones. Certainly, there are other factors, which can affect children’s prospects, but the advantage in favour of high-income families is relatively apparent in the empirical literature (Solon, 1999 ).

Livingstone and Stowe ( 2007 ), based on the General Social Survey (GSS), conducted an empirical study on the school completion rates partitioning individuals into family and class origin, residential area as well as race and gender. They focused on the relatively low completion rates of low-class individuals, from the inner city and rural areas of the US. Their findings reveal that working-class children are being discriminated on their school completion rates, compared with the mid- and high-class children. Race and gender discrimination has been detected in rural areas but not in inner cities and suburb areas, where the completion rates are more balanced.

Stone ( 2013 ), finally sees things from a very different perspective, where inequalities exist mainly because of simply bad luck. He argues in favour of lots, when a university has to decide whether to accept an applicant or not. Even if, an argument like this seems highly controversial, it consists of something that has been implemented in many countries, several times in the past (Hyland, 2011 ). The argument that an individual deserves a place in university just because he/she scored higher marks in a standardised sorting examination test does not prove that he/she will perform better in his/her subsequent academic tasks. Likewise, if an individual, who failed to secure a place in university due to low marks, was given a chance to enter university through a different procedure, he/she might have performed exceptionally well. Yet, human society cannot solely depend on lotteries and computer random algorithms, but sometimes, up to a certain point and in the name of fairness and transparency, there is a strong case for also looking on the merits for using one (Stone, 2013 ).

Furthermore, Lowe ( 2000 ) argued that the widening of higher education participation can create a hyper-inflation of credentials, causing their serious devaluation in the labour market. This relates to the concept of diploma disease, where labour markets create a false impression that a higher degree is a prerequisite for a job and therefore, induce individuals to undertake them only for the sake of getting a job (Dore, 1976 ; Collins, 1979 ). This situation can create a highly competitive credential market, and even if there are indications of higher education expansion, individuals from lower social class do not have equal opportunities to get a degree, which can lead them to a more prestigious occupational category. This is, in turn, very similar to the Weberian theory of educational credentialism, where credentials determine social stratum (Brown, 2003 ; Karabel, 2006 ; Douthat, 2005 ; Waters, 2012 ).

The concept of credential inflation has been extensively debated from many scholars, who question the role of formal education and the usefulness of the acquisition of skills within universities (Dore 1997 ; Collins, 1979 ; Walters, 2004 ; Hayes and Wynard, 2006 ). Evans et al. ( 2004 ) focuses on the tacit skills, which cannot be acquired by formal learning, mainly obtained by work and life experience as well as informal learning. These skills are competences related to the way a complex situation could be best approached or resemble to personal traits, which can be used for handling unforeseen situations.

Policy implications

Higher educational attainment that leads to a specific academic degree is a dynamic procedure, but with a pre-defined end. This renders the knowledge acquired there, as obsolete. Policies, such as Bologna Declaration supports an agenda, where graduates should be further encouraged to engage with on-the-job training and life-long education programmes (Coffield, 1999 ). Other scholars argue that institutions should have a broader role, acknowledging the benefits that higher educational attainment bring to societies as a whole by the simultaneous promotion of productivity, innovation and democratisation as well as the mitigation of social inequalities (Harvey, 2000 ; Hayward and James, 2004 ). Boosting employability for graduates is crucial and many international organisations are working towards the establishment of a framework, which can ensure that higher education satisfies this aim (Diamond et al., 2011 ). Yet, this can have negative side-effects making the employability gap between high- and low-skilled even wider, since there is no any policy framework specifically designed for low-skilled non-graduates on a similar to Bologna Declaration, supranational context. Heinze and Knill ( 2008 ) argue that convergence in higher education policy-making, as a result of the Bologna Process, depends on a combination of cultural, institutional and socio-economic national characteristics. Even if, it can be assumed that more equal countries, in terms of these characteristics, can converge much easier, it is still questionable if and how much national policy developments have been affected by the Bologna Declaration.

However, the political narrative of equal opportunities in terms of higher education participation rates does not seem very convincing (Brown and Hesketh, 2004 ; The Milburn Commission, 2009 ). It appears that a consensus has been reached in the relevant literature that there is a bias towards graduates from the higher social classes, but it has been gradually decreasing since 1960 (Bekhradnia, 2003 ; Tight, 2012 ). Nonetheless, despite the fact that, during the last few decades, there has been an improvement in the participation rates for the most vulnerable groups, such as women and ethnic minorities, the inequality is still obvious in some occasions (Greenbank and Hepworth, 2008 ). Machin and Van Reenen ( 1998 ) trace the causes of the under-participation in an intergenerational context, arguing that the positive relationship between parental income and participation rates is apparent even from the secondary school. Likewise, Gorard ( 2008 ) identifies underrepresentation on the previous poor school performance, which leads to early drop-outs in the secondary education, or into poor grades, which do not allow for a place in higher education. Other researchers argue that paradoxically, educational inequality persists even nowadays, albeit the policy orientation worldwide towards the widening of higher education participation across all social classes (Burke, 2012 ; Bathmaker et al., 2013 ).

There are different aspects on the purpose of higher education, which particularly, under the context of the ongoing economic uncertainty, gain some recognition and greater respect from academics and policy-makers. Lorenz ( 2006 ) notes that the employability agenda, which is constantly promoted within higher education institutions lately, cannot stand as a sustainable rationale in a diverse global environment. This harmonisation and standardisation of higher education creates permanent winners and losers, centralising all the gains, monetary and non-monetary, towards the most dominant countries, particularly towards Anglo-phone countries and specific industries and therefore social inequalities increase between as well as within countries. Some scholars call this phenomenon as Englishization (Coleman, 2006 ; Phillipson, 2009 ).

Tomusk ( 2002 , 2004 ) positioned education within the general framework of the recent institutional changes and the rapid rise of the short-term profits of the financial global capital. Specifically, the author sees World Bank as a transnational organisation. Given this, any loan agreement planned from the World Bank regarding higher education reforms in developing countries, has the same ultimate, but tacit, goal, which is the continuous rise of the national debt and in turn, the vitiation of national fiscal and monetary policies, in order the human resources of the so called “recipient countries”, to be redistributed in favour of a transnational dominant class.

Hunter ( 2013 ) places the debate under a broader political framework, juxtaposing neo-liberalism with the trends formulated by the OECD. She concludes that OECD is a very complex and multi-vocal organisation and when it comes to higher education policy suggestions, there is not any clear trend, especially towards neo-liberalism. This does not mean that economic thinking is not dominant within the OECD. This is, in fact, OECD’s main concern and it is clear to all. Hunter ( 2013 : 15–16) accordingly states that:

“Some may feel offended by the vocational and economic foci in OECD discourse. Many would like to see HE held up for “higher” ideals. However, it is fair for OECD to be concerned with economics. They do not deny that they are primarily an organization concerned with economics. It is up to us, the readers, politicians, scholars, voters, teachers, administrators, and policy makers, to be aware that this is an economic organization and be careful of from whom we get our assumptions”.

Hyslop-Margison ( 2000 ) investigated how the market economy affects higher education in Canada, when international organisations and Canadian business interfere in higher education policy making, under the support of government agencies. He argues that such economy-oriented policies deteriorate curriculum theory and development.

Letizia ( 2013 ) criticises market-oriented reforms, enacted by The Virginia Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2011, placing them within the context of market-driven policies informed by neoliberalism, where social institutions, such as higher education, should be governed by the law of free market. According to Letizia, this will have very negative implications to the humanistic character of education, affecting people’s intellectual and critical thinking, while perpetuating social inequalities.

The term Mcdonaldisation has been also used recently to capture functional similarities and trends in common, between higher education and ordinary commercial businesses. Thus, efficiency, calculability, predictability and maximisation are high priorities in the American and British educational systems and because of their global influence, these characteristics are being expanding worldwide (Hayes and Wynard, 2006 ; Garland, 2008 ; Ritzer, 2010 ).

The notion of Mcdonaldisation is very well explained by Garland ( 2008 , no pagination):

“Mcdonaldisation can be seen as the tendency toward hyper-rationalisation of these same processes, in which each and every task is broken down into its most finite part, and over which the individual performing it has little or no control becoming all by interchangeable. It may be argued that the labour processes involved in advanced technological capitalism increasingly depend on either the handling and processing of information, or provision of services requiring instrumentalised forms of communication and interaction, just as the same “professional” roles frequently consist of largely mechanized, functional tasks requiring a minimum of individual input or initiative, let alone creative or critical thought, a process illustrated in blackly comic by the 1999 film Office Space”.

