SOC101Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Symbolic Interactionism, Credentialism And Educational Inflation, Cultural Capital
Document Summary
Education: a complete system of schools, from elementary to post graduate, is the prerequisite of industrial society and is found in all right societies. Consequently, national wealth and national education levels are strongly related: school systems carry out two tasks, homogenizing and sorting. Students are made similar by indoctrination into a common cultural system but are also steered into different social classes: mass education, once established, brings out nearly universal literacy and numeracy. Mass education makes large populations linguistically and culturally uniform, providing the basis for nationalism: functionalisms believe that education fosters meritocracy. Conflict theorists argue that the high cost of education favors the wealthy and that schools inevitably favor students whose parents are highly educated. However, men remain more likely to complete programs that lead to high pay. The education system is second in importance only to the family as a an agent. Three hundred years ago, only a small minority of people learner to read and.
