Educational System Function

There are not that many things in our life that are essential for us to have a successful and prospering living. One of those things is education. There are many aspects and issues connected to education that need public and government attention to be paid to. Providing respectful and proper education is a guarantee of successful and flourishing future to the whole society not only the individual.Technical College

Educational institutions have two basic functions. On the one hand, they act as agencies of socialisation, transmitting social rules, norms and values; on the other hand, they are mechanisms of allocation, channels for selecting and training people to fill the many occupations of industrial economies. This dual function of socialisation and allocation is fulfilled to some degree by all educational systems. However, in a society with a complex division of labour there is often a contradiction between the two functions of socialisation and allocation. This essay will use both Marxist and Functionalist perspectives to question the educational system and to what extent if at all are the dice loaded. technical college

Educational policies after the Second World War were primarily concerned with facilitating greater, and more equal, access to educational qualifications. This was attempted in R A Butlers 1944 Educational Act which sought to make entry to selective schools and universities meritocratic, that is dependent on ability rather than social status or wealth. The Act proposed a system in which children would be transferred at the age of eleven to grammar, secondary modern, or technical schools according to their ‘age, aptitude and ability’. technical college

Grammar schools continued to be seen as superior and biased towards middle class males due to the academic subjects, Mathematics (traditionally a male subject) and English being the key indicators used to measure the students. technical college

Since we have simple tests of discovering children’s natures (and there are luckily two varieties of these) we can perfectly easily tailor the schooling they get to suit these natures. Such a position accords a pretty self fulfilling and pessimistic function to education and the fact this process of division has always produced a high correlation with the division between middle class and working class children simply serves to confirm the appropriateness of the division in the first place. The above quotation highlights how the commonly held attitudes towards the working class only reinforced the class distinction. Talcott Parsons stated in his writing on education its “Functions to allocate these human resources within the role structure of adult society”. Perhaps if the government had built a larger quantity of technical colleges then the education system would have been more successful in allocating individuals into work roles that match their abilities. By its very nature the eleven plus looked at student’s academic skills completely ignoring student’s personal abilities. Whereas in the education systems of Germany and Japan, in the same period, the majority of students took a vocational path in order to secure educational success. Perhaps this is why their societies achieved greater industrial and economic accomplishment. Equally, successful entry to a grammar school was not guaranteed if the student had passed their eleven plus exam, this was due to the limited number of places. If we compare the number of grammar schools in Surrey, (which is known for its large percentage of upper and middle class), to the number in the industrial Midlands (with its high population of working class), there is proportionally less number of places for students, therefore making the educational system largely a postcode lottery. technical college

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