Realistically, higher education cannot be solely conceptualised by the human capital approach and similar quantitative interpretations, as it has cultural, psychological, idiosyncratic and social implications. Additionally, Hoxby ( 1996 ) argued that policy environment and systems of governance in higher education play a significant role to an individuals’ decision-making process to obtain further education and unfortunately, policy makers regard this aspect as static that can never be transformed.

Lepori and Bonaccorsi ( 2013 ), following Latour and Woolgar’s ( 1979 ) rationale of the high importance of vested interest in scientific endeavours, argue that higher education trends are too complex to be reduced and captured adequately, by the use of economic indicators as related to the labour market. However, the market and money value of higher education should not be neglected, especially in developing countries, as there is evidence that it can help people escape the vicious cycle of poverty and therefore it has a practical and more pragmatic purpose to fulfil (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos, 2004 ). According to World Bank ( 2013 ), education can contribute to a significant decrease of the number of poor people globally and increase social mobility when it manages to provides greater opportunities for children coming from poor families. There are also other studies that do not only focus to strict economic factors, but also to the contribution of educational attainment to fertility and mortality rates as well as to the level of health and the creation of more responsible and participative citizens, bolstering democracy and social justice (Council of Europe, 2004 ; Osler and Starkey, 2006 ; Cogan and Derricott, 2014 ).

Mountford-Zimdars and Sabbagh ( 2013 ), analysing the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, offer a plausible explanation on why the widening of participation in higher education is not that easy to be implemented politically, in the contemporary western democracies. The majority of the people, who have benefited from higher educational attainment in monetary and non-monetary terms, are reluctant to support the openness of higher education to a broader population. On the contrary, those that did not succeed or never tried to secure a place in a higher education institute, are very supportive of this idea. This clash of interests creates a political perplexity, making the process of policy-making rather dubious. Therefore, the apparent paradox of the increase in higher educational attainment, along with a stable rate in educational inequalities, does not seem that strange when vested interests of certain groups are taken into account.

Moreover, the decision for someone to undertake higher education is not solely influenced by its added value in the labour market. Since an individual is exposed to different experiences and influences, strategic decisions can easily change, especially when these are taken from adolescents or individuals in their early stages of their adulthood. Given this, perceptions and preferences do change with ageing and this is why there are some individuals who drop out from university, others who choose radical shifts in their career or others who return to education after having worked in the labour market for many years and in different types of jobs.

Higher education has expanded rapidly after WWII. The advent of new technologies dictates the enhancement of people’s talents and skills and the creation of a knowledge-based-economy, which in turn, demands for even more high-skilled workers. Policy aims for higher education in the western world is undoubtedly focusing on its diffusion to a broader population. This expansion is seen as a policy instrument to alleviate social and income inequalities. However, the implementation of such policies has been proved extremely difficult in practise, mainly because of existent conflicted interests between groups of people, but also because of its institutional incapacity to target the most vulnerable. Nonetheless, it has been observed a constant marketization process in higher education, making it less accessible to people from poor economic background. Concerns on the persistence of policy-makers to focus primarily on the economic values of higher education have been increasingly expressed, as strict economic reasoning in higher education contradicts with political claims for its continuing expansion.

On the other hand, there are studies arguing that the instrumental model can make the transition of graduates into the labour market smoother. Such studies are placed under the mainstream economics framework and are also informed by policy decisions implemented by the Bologna Process, where competitiveness, harmonisation and employability are the main policy axes. The Bologna Process and various other institutions (e.g., the EU, World Bank, OECD) have provided a framework under which higher education can be seen as inextricably linked with labour market dynamics; however, the intrinsic notion of higher education is treated more as a nuisance and less as a vital component on this framework. Nevertheless, this makes the job competition between graduates much more intense and also creates very negative implications for those that remain with low qualifications as they effectively become socially and economically marginalised.

The purpose of higher education and its role in modern societies remains a heated philosophical debate, with strong practical and policy implications. This article sheds more light to this debate by presenting a synthetic narrative of the relevant literature, which can be used as a basis for future theoretical and empirical research in understanding contemporary trends in higher education as interwoven with the evolutions in the broader socio-economic sphere. Specifically, two conflicting theoretical stances have been discussed. The mainstream view primarily aims to assist individuals to increase their income and their relative position in the labour market. On the other hand, the intrinsic notion focus on understanding its purpose under ontological and epistemological considerations. Under this conceptual framework, the enhancement of individual creativity and emancipation are in conflict with the contemporary institutional settings related to power, dominance and economic reasoning. This conflict can influence people’s perceptions on the purpose of higher education, which can in turn perpetuate or otherwise revolutionise social relations and roles.

However, even if the two theoretical stances presented are regarded as contradictory, this article argues that, in practical terms, they can be better seen as complementing each other. From one hand, using an instrumental perspective, an increase in higher education participation, focusing particularly on the most vulnerable and deprived members of society, can alleviate problems of income and social inequalities. The instrumental view of education has a very important role to play if focused on lower-income social classes, as it can become the mechanism towards the alleviation of income inequalities. On the other hand, apart from the pecuniary, there are also other non-pecuniary benefits associated with this, such as the improvement in the fertility and mortality and general health level rates or the boost of active democracy and citizenship even within workplaces and therefore a shift of higher education towards its intrinsic purposes is also needed. (Bowles and Gintis, 2002 ; Council of Europe, 2004 ; Brennan, 2004 ; Brown and Lauder, 2006 ; Wolff and Barsamian, 2012 ).

Summing up, education is not a simply just another market process. It is not just an institution that supply graduates as products that have some predetermined value in the labour market. Consequently, acquired knowledge in education verified by college degrees is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the labour market to create appropriate jobs, where graduates utilise and expand this knowledge. In fact, the increasing costs of higher education, mostly due to its internationalisation, and the rising levels of job mismatch create a rather gloomy picture of the current economic environment, which seems to preserve the well-paid jobs mostly to those from a certain socio-economic class background. At the same time, poor students are vastly disadvantaged to more wealthy ones, considering the huge differences in terms of higher as well as their past education, their parent’s education and also certain elitist traditions that work towards perpetuating power relations in favour of the dominant class.

As Castoriadis ( 1997 ) notes, it is impossible to separate education from its social context. We, as human beings, acquire knowledge, in the sense of what Castoriadis calls paideia , from the day we born until the day we die. We are being constantly developed and transformed along with the social transformations that happen around us. The transformation on the individual is in constant interaction with social transformations, where no cause and effect exists. Formal schooling has become nowadays an apathetic task where no real engagement with learning happens, while its major components such as educators, families and students are largely disconnected with each other. Educators, cynically execute the teaching task that a curriculum dictates each time, families’ main concern is to attach a market value to their children educational attainment, “labelling” them with a credential that the labour market allegedly desires, while students pay attention to anything else apart from the knowledge they get per se and therefore they care too little for its quality and also its practical use.

To tackle the ever-growing social inequalities due to the narrow economic policy making in education, we need a radical shift towards policies that are informed from Freire’s problem-posing education and Sen’s capabilities approach, get insights in terms of structure from Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory, while giving context according to the Bildung tradition also acknowledging that education, apart from instrument, is a vehicle towards liberation, cultural realisation as well as social transformation. In practical terms, real-world examples from Finland or Germany can be used, which policy makers from around the world should start paying more attention to, moving away from narrow and sterile instrumentalism that has spectacularly failed to tackle social inequalities.

In the context of a modern world where monetary costs and benefits are the basis of policy arguments, a massification and broader diffusion of higher education to a much broader population implies marketisation and commercialisation of its purpose and in turn its inclusion on an economy-oriented model where knowledge, skills, curriculum and academic credentials inevitably presuppose a money-value and have a financial purpose to fulfil. The policy trends towards an economy-based-knowledge, through a strict instrumental reasoning, rather than the alleged knowledge-based-economy seems to persist and prevail, albeit its poor performance on alleviating income and social inequalities. Yet, in a global context of a prolonged economic stagnation and a continuous deterioration of society’s democratic reflexes, a shift towards a model, where knowledge is not subdued to economic reasoning, can inform a new societal paradigm of a genuine knowledge-based-economy, where economy would become a means rather than an ultimate goal for human development and social progress.

