What is the Marxist view on education? Part 2. Introduction. In the last video, What is the Marxist view on education? Part 1, we explored Althusser's ideological state apparatus, correspondence principle, the hidden curriculum, and the myth of meritocracy. This video investigates an in-depth look at Paul Willis's Learning to Labor, Paulo Freire, Reproduction of Class Inequality, and a full evaluation of the Marxist perspective.
Willis Learning to Labor Marxists believe capitalism cannot function without a workforce accepting their exploitation, an education's role in perpetuating and codifying class inequality. Basically, it ensures working-class students learn to accept poor-paying, alienating jobs. However, Bolas and Gintas view education as a straightforward process of indoctrination of students into the myth of meritocracy. In fact, Paul Willis'study pointed out that working-class students could resist attempts to indoctrinate them. The Marxist, Willis, has interest in school's role in capitalism, but he conflates this with an interactionist approach which focuses on the meetings students place on their situation and how this may contribute to resisting indoctrination.
The Lad's Counterculture Based on qualitative research consisting of participant observations and unstructured interviews, Willis studied the counter-school culture of 12 working-class students transitioning from school to work, known as the Lads. The lads represented a counterculture opposed to schools and scornful of conformist boys they named ear-holes, those who listened to their teachers. They had their own intimidation style of humor, of taking the piss out of ear-holes and girls. These lads were bored with school, finding it meaningless, and disregarding its rules and values by smoking, drinking, disrupting class, and truanting. They viewed these acts of defiance as a means to resist school, rejecting the meritocracy ideology as a con. where middle-class students get middle-class jobs through hard work.
Willis saw similarities between the LAD's anti-school counterculture and a shop-floor culture of manual workers. They both view manual work as superior to intellectual work, viewed as inferior. The LADs strongly identify with manual work, which explains the reason they view themselves as superior to girls and ear-oles working towards non-manual jobs. It also explains why LAD's resistance to school helps them fill jobs they find inferior based on skill, pay, and conditions that capitalism needs individuals to fill.
For example, becoming used to the boredom of school, finding ways to entertain themselves, they do not anticipate being satisfied by their jobs having the ability to create diversions to cope with tedious, unskilled labor. Their acts of rebellion guarantee them working unskilled jobs, ensuring their failure to gain worthwhile qualifications. Willis sees irony in this, as the lad's resistance to the ideology in school and their counterculture ensures they are slotted into unskilled jobs for which capitalism thrives on.
Key study, Paolo Freire. Paolo Freire finds in the emerging global society a new context in which education cannot be indifferent to the reproduction of dominant ideologies and the interrogation of them. Freire shows why an acceptance of fatalism leads to loss of personal and societal freedoms.
He argues against progressive liberalism. and its acceptance of a world where poverty must inevitably coexist with opulence. Baulus and Guintas'view is similar to that of Palo Friere. In Pedagogy of Freedom, 1998, he wrote that the teacher's role should be to support poorer students to question and change society, but he was imprisoned for his beliefs.
The United States revoked funding from his primary education program in Brazil in case his radical ideas would encourage revolution. Methods and Contexts Observations and Interview Paul Willis, in Learning to Labor, How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, 1977, used participant observations observed in unstructured interviews with 12 British working-class boys during their last school year in initial time in factory work. Willis did not find the lads lazy as they formed an anti-school subculture.
They did not see any point in education. This made it impossible for them to succeed at school and rise above their class as it recognized the influence of class inequalities on the attitudes of these boys and their families. Like in school, the lads passed the time in the factory, joking around to ease boredom.
Post-modernism and Marxists. The correspondence principle views school the same as work, and that capitalism requires low-skilled workers willing to accept mass production jobs that can alienate them. This is classified as Fordism, based on the Ford Motor Company being the first to institute mass production.
Bolas and Gintis. view education as a way to prepare students to accept this type of work. Postmodernists indicated Marxist views are outdated, claiming society has cultivated a postmodern era where class divisions are irrelevant.
As a result, society is more diverse, fragmented, and resembles a flexible specialization, where production is customized for smaller, specialized markets. This post-Fordist system requires a more skilled and flexible workforce to match advancing technology. Post-Fordism demands a new form of education encouraging self-motivation and creativity and providing lifelong training based on constant technological advancements, rendering skills obsolete at a faster pace.
This results in postmodernists indicating education has evolved to become more diverse and responsive to different individual needs. In fact, the correspondence principle is no longer relevant and produces diversity opposed to inequality as seen by postmodernists, which contrasts to Marxists. Methods and Context Researching Class Inequality The characteristics of the reproduction of class inequality has research implications, including the lack of career-tracking data of students for researchers.
There's difficulty in contacting past students based on old addresses or a lack of access for researchers. Some fee-based schools have student associations which may facilitate contact. Past students in working-class jobs could be viewed as failures or patronized by a middle-class researcher.
Schools could be defensive about sharing information regarding the occupational futures of their students in case this is negative. Past students could not know the reasons they got working-class jobs or may feel as though they did not work hard enough in school. Evaluation.
Marxist views are useful in highlighting the myth of meritocracy, in that they illustrate the role education has as an ISA in serving the interests of capitalism of perpetuating and substantiating class inequality. However, postmodernists criticize Bolas and Gintis'correspondence principle based on current day's post-Fordist economy, which needs schools to produce a different type of labor force than the one posited by Marxists. Postmodernists believe that education produces diversity, not inequality. Marxists disagree with one another on the method of reproducing and legitimizing inequality.
While Bolas and Gintis hold a determinist view that students have no free will and accept indoctrination, their views fail to explain why students reject school's values. In contrast to that, Willis rejects the premise that school brainwashes students into passively accepting their fate. He combines Marxist and interactionist views that students can resist school and how this can lead to entry into the working class sector.
Critics argue that Willis'account of the lads paints them as working class heroes, disregarding their antisocial actions and sexist viewpoints. His study was based on a small sample size of 12 boys in one school, which cannot be generalized to other students in their experiences and attitudes. Critical modernists like Raymond Murrow and Carlos Torres were critical of Marxists for focusing on class first, which views class standing as the basis for inequality.
ignoring other kinds of inequality. Instead, Morrow and Torres view society as now more diverse, like postmodernists, where they see non-class inequalities, like ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation as equally important. They argue that sociologists must explain how education perpetuates and codifies all forms of inequality, not just class-based inequality. They must also explain how different types of inequality are interrelated.
Feminists like Madeline MacDonald, make similar points about Bullis and Gintis, ignoring the view that schools reproduce patriarchy and not just capitalism. Angela McRobbie also pointed out that females are absent from Willis's study. However, Willis's work has prompted increased research on how education produces and supports other types of inequalities. For example, Paul Connolly explored education's roles in creating ethnic and gender inequalities. Additional studies on relationships of other types of inequality have been conducted by Sowell, Evans, and Mack and Gale.
Summary. Marxists hold a conflict perspective, viewing education as supporting capitalism. Education is an ideological state apparatus that produces and substantiates class inequalities through the correspondence principle and the myth of meritocracy.
While students can resist this indoctrination, this counter-school culture can prepare them for unskilled jobs. Postmodernists indicated the economy has become post-Fordist. and education is more diverse and flexible.