Examining Education
Education is the process of teaching and learning. There are many ways for a person to be educated including; lectures, reading assignments, questions & answers, and discussions. Formal systems of education, instituted by societies usually take the form of schools where any of the established methods of teaching may take place. There are several perspectives to why a society will develop a formal education system. Functionalists, conflictionists, and symbolic interactionists each have their own separate views.
The key idea of the functionalist perspective is that society is made up of separate parts which support the system as a whole and that changes in one part of society cause changes to other parts of society. These changes are classified into manifest and latent functions. Manifest functions are the intended, or planned, changes, latent functions are the unintended, or unplanned, changes (Henslin, 2006).
Functionalists believe that future generations need to know the knowledge and skills of the previous generations. They also believe that a culture needs to pass its set of core values on to future generations. Schools were established to fulfill those needs and are an example of a manifest function of forwarding knowledge and skills. The latent function of schools is the passing of core values (CliffsNotes.com, 2008). An obvious example of a manifest function of schools is literacy; in order for people to function well in society and for a society to succeed, reading and writing are paramount. A not so obvious example of a latent function may be patriotism; children learn how their country is important and what it has contributed to the world.
The conflict perspective focuses on competition as the driving force in society. To that end, an education system created and run by the powerful will reinforce their own power base using a hidden curriculum, discrimination by IQ, and providing unequal funding to schools of the lower classes...
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