Data availability

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

For example, Confucian tradition is very rich, when it comes to education and human development. It is indeed very interesting to see how the basic principles of Confucian education, such as humanism, harmony and hierarchy, has been transformed through time and especially after the change in China’s economic model by Den Xiaoping’s reforms towards a more open economic system and along this a more business-oriented and globalised educational system. Perhaps the Chinese tradition in education, which mainly regards education as a route to social status and material success based on merit and constant examination can explain why the human capital theory is more applicable. On the other hand, additional notions in the Confucian tradition that education should be open to all, irrespective of the social class each person belongs to (apart perhaps from women and servants that were rather considered as human beings with limited social rights), its focus on ethics and its purpose to prepare efficient and loyal practitioners for the government introduces an apparent paradox with human capital theory but not necessarily with the instrumental view of education. This contradiction deserves to be appropriately and thoroughly examined in a separate analysis before it is contrasted to the Western tradition. For this reason the current research focuses only on the Western world leaving the comparison analysis with educational traditions found around the world, among them the Confucian tradition, as a task that will be conducted in the near future.

The use of capital in Bourdieu is criticised by a stream of social science scholars as rather promiscuous and unfortunate (Goldthorpe, 2007 ). They argue that a paradox here is apparent as in English linguistic etymological terms, the word capital implies, if not presupposes market activity. The same time Bourdieu criticises Becker’s human capital tradition as solely market-driven and a tacit way where the ruling class maintain their power through universities and other institutions. Waters ( 2012 ) argue that the use of the term “capital” in both Becker’s and Bourdieu’s writings is unfortunate, while both use the term to mean different things. Bourdieu’s understanding on the nature of “habitus” is a much more applicable term to explain the social role of education systems. Habitus is not capital, even if there is constant interaction between the two. Becker on the other hand, seem to neglect social and cultural capital as well as Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, which in turn is about the reproduction of society and power relations by universities and other institutions.

Some might have valid ontological objections on this, in terms of the purpose of philosophy as a whole; however the concept of Bildung has given education a role within society that moves away from individualism and the constant pursuit of material objects as ultimate means of well-being.

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School Institution and Its Functions Essay

What is education, a general feel of what school entails, subject matter, school and social progress, comparison of the views presented in this article to those of john dwey, other scholar’s views, works cited.

Education is a gradual learning process of directing an individual’s powers through integrating all ideas, feelings and emotions with a purpose of attaining intellectual capital. Education integrates all humans’ moral resources in stimulus aspect which makes a person act as a sovereign member of the society (Dewey 43).

School is a social institution that functions to concentrate the education process in the most effective way to enhance proper community life. Therefore, a school must readily help its learners achieve the learning objectives. A school setting should provide psychological necessities that are aimed at deepening and extending the learner’s perception of the social values. In another view, a school is supposed to integrate all the positive community values by providing moral support to the learning child. Teachers who spearhead the education process should impose good habits to influence the discipline of the learners. By so doing, a school sets the standards of grading the child, thereby determining the promotion of the child to the fitness in the social life.

The social life of a child is gauged according to the level of concentration and its correlation with the child’s growth. Education process should not violate the child’s development process (Dewey 99). Therefore, it should unify all other disciplines associated with education. A school setting should include a curriculum that identifies the unconscious aspects of all the subject matters. In this context, education is a reflexive expression that must follow the procedures set.

As a study program, education should be a part of all human activities, and the enacted curriculum should unify its social aspects. In addition, social heritage enables the child to perform the fundamental heritage, which is an important tool in realizing civilization (Dewey 167). Education curriculum should treat all areas equally. This aspect prohibits the introduction of relaxation and relief as a mode of additional accomplishments. Moreover, primary education is determined highly by the child’s powers and consciousness attained in the learning process.

In teaching science, the greatest drawback is the presentation of the learning materials in an objective format. This analogy creates high value for science, since it gives experiences in the interpretation and control aspects. On the other hand, literature and related language studies are less valued. This analogy erodes the child’s social element. Language should not only be viewed as a media for communication, but also as an important social development instrument. Therefore, an education system should equally present all the life parameters within the curriculum in the format of non-succession studies. The main aim of the education system would be to enhance the standards of the child’s future characters and growth.

The method of delivering the education process should consider the powers and interests of the child’s development. In this quest, the consciousness of the learner during the learning process should guide the teachers in assessing the progress of the child’s development. Therefore, all such learning materials as symbols and images must be included. While accorded the proper arrangement, these materials assist the students to focus on the subject matter. An intellectual adult is made from these and other education strategies. Teachers should be observant of the child’s interests in order to nurture their talents as they grow (Cambourne 784).

Education is a paramount method that controls the progress of the child in a social way. In such a case, education should regulate all the processes of adjusting individual’s social consciousness as it regards some of the social reconstruction. In managing the educational progress, individualistic, and socialistic ideals are enacted as the guidelines. In addition, the entire community should play a role in ensuring the education progress (Cambourne 785). The various stakeholders should provide sufficient materials necessary for the learning task especially in all the disciplines included in the curriculum. Another scholar known as Piaget suggested that youngsters are conceived with an fundamental mental capacity (hereditarily and advanced) on which every learning process results to a more effective than previously adopted in the child’s learning progress.

In this analysis of education process, a child is taken as the most important entity as far as intellectual and knowledge achievements are concerned. However, John Dwey recognizes parameters such as teachers, the learning child, education and curriculum as the key elements that contribute to the upbringing of intellectuals in the society. In my opinion, the method of delivering the education process gives priority to proper organization of the materials that are necessary in nurturing the child’s learning process and future developments. However, John Dwey views the method as a wholesome process that entails the coming together of all stakeholders who play the necessary part in order to achieve the objectives. I agree with the ideas on the social roles that education plays. In addition, it is also true that education entails giving priority to the child’s development factors in an equal perspective as Dewey argues.

John Dewey views education as a learning tool that should be monitored at every stage of a child development (Dewey 56). In another analysis, Gardner recommended that there should be eight intelligences which are conceivable. He also suggested an existence of a ninth known as “existentialist insight”. In another approach, Gardner views education as specific end-goal to catch the full scope of capacities and gifts that individuals have. Gardner recommends that individuals who do not have learning limit are prone to learning problems. However, these individuals have a wide range of intelligences including musical, interpersonal, spatial-visual and phonetic intelligences.

Cambourne, Brian. “Conditions for literacy learning: Why do some students fail to learn to read?” The Reading Teacher 13.45 (2001): 784-786. Web.

Dewey, John. Experience and Education . New York: Macmillan, 2008. Print.

Dewey, John. My Pedagogic Creed . Chicago: A. Flanagan, 2010. Print.

Dewey, John. The School and Society . Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago, 2006. Print.

Piaget, Jean. The Moral Judgement of the Child . Glencoe: Free, 2008. Print.

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• Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences
• John Dewey: Philosophical Ideas of the Twentieth Century
• Darwin’s Influence on John Dewey’s Reflex Arc Concept
• Psychology Aspects in Spearman’s, Stenberg’s and Gardner’s Models of Intelligence
• Gardner's "Grendel" as a Nihilist and Existentialist
• US Education: Goals, Methods, and Equality Issues
• Children’s Rights Educational Project
• Poverty and Education: School Funding Reinforces Inequality
• Funding of Schools in the Georgia State
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Education as a Social Institution Essay

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As the functionalism theory states, each social company exists to be able to fulfill a social require in addition without the social institution in question, interpersonal order could falter.

The conflict theory states, a social organization creates and furthers interpersonal inequalities and assists to maintain an ascribed social position in the cultural order yet , as the social order is constantly in flux, the social order attempts to find a balance in and then for society. The interactionism theory tries to understand why individuals who maintain a existence within a interpersonal institution take action and/or react to each other beneath certain excitation (Vissing, 2011). The sociable institution of education is comprised of that which we term since schools therefore throughout this kind of paper the terms education institution, schools, and the school system will be used interchangeably and accordingly.

