SOCI 201

INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY

- Dr. Gbenga Adejare -

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 Education
__________________________________________

Tools, Processes and Politics

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 “A little learning
is a dangerous
thing...”
― Alexander Pope

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 But…

• What should be known?

• How should we know?
• Where should know from?
• Whose is the knowledge?
• When is the right time to know?
• Why should we know otherwise?
• …and the questions go on and on!

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 Introduction: Education as a Social Institution

• Influence: it influences socialization, status formation, social

order and economic productivity
• Categorization: educational creates an enduring set of ideas
about education and how it can be used to accomplish that are
deemed important to society
• Tool: education serves as a powerful instrument for promoting
ideas among impressionable youth, provide skills, modify
behaviours, social interaction and conflict are negotiated
• Schools determine children’s potential social acceptability and
social mobility

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 The Rise of Public Education in Canada

• Before the Industrial Revolution, there was little interest in

educating the masses
• The Industrial Revolution demanded a more disciplined,
trainable, and literate workforce
• Consequently, industrialization and public education became
interdependent

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 The Rise of Public Education in Canada cont’d

• As early as 1846, education was seen as a way of achieving

economic modernization
• Education reformer Egerton Ryerson promoted the idea of a
school system that would be universal, free, and compulsory
• Education produce social order and ensure social control by
subverting potential social conflict among immigrants (Irish
labours)
• Education as tool of assimilation

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 The Rise of Public Education in Canada cont’d

• Schecter (1977) argued that compulsory, state-run public

education is based on centralization and uniformity
• Legitimizes and supports social inequality
• Instrument of social control of the emerging working class
• Provincial school boards established to act as executive bodies
to set up and maintain large systems of “normal schools”
• Enforced codes of discipline
• Enacted hierarchical authority relations

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 The Rise of Public Education in Canada cont’d
• Compulsory education is used as an instrument social
subordination
• Education ranks and sorts children to the detriment of those
considered inferior
• Malacrida (2015) identifies three ways in which children of
different intellectual abilities were sorted out of the
mainstream:
• Truancy laws, punishing those who did not come to class
• Tests and curriculums that standardize expectations of educational
success
• “Health” testing conducted via medical and psychological examinations

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 Post-war Expansion and the Human Capital Thesis

• Economic expansion after WWII required an increasingly

educated workforce
• Expansion of post-secondary education institution
• Human capital thesis: Industrial societies invest in schools to
enhance the knowledge and skills of their workers
• Used to justify low income among marginalized groups, which is
attributed to low human capital
• Since the 1970s, decreases in the taxes charged to
corporations have contributed to cuts in governmental funding
for postsecondary institutions

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 Models of Public Education in Canada

• The Assimilation Model

• Multicultural Education
• Anti-racism and Anti-oppression Education

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 The Assimilation Model

• Education in Canada has historically been based on a

monocultural model that emphasizes assimilation into the
dominant culture
• English Canada was perceived as a white Protestant nation and
newcomers were expected to assimilate to fit in
• Example: focus on English literature
• This model fails to recognize racial bias and discrimination
inside and outside the school system

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 Multicultural Education

• Canada’s federal government implemented its official policy of

multiculturalism in 1971
• Preserve and promote cultural diversity
• Remove the barriers that denied certain groups full participation within
Canadian society
• Study and celebration of lifestyles, traditions, and histories of
diverse cultures

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 Multicultural Education, cont’d
• Three fundamental assumptions of multicultural education
1. Learning about one’s culture would improve educational achievement. (E.g., Indigenous
Knowledge System)
2. Learning about one’s culture would promote equality of opportunity
3. Learning about other cultures would reduce prejudice and discrimination
• Classroom focus tended to favour a museum approach that overlooked the
complexity and vitality of these different cultures
• E.g., exotic aspect of different cultures - food, festivals, and folklore

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 The Hidden Curriculum – Socialization Agency

• Schools do a lot more than just teach students the so-called A-B-Cs and 1-
2-3s.
• Whether it’s learning about discipline, being reminded of the authority of teachers,
hierarchies, or ideals, schooling does a lot more than equipping students with skills
and abilities.
• Sociologists refer to this as the hidden curriculum, or the lessons about
expectations for behaviour that tend to be more informal or unwritten.
• It consists of the unstated or unofficial goals of the education system
• The hidden curriculum is delivered through socialization and is designed to instruct
on shared norms and values.

