education present
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SECOND EDITION
You MayAsk YourselfDalton Conley
An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist
Chapter 13Education
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What Is Education?
• Education is the process through which academic, social, and cultural ideas and tools are developed.
• Unfortunately, not all students emerge successfully from this system.
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What Is Education?
• Some problems include:– functional illiteracy: the inability to read or
write well enough to function in society– innumeracy: having insufficient math skills to
function in society
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Learning to Learn or Learning to Labor? Functions of Schooling
• The two main functions of schools are to educate students and to socialize them.– Schools teach general skills, such as reading,
writing, and arithmetic, as well as specific skills needed for the workplace.
– Human capital refers to the knowledge and skills that make someone more productive and bankable.
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Learning to Learn or Learning to Labor? Functions of Schooling
• Schools transmit values, beliefs, and attitudes that are important to society.
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Learning to Learn or Learning to Labor? Functions of Schooling
• This hidden curriculum serves to form a more cohesive society but has also been used to impose the values of a dominant culture on outsiders or minorities.
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Learning to Learn or Learning to Labor? Functions of Schooling
• Schools have been described as sorting machines that place students into programs and groups according to their skills, interests, and talents.
• Critics argue that this sorting process is not based solely on merit and that ultimately it serves to reproduce social inequalities.
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Do Schools Matter?
• The 1966 Coleman Report showed that two primary factors – family background and peers – explained differences in achievement among schools, rather than differences in school resources as had been expected.
• Since the 1980s, it has been shown that smaller class sizes have a positive impact on student performance.
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Do Schools Matter?
• Private school students perform better academically than their peers at public schools, in part due to academic and behavioral differences.
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What’s Going On inside Schools?
• Tracking is dividing students into different classes according to ability or future plans.
• In practice, tracking has a number of negative effects and may be more beneficial for those who are already privileged.
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What’s Going On inside Schools?
• The Pygmalion Effect, or self-fulfilling prophecy, is the process that occurs when behavior is modified to meet preexisting expectations.
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Higher Education
• In 1910, 3 percent of men and women over age 25 had a college degree.
• In 2004, 28 percent of men and women over age 25 had a college degree.
Figure 13.1 A Century of Higher Education RatesYou May Ask Yourself, 2nd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
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Higher Education
• Credentialism– overemphasis on credentials, such as college
degrees, for signaling social status or job qualifications
– As more and more people meet the qualifications for certain types of jobs, employers upgrade the requirements in order to weed out more people.
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Higher Education
• The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) has been shown to accurately predict a student’s potential for college success.
• However, critics argue that there are other equally good predictors that don’t share the SAT’s downsides.
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Inequalities in Schooling
• Sociologists are still interested in understanding the achievement gap between white an minority students. This has often been attributed to class, but other theories circulate.
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Inequalities in Schooling
• The achievement gap between girls and boys has been closing in many academic measures, but women are still earning less money than men, leading sociologists to investigate it further.
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Inequalities in Schooling
• Studies show that family size, spacing between siblings, gender, and birth order can all affect educational outcomes.
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Inequalities in Schooling
• Socioeconomic class, race, and ethnicity are often intertwined and clearly affect educational outcomes.
Figure 13.2 Educational Attainment Based on Race, 2007You May Ask Yourself, 2nd Edition
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Chapter 13: Education
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