Each individual within a world is introduced to and educated in a approach to values and norms pertaining to their particular contemporary society beginning from a young age and continuous through the individual’s lifetime in addition , the school system plays a huge part because education as the children of that particular society develop into adults. The instructors or teachers inside the school program act as part models to elicit appropriate behavior and strengthen ethnic and societal norms (Beaver, 2009). Together with the academic program taught in schools, educational institutions also become a large mingling agent where students are introduced to their very own first tertiary peer group.

Education is a social organization and throughout the school program it meets a cultural need since the school system is our initial tertiary peer group, the college system presents us to societal best practice rules, and the school system imparts to world, knowledge and skills. Being a socializing business, school is a basic and necessary common structure pertaining to society. Using an interactionism view, this is so , because it introduces all of us to, reintroduces us to, affirms, and reaffirms most of society’s principles and norms through a tertiary peer group consisting of additional students and the instructors.

The college structure shows the student through example and instruction the right way to integrate into and action within the group setting plus the value/reward approach to participating in a team establishing. This is accomplished through the guidelines and guidance presented to them from your instructors. The student is also influenced by the targets of the teacher, the expectations of their peers, and the way their peers perceive all of them and their accomplishments (Vissing, 2011).

Additionally , declining to meet academics schedules the student may show up irresponsible with their peers plus the instructors because they academically fall behind others inside their peer and age groups. It is noted that students generally meet the expectations made of them, in other words if perhaps students are required to perform very well they do therefore , conversely, if they are not anticipated to perform well they just do not (Vissing, 2011). Therefore , the student’s educational achievement level may be determined by the manner where the instructors see the students plus the student’s habit and accomplishments.

For example , in the event that an instructor sights a student as being a trouble manufacturer the student will probably be labeled and treated as a result thus deterring the student from reaching his/her full potential. Looking at this issue with the watch of the scholar as the priority, the student’s educational achievement might be a determinant or a immediate result of the way in which in which the student views university and how come the student views the school in such a manner. Students will not surpass academically in the event that they do not appreciate attending college in general, or attending certain classes consequently , what are a lot of causes for the student sense this way.

It is evident the fact that interactions between your students and instructors play a large role in how the students feel about classes and college in general. Two major elements come into play here and they are generally, the course instructors social and emotional support for students and the nature of [the instructors’] expectations intended for students’ educational performance (Hallinan, 2008). This kind of interaction between student and instructor is of great worth as it influences how a college student perceives themselves and their environment within the university system.

For example , students that perceive they may be being forgotten or their very own capabilities will be being undervalued by the trainer will carry out poorly. Conversely, when an instructor shows students some focus, and displays them they can be capable and of value as a student, students will perform to the most of their capability. However , pertaining to either of these scenarios to persist the instructor must be in line with their relationships with the scholar.

Moreover, in the event the instructor’s objectives and interactions are not according to regard towards the student then a ability in predicting the student’s success in school or their emotions toward university becomes challenging. The predictability of a student’s feelings toward the school system becomes troublesome under these kinds of conditions as the equation found in this case is a feedback cycle based on how well the instructor suits their targets to the student’s academic talents. Moreover, the key variable in the equation of predicting a student’s emotions toward the school system is the student’s a reaction to the instructor’s expectations of them when planning to determine how happy the student is with a class or school on the whole (Hallinan, 2008).

What we see with the interactionism theory can be how the instructor can effect the student’s outlook and ultimately the students’ academics outcome by simply how they connect to the student and their overall expectations of the college student and their academics abilities. And also the interactionism theory shows how the students peer group can also account for their particular success or failure in school and specific classes as a result of influence the peer groups perceptions individuals student’s academics performances. Lastly the interactionism theory displays how the students overall emotions and self-perceptions toward the school system as a whole, individual classes, and their personal academic overall performance may also affect the students achievement and/or inability.

What the conflict theory reveals is the way the school program supports the continuance in the social inequalities between the top-notch class plus the lower course individual in relationship for their achieved status in a culture/society while maintaining its status. This allows the top notch class of any society to control and immediate the school system and its programs in a manner that will certainly ultimately benefit that prestige (Beaver, 2009). The conflict theory also acknowledges the competition between peers that encourages a more curved comprehension of subject matter through stronger and/or competitive research skills and this concept of competition follows a student through school and into the workforce.

In addition , the concept of competition is marketed through a approach to rewards in the school system and in the workforce including the honor role, the dean’s list, acceptance into honor societies, or becoming employee of the month or season. The school system accomplishes this kind of with its program so that the decrease class college student will accept the inevitability of any position inside the working school and wedding caterers to the prestige student by grooming these to acquire and look after positions in the ruling category (Beaver, 2009) (Vissing, 2011).

Additionally , the conflict theorist proposes which the school program controls the thinking patterns and reasoning powers from the students plus the manner in which students acts and reacts in social situations (Vissing, 2011). In addition , through example the students are launched and directed in the cultural values and beliefs with their society and culture. This kind of seeming schedule of the school system is better explained by Yvonne Vissing (2011) when your woman states, this role of education [is called] the hidden curriculum. [It is because] inequality results in many different forms, which includes structured variations in quality of educational institutions offered to the wealthy versus the poor (p 167).

However , this kind of hidden curriculum is not a set curriculum but it is usually implied and taught so as to always be unnoticed by the student’s daily attendance at school system. To clarify the invisible curriculum a good example of comparison between two several societies to be used. In society-a one of the more essential values is individualism; individualism implies the justification to freedom of thought and action by individual. Consequently , in society-a, the school programs is designed to showcase self-identity and self-esteem. However , in society-b, the value of individuality is thought about as an unhealthy social trait and the learners are taught through inference that being singled out is usually shameful and social respect is of more importance than self-esteem.

Consequently , in society-b, the curriculum is designed so that students will be taught that group reverance is of even more importance than self-honor is definitely (Davis, 2010). The issue theory as well shows the way the business world contains a large risk in the kind of students the college system turns out and these kinds of needs are addressed through a school’s program. Additionally , since the business world, which can be directed and controlled by the top-notch, advises selected change in the curriculum inside the school system to meet their needs the college system occasionally modifies and adjusts it is curriculum to fulfill those changing needs.

Nevertheless , this boosts the question, in fulfilling the needs of the business world does the school program always progress and bridegroom the best applicant for a managing position inside the workforce or perhaps is there a bias in place in which instead the most likely prospect is advanced and groomed for those positions (Beaver, 2009). According to Daniel Ashton, in England a collaborative software between federal government and education tries to treat the issues between school program (Educational Institution) and the world of business. One of the problems that is being resolved is, the gap between industry and the school system relating to workplace skills and present educational curricula.

The manner in which this kind of gap has been addressed is with an evaluation of a person’s natural capabilities to assist in developing that individual and those abilities to help build a active and attractive society (2009). It is valuable to note below that among the youth in lower course urban and rural America the perceived likelihood that the high quality education will be of any relevance in their long term working position is small. Additionally , the reason is , the sub-culture of the urban and rural lower class American is definitely where they will feel comfortable, as well as the middle/upper school urban/city culture of America is not only new to all of them but likewise uncomfortable to them.

Furthermore, as the larger educational ideas are different and have not any real bearing on their daily lives the lower class college student can best case scenario only absorb the higher educational concepts by rote by itself if at all (Becker, 1955). Although many countryside school devices persist in advancing the conceptual educational theories, various students during these rural areas still find it difficult to advance and succeed outside the house their all-natural comfort zone. Consequently , the ability to surpass beyond the working class is definitely deterred by many technological and vocational training schools in these areas (Becker, 1955).

We see with all the conflict theory how it supports interpersonal and status inequalities through class stratification, the status structure, and through peer competition. Additionally it shows we have a hidden subjects or schedule that settings the thought design of college students headed in the workforce of society where they are anticipated to accept a standing of the controlled or handling members inside the workforce based upon their family members status level in society. In addition , it shows the way the business world has a stake inside the level and focus of the curriculum used to the student in romance to the staff and sociable skills trainees has attained upon graduation as they nter the workforce.

Lastly, this shows how education is usually split into generalized higher education, specialised higher education, and vocational education and trained in support of both professions and investments in the workforce and world of business. Emile Durkheim’s view of education was that over time the school system started to be comprised of a great ordered composite of sociable disciplines and social structures with the ability to intermesh with like and in contrast to social constructions. However , Durkheim also postulated that culture as a whole a new greater capacity to modify their structure than that of the social structure of school system (Clark, 1973).