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 The Hidden Curriculum – Socialization Agency cont’d

• Those who regard the hidden curriculum as positive are generally echoing the
themes from structural functionalists.
• Conflict theorists look at the hidden curriculum as one of the mechanisms for
reproducing social class.
• Education system reproduces inequality.
• Conflict sociologist might argue that the hidden curriculum is performing a
latent dysfunction
• Example: reproduces the class system by hindering social mobility
• Examples: the value of work, the need to respect authority, the efficient use of one’s
time

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 The Hidden Curriculum – Socialization Agency cont’d

• Among the most important sociological contributions from this perspective

is the correspondence principle.
• The argument that the norms and values instilled in school correspond to the norms
and values expected of individuals in a capitalist society.
• A capitalist society needs workers who will be compliant, deferential to their
superiors, perform their tasks effectively, and be motivated to compete with
their co-workers.
• Elite boarding schools reproduce power and privilege through a robust
social network.

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 The Hidden Curriculum – Deprivation

Lack cultural capital

Lack of social Capital
Parenting: status -
Material factor – poor level education,
diet, sickness, work Underachievement
paradox social class, etc
orientation

Teacher evaluations –
stereotyping, labelling, and Language: use of restricted
the self-fulfilling prophecy code (meant for exploitation
or dominance

Subcultures

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 Inclusive Education – Critical Pedagogy

• Decolonizing knowledge through

“Education makes engaging in multiple ways of
people easy to lead, knowing and being
but difficult to drive;
easy to govern, but • Centering the benefit of
impossible to enslave” transformative learning
-Henry Brougham (1778-
1868) • Sociological imagination
• Envisioning a better world
 Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Education
This approach is about decolonizing education and promoting
inclusivity. It...
• Seeks to expose and eliminate the institutional and individual
barriers to equity
• It is intended to create a classroom environment where…
• Stereotypes and racist ideas can be exposed
• Sources of information can be critically examined
• Alternative and missing information can be provided
• Students can become equipped to look critically at the accuracy of the
information they receive
• The reasons for the continued unequal social status of different group can
be explored
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 Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Education cont’d
• Emerged in the 1980s
• Recognizes that racial inequality exists, and that racism is
systemic in Canada
• Seeks to change institutional policies and practices
• Seeks to change individual attitudes and behaviour reproducing
inequalities

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 Discipline, Punishment, and Evaluation

• Discipline is a key part of the hidden curriculum

• Refers to controlled behaviour, not to the punishment administered for,
say, speaking out of turn or passing notes in class
• Common at all levels of education is the external and internal
“routinization” of the individual
• Punishment is enacted if the rules are not followed
• Example, “time-out,” trip to the principal’s office, detention

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 Discipline, Punishment, and Evaluation, cont’d

• Public education creates what Michel Foucault termed the docile

body
• Representing an individual that has been conditioned, through a specific set
of procedures and practices, to behave precisely the way administrators want
it to
• Typically, docile bodies are conditioned through three forms of disciplinary
control:
1. Hierarchical observation
• People are controlled through observation and surveillance
2. Normalizing judgment
• Individuals are judged on how their actions rank when compared with the
performance of others
3. The examination.
• A normalizing gaze [that] establishes over individuals a visibility through which
one differentiates them and judges them

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 Discipline, Punishment, and Evaluation, cont’d

• Studies have shown that negative stereotypes in education breed

stereotype threat
• The idea that negative stereotypes about a group to which an individual
belongs will have negative impacts on their academic performance.
• Even when the expectation is not directed explicitly to an individual
student, negative outcome is still possible
• Their membership in a group acts as a threat.
• The response to the negative stereotype expectation is to
underperform ( – self-fulfilling prophesy).

