Education as an Agent of Cultural Transmission

What's Cultural Transmission? The process of cultural practices being passed from one generation to the next The process of socialisation or inheriting norms, customs, traditions and ideologies via a shared set of rules and understanding An agent is the vehicle or carrier

Singleton (1974) defines culture as "The shared products of human learning", he sees culture as "Standards for deciding what is, standards for deciding what can be, standards for deciding how one feels about it, standards for deciding what to do about it, and standards for deciding how to go about doing it"

Transmission and Class If we think of culture as standards or rules - who makes these rules? A small, governing, leisured class who find it necessary to create and preserve the "high" cultural heritage and also to ensure its transmission to the next generation of that class (old school approach) Today?

Schools as Agents Traditional curriculum provides basis for moral education and appropriation of culture by the students The process of learning cultural knowledge operates as ideological carrier of social inequalities

Bourdieu finds that it is through socialisation and education that cultural ideas are believed, these in turn, play the role of structuring individual and group behaviour in ways that tend to reproduce existing class relations How might this process happen?

Unequal distribution of cultural capital among social classes in levels of education and patterns of cultural consumption. For instance, most university diplomas were held by individuals of upper or middle class origins and very few are held by children of working class (cultural Why was this? Is it still true today?

Habitus – Bourdieu Children learn taste through ‘habitus’ Middle class children are more likely to be taken to museums, encouraged to read literature etc

Western cultures = training to western traditions (anti socialist, pro democratic, pro economic, patriarchal, white centric) Old Russia = socialist economy, rejection of material goods, China = celebration of communist ideals, rejection of western waste, celebration of traditional morals and respect etc Old South Africa = reinforcement of racial inequalities

Summary Education uses ideology to control how people think and feel about certain issues, morals, concepts and beliefs It does this via socialisation or the process of normalising things through repetition and reinforcement But are we active or passive? Are we blank slates waiting to be pre-determined by society?

Activity In groups, define a variety of Agents of Cultural Transmission Pick one and think about how they may operate – what ideological processes do they use? Prepare a brief case study either supporting the theory or arguing against