Therefore , looking at Education throughout the school program from a functionalism perspective, the school method is a viable sociable structure since it fulfills various primary and secondary sociable and social needs. A few of these primary requirements are the teaching and rewarding of ethnical values and norms, as well as the teaching of work ethics and certain general and specific factors about the work environment the students will at some point enter. One of the more important concepts schools instruct in the area of the work’ environment, both in school and out of school, is how to acknowledge success and/or failure and how to move forward underneath both circumstances (Beaver, 2009) (Vissing, 2011).

It is also vital that you look at a number of the secondary sociable needs satisfied by the university system. Inside the early summary of the school program, the student can be immersed to a tertiary expert group in which they begin to interact socially with many other folks in their age range. In today’s society schools also become a form of child care system and with extracurricular (sports) applications after the academic period the students are held off the streets and out of the competitive workforce till they have come to a certain age (Vissing, 2011).

In the achievement of practical and competitive employment in the present and long term workforce, the school systems present many specific elective exercises for many careers and investments in society’s business industries. This system of elective classes assists students in determining and becoming assessed in their abilities and compatibility of the particular career and/or operate. Additionally , to help the student and satisfy the business industry the college system provides incorporated particular schools that follow a refined or targeted curriculum to be able to fulfill the burgeoning needs of particular sectors in the business and economic realms. However , these kinds of schools carry an additional outcome for the more general school as well as its students.

Though a larger number of people enjoy the economical benefits offered in their profession of choice, trainees who graduates from this form of school has a less rounded education than the student who also graduates via a traditional college. Additionally , pertaining to the business world, the only purpose in this type of education is to satisfy its needs for semi-qualified workers as well as the benefit based on this type of education for the worker is being employed in a trade and/or profession of their choosing and acquiring the obtained status they will desired. Consequently , through this kind of narrowed and focused education both the student and the business community are pleased and share a feeling of success (Tufts, 1909).

The control of just how and precisely what is taught in the school method is directed and enforced by the dominant tradition of a world. Therefore , in all school systems students are taught nationalism, nationalism is of the ideals and rules particular with each individual country and that countries culture/society, and culture will present that nationalism with a opinion leaning toward that particular nation/culture. For example , in the usa of America the schools educate about the struggle there were in to become nation, the meaning of our countrywide flag and exactly how we honor it with this pledge of allegiance to the nation that represents.

The actual school program does not instruct is the wreckage caused to the aboriginal people of this region by the major imperialist mentality of the individuals that conquered these aboriginal people. Our major culture may be intrigued by simply and even end up being sympathetic toward the lifestyle and culture that was decimated in the making of this dominant nation/culture however , that culture as well as values and norms happen to be of tiny significance in the indoctrination from the nation’s society of the dominant ethnic values and norms (Becker, 1955).

Even though the primary function of the college system is the indoctrination in the student in knowledge and skills to become used later in the work arena is it doesn’t latent function of the school system, i actually. e.: the social relationships within the expert groups the scholars are brought to, is of better importance. The functionalism theory shows that as being a bureaucratic structure the education organization is steeped in traditions, and is more unlikely to change than society is really as a whole. The functionalism theory additionally displays the requirements of society being fulfilled, through the sociable values, norms, national icons, work ethics, and responsibility of the society it serves.

Additionally , the functionalism theory shows how the values of accountability and ethics happen to be accomplished with active peer group the usage. In addition , operate ethics completed through educational structure and schedules. Finally, we see how the national symbols on the dominant culture are instilled over a society with little regard to the subjugated culture that may have been in place prior to becoming overshadowed and have absolutely immigrated to that culture. Using three sociological theories and looking through the institution system on the social institution referred to as Education we see how this institution affects society as a whole and fulfills particular social and cultural demands.

With interactionism, we see how the expectations from the crew affect the individual’s self-expectations and actions within the group, world, and particular culture. Interactionism additionally reveals how the institution system presents and advices students how you can interact with the other person and contemporary society in a great and healthy manner. Once we look at the school system with the conflict theory, we see how it supports the inequalities between the course stratification plus the status composition in a culture, both in the individual level and the collective level while maintaining the status quo.

Additionally , the turmoil theory reveals how the top-notch class uses the business sector to effect the programs in the school system, which usually also contributes to the continuance of interpersonal inequalities. In addition, the discord theory reveals how the institution system has the power the control the considering patterns of your society through a hidden curriculum’. What functionalism shows all of us about the school system is the college system is a viable social structure as it fulfills many principal and secondary social and cultural needs.

It on top of that shows all of us some of those interpersonal needs, which are the teaching and reinforcing social values and norms. Additionally , that the school system instructs students work ethics along with particular and general aspects about the work environment they will eventually enter. Furthermore, when we consider the educational institution using the functionalism theory we see how the institution system confirms the quality of education as a social institution by simply fulfilling certain needs of a culture and society. Finally, we see the interrelationship among these 3 sociological ideas and the educational institution.

This can be shown to us through each of our peer group, teacher, organization, social, status and staff expectations and interactions. Additionally , we are displayed how the educational institution can and does influence our self-esteem, self-perception, and achieved status level.

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Social Institutions Essay

The sample paper on Social Institutions Essay familiarizes the reader with the topic-related facts, theories, and approaches. Scroll down to read the entire paper.

Social Institutions are a set of organized beliefs and rules that are to establish how society will meet basic functions. Social institutions are basic and important to the human society. Social institutions provide structure for behavior in certain parts of social life. There are several types of Social institutions such as mass media, the government, the economy, family, and the healthcare system (Schaefer R.

T. , Pg. 113). Each of these social institutions listed intersect and are interrelated coming together and affecting our daily life.

I have chosen to focus this paper on a social institution that is not listed above; the social institution of education. Education is both a social institution and an organization. Education is a process where educated teachers teach skills, knowledge and values to students. Education has been in our history since the 1950’s. Each individual has the right to have an education whether young or old.

Individuals need education to prepare them for dealing with the issues in everyday life. This gives us an insight to why education prepares one for life as an adult.

In the time that we live now schools are in competition with other social institutions and our government has been unsuccessful in satisfying all needs of education. The history of education states that education served both the economic and political needs though this has changed. Below I will look closer at the theories in how they relate to education and are represented by individuals, society and the social change.

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The Functionalist perspective is a sociological approach which emphasizes the way in which the parts of a society are structured to maintain its stability (Schaefer R. T. , Pg. 14).

Education As A Social Institution Essay

This means that one would not work without the other. Education performs a number of important services each contributing to the operation and maintenance of the whole system. Functionalist believes that there are main functions of education, transmission of cultural values, social control, economic training and social selection. The functionalist strives for stability rather than conflict and change, for changes could confuse the balance of social systems. According to the functionalist theory Education has an effect on the view of individuals who are a part of education because a bridge is seen between family and society.

Schools transmit core values of society, as well a social network for the young encouraging innovation and social change. The educational system is seen as fair, the schools teach what acceptable behavior is and what is unacceptable. Functionalist believes that in every society there is the right to regulate some of the citizen’s activities. Young ones are prepared for adult roles and positions through the socialization of education. Labor is provided for education to meet needs of our economy. Without the economy our schools would not be able to survive.

Functionalist claim that the educational institutes provide the training of skills, needed to fulfill jobs in society, without these families would not be able to survive either. According to the functionalist view there is a high degree of equality for opportunity in the educational system. The functionalists stress the link between the economy and education. We all benefit from the benefits of the educational system. There are differences between the social class and education; individuals are assigned to functions by education rather than by class.

The functionalist theory suggests that as a society develops they become complex and interdependent. Emphasing social order rather than social change. These causing differences that shall be integrated as a whole. This meaning change does not occur but structures within society change or emerge to compensate for the change. The change occurs and the structures are integrated to assure smooth functioning, this allowing for social order to be achieved through the process of socialization, education and sanctions.

The view of society by functionalism is affected by society because they believe that the society must function together or it shall fall apart, calling for a system that will instill beliefs and values in each member such as the school, believing that those who work the hardest will be the only ones to excel in society. The functionalist believe that the meritocratic society in which society is based on ability and effort rather than a privilege and inheritance stating that society works better when education is present.

The more the skills of an individual the better the society will be, and the more education would require less inequality. Students learn morals and the moral are a part of the society and have a part in the society this preventing the failure of society allowing one to feel a part of the society. Based on conflict theory society consists of different groups that struggle with one another to obtain the social resources that are available, these being money, power, prestige, and/or the authority to impose one’s value within the society.