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 Cultural Reproduction Theory
• Cultural reproduction theory involves the legitimization of
inequality
• Jeannie Oakes and the Hidden Curriculum of Tracking
• Oakes (2005) defined tracking as “the process whereby students are
divided into categories so that they can be assigned in groups to
various kinds of classes”
• Classes and students are ranked according to different levels of
aptitude and projected outcomes
• Overrepresentation of lower-class and non-white students does not
reflect student aptitude, but cultural biases of tests and educators
• Inferior quality of lower-track education came partly from the reduced
expectations for students in the lower track

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 Cultural Reproduction Theory, cont’d
• An important element of cultural reproduction is the reproduction of social
structure
• Socioeconomic status (SES) is largely impacts on individual’s educational
achievement
• Where educational attainment refers to the benchmarks of academic performance,
including such things as reading level, grade point average, and test score.
• Researchers document jobs, incomes, and educational attainments so as
determine SES of households.
• These factors invariably influence educational outcomes.
• It is mostly about the resources that a family can or cannot provide for their child’s
education.

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 Cultural Reproduction in Anyon’ s Five Schools
• Jean Anyon (1980), in a research on Social Class and the
Hidden Curriculum of Work, studied five schools in New Jersey
and came up with the following categorization of schools:
1. Working-class schools
2. Semi-skilled or unskilled jobs
3. Middle-class schools
4. Affluent professional schools
5. Executive elite schools

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 Cultural Reproduction in Anyon’ s Five Schools cont’d
❑Working-class schools

• Students’ fathers held semi-skilled or unskilled jobs; some were

unemployed
• Schoolwork primarily entailed:
• Following the steps of a procedure
• Mechanical adherence to rules
• Very little decision making or choice

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 Cultural Reproduction in Anyon’ s Five Schools cont’d
❑Middle-Class Schools

• Students’ parents worked in skilled, well-paid trades,

professional jobs or owned small businesses
• Schoolwork focused on “getting the right answers”
• Follow directions to get right answers, but required
some choice and decision making
• Answers are found in books and by asking the
teacher

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 Cultural Reproduction in Anyon’ s Five Schools cont’d

❑Affluent Professional Schools

• Students’ parents were employed as corporate lawyers, engineers,

executives
• The schoolwork entailed:
• Creative activity carried out independently
• Students are continually asked to express and apply ideas and concepts
• Work involves individual thought, expressiveness, expansion, illustration, and
choice of method
• Work should show individuality

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 Cultural Reproduction in Anyon’ s Five Schools cont’d
❑Executive elite schools

• Students’ fathers held jobs as vice-presidents or

presidents of major corporations
• Work required:
• Developing one’s analytical intellectual powers
• Reasoning through a problem, producing intellectual
products that are both logically sound and of top academic
quality
• Conceptualizing rules and applying those rules to solving a
problem
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 Issues in Indigenous and Minority Education
• The Politics of Representation in Textbooks
• Textbooks form an important and influential part of education
• Textbook representations
• Indigenous and other minority groups are underrepresented in Canadian textbooks
• Indigenous writers were not represented as a significant source of information on their
own people
• Foucault (1980) uses the term disqualified knowledges
• Knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task

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 Issues in Indigenous and Minority Education, cont’d

• Credentialism: practice of valuing credentials (degrees, diplomas,

certificates) over actual knowledge and ability in the hiring and
promotion of staff
• In Indigenous and minority communities, elders are essential to
children’s education
• Qualification comes from recognition and valuing of their knowledge,
not paper credentials
• Teachers coming from non-Indigenous communities are not familiar
with the structure of the community. E.g. The system of respect