The conflict theory believes strongly in change, disregards stability and its job is to control. Education can be used by powerful groups to limit opportunities for those of less power in the society. The conflict theory individuals view education as a power to exert power over another. Since education is based on class, students are born into the social system; this determines his or her behavior. Each student is viewed differently as a result in being taught and treated differently by those who may be of a higher class in the society.

This is cause for inequality which the conflict theorists think that there is little that can be done about the inequality without broader changes. This results in a lot of confusion between students and teachers. For example one school teaches in one manner and the other may teach in a completely different manner. The conflict theory is viewed as a competition between students, lack of power, influence, wealth are all viewed as one’s own fault. According to conflict theory social changes in not avoidable in society.

When society reaches a point the organization forms barriers to further economic growth due to powerful groups and as the interest change so does society. Society strives through power, dominance, and authority. The most powerful members will create the rules for one to succeed and for the opportunities in the society, this allowing the groups to keep the power and authority. The functionalist and conflict perspective are similar in some ways. They both examine the same functions, and agree that the educational system practices sorting but they disagree on how sorting enacts.

Both have a structuralism in the approach to education, paying attention to the social institutions rather than the individuals. The attention to the students and teacher interaction is little this including how the teacher or student may interpret what goes on in the schools. When looking at the interaction perspective it focuses on everyday social interaction among the individuals rather than the large social structures such as politics and education.

The interaction perspective places focus on the face to face social interaction between the student and the teacher while in the classroom. Recognizing the social expectations and meanings as a part of interaction; this playing a major role in what the students learn and accomplish as well how they feel about themselves. Ones social life is determined by expected behaviors this meaning a person will learns from communication and social interactions. Internationalists ignore the fact that social institutions such as family, religion, and the economy have part in molding the human behavior.

The Interactions perspective claims that educational attainment is constructed through teacher expectations and inside of the schools. The schools label the students according to their grades, and self is determined by interaction. Concerns of interaction are made regularly about the daily life and experiences. Self is viewed by how others view the individual and how the person responds and develops his or her response. How people interpret objects and meanings around them is the determination of social change.

Social interactions then change perspective on the viewing of something, expectations and boundaries are then changed. Change is a dynamic and constant feature of society. Our society is created by those who exist and act, society will always be changing.

References Schaefer R. T. , Sociology: A Brief Introduction 8th Edition, McGraw Hill Companies, Inc. 2009. http:www. cliffnotes. com/WileyCDA/CliffsReviewTopic/Theories-of-Education. topic Atricle

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Education as a social institution

Although today we learn basic but Important things we need to know In order to be accepted In society. Through education social Institutions we learn to read, write, and speak; these seemingly simple tasks are tasks we need for Just about any occupation today. Education as a social Institution affects me every school day. On my academic days I take part In education as the student, while on tech days I take part In education as the teacher. I really like the teaching style In the united states: also I enjoyed learning about the different teaching styles used in other parts of the world.

Japan's teaching style was very intriguing to me. I believe the U. S. Would benefit immensely from taking principles from Japan into our educational social institutions. I was fascinated with the solidarity with the group that is stressed in Japan's education system. I'm impressed with how much responsibility the Japanese children have, and would really like to see our younger generations grow up to be like that too. As a teacher, the rising problems in U. S. Education worry me as I think about future generations. I feel that mediocrity is mediocre.

I strongly believe that students should work hard for their grades, and not get them handed to them by lowering the passing grade. If we continue to lower the grades our population will become less educated. I am also concerned about the violence in our schools today. Safety wasn't always an issue in schools, so why have we allowed so much violence in that it is an issue? Seeing a cop pace through halls with a mission is intimidating to students, and wouldn't be happening if there was no violence at all in schools. I believe schools would do more to prevent violence from even coming close to schools.

Order custom essay Education as a social institution with free plagiarism report

On the other hand, as a student, I'm guilty of being accepting to grades I get when a teacher uses a curve. As a student I take advantage of education as a social Institution. Although education is a very critical part of a student's life, I feel all of us don't give it the credit it deserves. Education as a social Institution teaches us more than English, Math, and Science; our schools teach us norms, taboos, and how to behave In our culture. I believe education Is the most Important social Institution In our society. Education as a social institution By allowing If you think about it, we would not get very far in life if we didn't have education social institutions. It's understandable that obviously earlier societies did it before education became a social institution. Although today we learn basic but important things we need to know in order to be accepted in society. Through education social institutions we learn to read, write, and speak; these seemingly simple tasks are tasks Education as a social institution affects me every school day.

On my academic days I take part in education as the student, while on tech days I take part in education as the teacher. I really like the teaching style in the United States; also I enjoyed wouldn't be happening if there was no violence at all in schools. I believe schools institution. Although education is a very critical part of a student's life, I feel all of us don't give it the credit it deserves. Education as a social institution teaches us more behave in our culture.

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Education as a social institution Essay

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Reflection on Education as a social institution Learning about education’s functions as a social institution was very interesting to me. I learned a useful amount of information on the importance of education as I studied this chapter. Eve always thought of education as an Important aspect to society, but never realized its true significance. If you think about it, we would not get very far In life If we didn’t have education social Institutions. It’s understandable that obviously earlier societies did It before education became a social Institution.

Although today we learn basic but Important things we need to know in order to be accepted In society. Through education social Institutions we learn to read, write, and speak; these seemingly simple tasks are tasks we need for Just about any occupation today. Education as a social Institution affects me every school day. On my academic days I take part In education as the student, while on tech days I take part In education as the teacher. I really like the teaching style in the united States: also I enjoyed learning about the different teaching styles used in other parts of the world.

Japan’s teaching style was very intriguing to me. I believe the U. S. Would benefit immensely from taking principles from Japan into our educational social institutions. I was fascinated with the solidarity with the group that is stressed in Japan’s education system. I’m impressed with how much responsibility the Japanese children have, and would really like to see our younger generations grow up to be like that too. As a teacher, the rising problems in U. S. Education worry me as I think about future generations. I feel that mediocrity is mediocre.

I strongly believe that students would work hard for their grades, and not get them handed to them by lowering the passing grade. If we continue to lower the grades our population will become less educated. I am also concerned about the violence in our schools today. Safety wasn’t always an issue in schools, so why have we allowed so much violence in that it is an issue’seeing a cop pace through halls with a mission is intimidating to students, and wouldn’t be happening if there was no violence at all in schools. I believe schools should do more to prevent violence from even coming close to schools.

On the other hand, as a student, I’m guilty of being accepting to grades I get when a teacher uses a curve. As a student I take advantage of education as a social Institution. Although education Is a very critical part of a student’s life, I feel all of us don’t give It the credit it deserves. Education as a social Institution teaches us more than English, Math, and Science; our schools teach us norms, taboos, and how to behave In our culture. I believe education Is the most Important social Institution In our society. Education as a social institution By allowing tidied this chapter.

Eve always thought of education as an important aspect to If you think about it, we would not get very far in life if we didn’t have education social institutions. It’s understandable that obviously earlier societies did it before education became a social institution. Although today we learn basic but important things we need to know in order to be accepted in society. Through education social institutions we learn to read, write, and speak; these seemingly simple tasks are tasks Education as a social institution affects me every school day.

On my academic days I take part in education as the student, while on tech days I take part in education as the teacher. I really like the teaching style in the United States; also I enjoyed wouldn’t be happening if there was no violence at all in schools. I believe schools institution. Although education is a very critical part of a student’s life, I feel all of us don’t give it the credit it deserves. Education as a social institution teaches us more behave in our culture. I believe education is the most important social institution in

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Education is the social institution guiding the transmission of knowledge, job, skills, cultures, norms and values Socialization starts within the family. The family is responsible for the primary socialization of children. When a child enters the educational system, the school becomes the main agent of secondary socialization. Some Marxist that about this are Bowels, Gintis and Althusser,.…

How To Write A Rhetorical Analysis Essay

Education means understanding the knowledge one has as well as the skills and material that one has learned from attending a school, college, or university. Education also means the act or process of teaching someone. Although both of these are important, if we did not have people that were more intelligent than one another, we would have no education. Throughout my life, many different educational influences have taught me skills to become successful.…

What Does It Mean To Be Educated

Another definition provided for education is found in the Oxford English dictionary and is The Process of “bringing up” a young person in a manner in which a person has been brought up. This definition seems to make more sense. High school and college are not absolutely necessary in becoming educated. The skills acquired while being brought up can often prove much more useful in real life then the 18 years of gaining knowledge in high school or college. What we learned in school should not solely be considered education.…

Philosophy of Education

As we all know education is a very serious topic in the United States today and plays an extremely large part in society. Education serves as a means of kids to gain a better perspective on the ever changing world around them. Schools should be a safe environment open to any child. Education teaches kids many different things that will help them become successful in whatever path they choose, either to higher education or entering into the work place. Schools offer many basic life skills aside from just simple reading and arithmetic, such as learning how to communicate and work with others around them. I believe the overall definition of the role of education is best said by United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, “Education should be a means to empower children and adults alike to become active participants in the transformation of their societies” (UNESCO).…

Why Is Education Important

The first thing that strikes me about education is knowledge gain. Education gives us knowledge of the world around us. It develops in us a perspective of looking at life. It helps us build opinions and have points of view on things in life. People debate over the subject of whether education is the only thing that gives knowledge. Some say, education is the process of gaining information about the surrounding world while knowledge is something very different. They are right. But then, information cannot be converted into knowledge without the catalyst called education. Education makes us capable of interpreting things rightly. It is not just about lessons in textbooks. It is about the lessons of life.…

Purpose of Education

In most of the dictionary education is defined as the imparting and acquiring of knowledge through teaching and learning. It’s is something one learns in schools and college, but I think that’s not true. Education is not only offered in school but it is journey which begins at birth and for most of us it has already begun. Education is to not only equip people with the knowledge of the world they have to live in but is to enhance and build up the character because It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.…

Argumentative Essay On Higher Education

What is education? The dictionary states, education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits. Great Universities have every Knowledge of high quality and amount. Millions of individuals collect a vast sum of knowledge each year because they are told to get a degree to achieve success and prosperity for a better life. They got their degrees, then they forge in the world to make a living for themselves.…

introduction to the social dimension of education

Education is one of the major institutions that constitute society. Educational institutions take part on society in different aspects; such as on the people’s intellectual development, policies, economics and several other fields. There are various social science theories that relate to education –consensus, conflict, structural functionalist and interaction theories.…

Factors That Affect the Academic Performance of the Selected College Students at Core Gateway College, San Jose City, Nueva Ecija, School Year 2012-2013

It is the knowledge of putting one’s potentials to maximum use. Education is the process of learning and acquiring knowledge at school from a teacher, receiving knowledge at home from a parent, a family member, and even an acquaintance. Education is a key that allows people to move up in the world, seek better jobs, and succeed in life. Education is one factor that affects job positions people hold, advance in their further career, the income they make, and the title they hold. The more educated a person is, the more prestige and power that person holds.…

Education as a Social Institution

The social institution referred to as Education is comprised of the school system and it is in the school system where knowledge and skills are developed along with cultural and social values and norms. Additionally, through the school system culture and society continue and further those social values and norms thus fulfilling a need prescribed by society. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the theories of functionalism, conflict, and interactionism perceive the social institution of education. As the functionalism theory states, each social institution exists in order to fulfill a social need in addition without the social institution in question, social order would falter. The conflict theory states, a social institution creates and/or furthers social inequalities and assists in maintaining an ascribed social status in the social order however, as the social order is continuously in flux, the social order tries to find a balance in and for society. The interactionism theory tries to understand why individuals who maintain a presence within a social institution act and/or react to each other under certain stimulations (Vissing, 2011). The social institution of education is comprised of what we term as schools therefore throughout this paper the terms education institution, schools, and the school system will be used interchangeably and accordingly. Each individual within a society is introduced to and educated in a system of values and norms pertaining to their particular society beginning at an early age and continuing through the individual’s lifetime additionally, the school system plays a large part in that education as the youth of that particular society develop into adults. The instructors or teachers within the school system act as role models to elicit proper behavior and strengthen cultural and societal norms (Beaver, 2009). Along with the academic curriculum taught in schools, schools also act as a large…

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NPR editor Uri Berliner resigns after bombshell expose reveals network’s pervasive left-wing bias

U ri Berliner, the veteran editor and reporter for National Public Radio who was suspended without pay after publishing a lengthy essay denouncing the outlet’s liberal bias, has resigned from the broadcaster.

“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,” Berliner wrote on his X social media account on Wednesday.

“I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism.”

Berliner wrote that he “cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.”

Berliner was referring to Katherine Maher, the chief executive at NPR who has come under fire for a series of “woke” social media posts in which she criticized Hillary Clinton for using the term “boy” and “girl” because it was “erasing language for non-binary people.”

Maher also appeared to justify looting In 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests, saying it was “hard to be mad” about the destruction. In 2018, she wrote a post denouncing then-President Donald Trump as a “racist” before deleting it.

On Tuesday, NPR spokeswoman Isabel Lara said in a statement that Maher “was not working in journalism at the time and was exercising her First Amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen.”

Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist, called out journalistic blind spots around major news events, including the origins of COVID-19, the war in Gaza and the Hunter Biden laptop, in an essay published last Tuesday on Bari Weiss’ online news site the Free Press.

In Berliner’s essay — titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust” — Berliner said that among editorial staff at NPR’s Washington, DC, headquarters,  he counted 87 registered Democrats and no Republicans.

He wrote that he presented these findings to his colleagues at a May 2021 all-hands editorial staff meeting.

“When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile,” Berliner wrote. “It was worse. It was met with profound indifference.”

Maher, who took up the role as CEO of NPR in late March, responded to Berliner’s essay by claiming that the veteran journalist was being “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning” to his colleagues.

She accused Berliner of “questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity … based on little more than the recognition of their identity.”

Berliner also called out his bosses at NPR for their refusal to seriously cover the laptop story — which was exclusively broken by The Post.

The laptop contained emails showing that the son of President Biden was engaged in influence-peddling overseas — though NPR and other media outlets declined to aggressively cover the story in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.

According to Berliner, senior editors at NPR feared that devoting airtime to the story would help Trump’s re-election chances just weeks before voters cast their ballots.

Berliner wrote that NPR had deteriorated into “an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience.”

“The laptop was newsworthy,” Berliner wrote. “But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched.”

Berliner also accused NPR of giving disproportionately more attention to allegations that Trump was colluding with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election — only to devote far less resources to Robert Mueller’s findings that there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges.

After the contents of the laptop proved to be authentic, NPR “could have fessed up to our misjudgment,” Berliner wrote.

“But, like Russia collusion [allegations against Trump that were debunked], we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.”

Berliner also called out NPR for pushing other left-leaning causes, such as subjecting staffers to “unconscious bias training sessions” in the wake of the May 2020 death of George Floyd.

Employees were ordered to “start talking about race,” he said.

NPR journalists were also told to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” that were based on racial and ethnic identity, including “Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color” (MGIPOC), “NPR Noir” (black employees at NPR) and “Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media.”

According to Berliner, if an NPR journalist’s language “differs from the diktats of those groups,” a “DEI Accountability Committee” would settle the dispute.