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 Issues in Indigenous Education, cont’d
• Best Practices in British Columbia
• Five best practices to ensure Indigenous students’ success
1. Collaboration between school district personnel and local Indigenous
communities
2. Commitment by administrators and teachers to incorporating
Indigenous content into the curriculum
3. Creation of influential positions dedicated to Indigenous education
4. Relationship-building between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
communities in the district
5. Willingness of school district authorities to share responsibility for
making decisions with Indigenous communities

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 Issues in Post-Secondary Education

• Long-Term Adjunct Instructors: An Educational Underclass

• Online Teaching
• McJobs
• Plagiarism

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 Long-Term Adjunct Instructors

• The number of low paid, long-term adjunct professors (also

sessional, contract, part-time) has been growing due to
economic and social factors
• Increasing number of post-secondary students
• Reduction of government investment in post-secondary education
• Increasing levels of private corporate funding
• Rising influence of corporate culture that regards education as a
business

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 Long-Term Adjunct Instructors, cont’d

• Major challenges
• High levels of job competition
• Low pay
• Poor work conditions
• Strained relationships with full-time faculty
• Dependence on positive student evaluations

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 A Critical Sociological Approach to Online Teaching
• Online teaching is driven by
• Technological improvements
• Desire to make education more accessible
• Cuts to post-secondary education funding
• Private organization specializing in delivering educational packages over the
internet
• Major challenges
• The main motivation is political and financial
• Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s introduction of the idea of mandatory online high school
courses in 2019 is a case in point
• Access without mobility
• Reproduces the class system while seeming to improve the lot of more marginalized
social groups

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 A Critical Sociological Approach to Online Teaching cont’d

• Alienation
• Separation between people and the work they are paid to do due
to administrative monitoring and control
• Instructors become disconnected from their intellectual property
• Significant drop-out rates
• Instrumental education relying on limited, narrowly
defined tasks
• Undermines critical education, which involves analysis of
ideas and discussion
• One-directional information flow controlled by the
curriculum
• Rather than a cyclical flow
• Class reproduction through a two-tiered system

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 Do You Want Fries with that Degree?
• McJobs
• Underemployment
• Involuntary part-time work for people seeking full-time employment
• Low-wage, low-skill employment for people with valuable skills,
experience, or academic credentials
• Causes
• The rate of unemployment
• Regional disparities (lack of employment opportunities and resources like
training and childcare in economically depressed communities)
• Discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, disability, or lack of appropriate
credentials

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 Do You Want Fries with that Degree, cont’d

• McJobs
• During the 1990s, universities produced 1.2 million graduates,
but only 600,000 jobs required university-level credentials
• If job creation remains the same as in the 1990s, several
hundred thousand graduates each year will be pursuing fewer
than 100,000 job openings

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 The Sociology of Plagiarism

• Carol Thompson (2006) defines plagiarism is the act of copying

another person’s work or of piecing together work from
several sources into an academic pastiche
• Passing off someone else’s ideas or work as your own

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 The Sociology of Plagiarism cont’d
• Factors that account for the increase in plagiarism
• Role models
• Influence of people such as professors, school administers, famous
writers, academics, and parents
• Advise students not to plagiarize, but indulge in plagiarism themselves
• Plagiarism as free enterprise
• Essay industry
• Graduate students who sell their writing services
• Companies that sell services to catch plagiarizers
• Social distance
• Students who know their professors are less likely to plagiarize

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 Conclusion: Cultures of Education

• Increasing corporate nature of post-secondary institutions

• Students are viewed as customers and might feel entitled to certain outcomes
• Group versus individual model
• Competition and inequality perpetuate alienation in educational
system
• Western culture emphasizes putting what you say “in your own
words”
• In other cultures, “repeating the words of the master” might be valued, which can
disadvantage international students
• Inclusive education is key!

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