How Education as a social institution impacts the Caribbean

Describe how education as a social institution impacts on Caribbean Society and Culture Several social institutions exist in today’s society and they are family, education, religion and the justice system. The Caribbean is defined as that area on the earth located between five and twenty five degrees north of the equator and fifty five and ninety degrees west of the Greenwich meridian. In the Caribbean, education is one of the institutions that is viewed as having the most promise for betterment of a people. Education as a social institution greatly impacts the society and culture of the Caribbean. Education can be defined as the group of social organizations which see to the transmission of knowledge and skills needed for economic …show more content…

This process directly influences the society and culture of the Caribbean. Societies are made up of persons who live, work and generally interact with each other; role allocation allows each person to have a set position in the society to know what it is that they are responsible for. In Caribbean culture it is seen for men and women that certain jobs are for men and certain jobs are for females. However, with access to education these traditional roles can be changed where men and women are able to do any type of job they aspire to. As this happens each person can feel more at comfortable as they can now have a be sure of a place in society and also allows a changing of culture as it expands the roles, beliefs and attitudes in our society as men and women are no longer looked at with disdain if they are doing a job which may be seen as not fitting to their gender. In contrast to this the Marxist believes that education results in the generation of a group of unskilled who settle for low paying jobs or the increasingly prevalent occurrence of skilled workers doing jobs they are overqualified for. Our Caribbean society is filled with person in this position and as a result this has adverse effects on the growth of the society and culture. As this occurs many have chosen alternate routes in order to make money and do better for themselves, some to crime and others to the process

Marxism Crime & Deviance

In their theories, Marxists say that certain types of crime are more likely to be punished compared to others. Street crimes (brawls, binge drinking, theft, muggings, social unrest and disorder) are more likely to be pursued than white collar crime (fraud, tax evasion, ‘insider training’ and even gambling and prostitution). This is because the capitalist governments who have run the country are sympathetic to those who are of the same belief and class, but have just got carried away with their search for wealth. In this society of greed, the working class have to turn to crime just to stay alive and to obtain the materialistic goods or lifestyle, which is typical to a capitalistic state, and that general standard of living and attitude to life, is enforced on them, when living in this type of society. Money and personal gain, and the ‘every man for himself’ attitude is what life is like in an unfair, and socially unequal way of life under a capitalist government.

assess the usefulness of Marxist approach to an understanding of crime and deviance’

Traditional Marxists believe that crime is inevitable in all societies because capitalism is criminogenic suggesting that it is societies very nature that causes crime. According to traditional Marxists society causes capitalism in different ways. One of which is due to poverty. The lack

Outline and Assess Marxist Explanations of Crime

Marxist sociologists argue that in order to understand crime and deviance, one needs to realise that it is the nature of exploitative economic systems that capitalist societies have in

Outline and Assess Marxist Explanations of the Causes of Crime

Chambliss (1979) argued that working class would try to increase wages and working conditions over a period of time. And the ruling class passed a law to limit wages paid to labourers. A more reason example is the government legislation enforcing benefit fraud. This is more of a working class crime. However, Functionalists challenge the concept of status frustration and argue that the laws are made for the good of everyone and that for society to work well it is to avoid anomie. This analysis shows that Marxism is useful to a large extent as it can be shown that there is seen to be a level of status frustration.

Analysis Of The Achievement Of Desire By Richard Rodriguez

For middle and lower class citizens educations seems like the primary way to succeed in life. Personally believe that my last statement is true. Richard Rodriguez also believed that and wrote about his experience with education. In his essay “The Achievement of Desire” he discusses things such as;How his parents are Mexican immigrants, barely speak English, and had little to no education. His essay hit home for me because I have experienced similar things in my life but not exactly the same. He also talks about how he felt that the only way of leaving behind the image of being uneducated and at the bottom of the ladder is to educate himself. So that’s what he did. Unfortunately during his educational years he forgot where he came from and abandoned his family and culture. He also discusses Hoggart’s essay “the use of Literacy” and his educational figure who is snobby know as the “scholarship boy”. Even though Rodriguez agreed and seen himself as this “scholarship boy” he knew that he wasn’t a perfect example of it. “The scholarship boy’s parents are poor and are uneducated as are my own”(341) he says but there is a difference him and the perfect scholarship boy. He noticed that he had pushed away his family but the scholarship boy is too blind to see that and only wants to succeed in life. You see myself in Rodriguez but I hope to stop the dissociation from my family and culture before it’s too late.

Gender Roles In The Caribbean Culture

Over several years gender roles have been present in our daily lives. Society has preconceived judgments on what role each gender should play and when it is ok to go against societal norms. Although as the years continue to progress and societal norms begin to change, one thing that has remained the same is the gender role stigma. Gender roles have been instilled within us even before we exit our mother’s womb, from the color the newborns room is painted in down to the color clothes they wear. Plenty of research has been conducted on gender roles in Western culture. Some of the components researchers looked for were, what gender roles are, how they affect society and the individual along with the culture and history behind where it began (Cobb, R. A., Walsh, C. E., & Priest, J. B. (2009). While researching gender roles and different cultures I could not help but notice there were little to no research on gender roles within the Caribbean culture. This gap of literature helped me pose the question why is there plenty of research on gender roles in Western culture, but a scarce amount of research on gender roles in the Caribbean culture? Along with, how will we be able to eliminate or shift societal norms of what gender roles should be? It is important to touch on what gender roles are like in the Caribbean culture because then we can compare and contrasts how gender roles are displayed within various cultures and ultimately come up with a solution or suggestions on how to

Gender Roles : African Americans

Gender roles describe the normative expectations of a culture group regarding the position that both sexes should hold in society. It also refers to the division of labor tasks, differences in behaviors, preferences, abilities; personalities that society expects of specific genders, (Kaiser, C. R., & Miller, C. T. 2009). It concerns the processes of how gender roles socialize and interact with each other in society as a whole and as an individual, (Stockard & Johnson, 1980; Thomas, 1986). Gender role deals with identity and at times are conceptualized as the acceptance and identification with social roles and behaviors associated with

Gender Roles in Australian Contemporary Society

This books focuses on things that influence gender roles such as Sociological Perspectives, Social Stratification , Sex and Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Nationality, Poverty and Social Exclusion , Crime and Deviance, Religion , Families and Households, Power, Politics and the State, Work, Unemployment and Leisure, Organisations and Bureaucracy, Education, Culture and Identity and Methodology.

Essay about The Identity and History of the Caribbean

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Since the arrival of Europeans the Caribbean islands have been going through constant change. The loss of native peoples and the introduction of the plantation system had immediate and permanent reprocussions on the islands. The Plantation system set up a society which consisted of a large, captive lower class and a powerful, wealthy upper class. As the plantation systems became successful labor was needed in order to progress. Slavery became the answer to the problem. Slavery played an important role in the how the economy changed the islands because there was a

Argumentative Essay - Education in Latin America

“Education leads to a brighter future.” Quite a clichéd phrase, actually. So popular, that people tend to forget the true significance of it. It is known that Latin America faces numerous problems that makes looking into the future a discouraging view; but we fail to realize the lack of education may be the root of these issues, including violence, unemployment and poverty. Even though education is widely available in Latin America, people are not yet engrained with the idea that education can be a facilitator for a superior life. Economic issues that stem from unemployment and poverty have led to the notion that education is wasted time that could be better spent

What Is Meritocratic

Marxists see the capitalist society as being ruled by the economy. The bourgeoisie rule the majority of the country’s wealth and the power to rule. The proletariat are exploited because they payed fairly. This is the foundation of class inequality. One of the most published conflict models is the model proposed by Bowles and Gintis in Schooling in Capitalist America (1976). Bowles and Gintis, like functionalists, see education has a vital link to the economy. But, unlike the functionalists, it is the requirements of industrial capitalism. Bowles and Gintis argue that education operates within the ‘long shadow of work’, which is the education system regulates the organisation of workers for the ideal workforce of a capitalist society (Giddens,

Bowles and Gintis Education and Inequality Essay

The most important information in the article is that capitalism causes extremes in social economics. There are those that are very rich and those that are very poor. The poor then are left with unrest and desire for that which they do not have. Education will equip then with the tools they need to escape poverty and be able to coexist with those in other social extremes. "The founders of the modern US school system understood that the capitalist economy only produces great extreme of wealth and poverty of social elevation and degradation" (p.362). "Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great

Essay about Challenges of Caribbean Society in Achieving National Unity

Challenges of Caribbean Society in Achieving National Unity There have been many attempts for the Caribbean nations to come together as one, leading to national unity in the region. Some attempts at unity include: Federation, CARICOM (Caribbean Community), CARIFTA (Caribbean Free Trade Association), CDB (Caribbean Development Bank), UWI (University of the West Indies), CXC (Caribbean Examinations Council), and recently CSME (Caribbean Single Market and Economy), which is still in the process of being carried out. The Caribbean’s aim is to come together socially, economically, and politically and to try to work as one nation. However, there are many cultural differences between the countries,

sugar revolution

This demographic revolution had important social consequences. Rather than being a relatively homogeneous ethnic group divided into categories based on economic criteria, Caribbean society

Gender and Development Theories, Wid, Wad and Gad, Their Strengths and Weaknesse

Gender relates to the social constructions and relations between men and women and it does not simply look at maleness or femaleness. Development is a multidimensional concept but in general it entails social upward mobility and empowerment but not limited to this. In studying gender relations and development it is of great importance to look at

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