1. Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach, 12e James M. Henslin
Chapter 17
Education

2. In hunting and gathering societies, there is no separate social institution called education. Instead, children learn from their parents and elders. This father in Thailand is teaching his son how to use a blowgun. The dart shot from the blowgun has been dipped in a poison that kills the prey.

3. In this 1921 photo of a one-room schoolhouse in Marey, West Virginia, you can see how public education had spread to even poor, rural areas of the United States. Notice the barefoot children.

4. This chart shows the incredible change in educational achievement
This chart shows the incredible change in educational achievement. As you can see, receiving a bachelor’s degree is now more than twice as common as completing high school used to be. Two of every three (68 percent) high school graduates enter college.

5. Community colleges have opened higher education to millions of students who would not otherwise have access to college because of cost or distance.

7. School is over—but not for this student
School is over—but not for this student. After the regular school day, hundreds of thousands in Japan attend 50,000 cram (juku) schools.

8. The poverty of the Least Industrialized Nations carries over to their educational system. These students in Zimbabwe are being taught outside because their school has run out of space.

9. The Functionalist Perspective: Providing Social Benefits
Teaching Knowledge and Skills
Cultural Transmission of Values
Social Integration
Gatekeeping (Social Placement)
Replacing Family Functions
Other Functions
The positive things that people intend their actions to accomplish are known as manifest functions. The positive consequences they did not intend are called latent functions. Let’s begins by looking at the functions of education.
Among the functions of education are the teaching of knowledge and skills, providing credentials, cultural transmission of values, social integration, gatekeeping, and mainstreaming. Functionalists also note that education has replaced some traditional family functions.
Industrialized nations have become credential societies, according to sociologist Randall Collins. By this, he meant that employers use diplomas and degrees as sorting devices to determine who is eligible for a job.
U.S. schools have added a manifest function: inclusion, or mainstreaming. This means that educators try to incorporate students with disabilities into regular school activities.
On average, the farther that people go in school, the longer they live.

11. Children with disabilities used to be sent to special schools
Children with disabilities used to be sent to special schools. In a process called mainstreaming or inclusion, they now attend regular schools. This photo was taken in Detroit, Michigan.

12. The Conflict Perspective: Perpetuating Social Inequality
The Hidden Curriculum: Reproducing the Social Class Structure
Tilting the Tests: Discrimination by IQ
Stacking the Deck: Unequal Funding
The Correspondence Principle
The Bottom Line: Family Background
The basic view of conflict theorists is that education reproduces the social class structure; that is, through such mechanisms as unequal funding and operating different schools for the elite and for the masses, education perpetuates a society’s basic social inequalities from one generation to the next.
Unlike functionalists, who look at the benefits of education, conflict theorists examine how the educational system reproduces the social class structure. By this, they mean that schools perpetuate the social divisions of society and help members of the elite maintain their dominance.
The term hidden curriculum refers to the attitudes, values, and unwritten rules of behavior that schools teach in addition to the formal curriculum. Examples are obedience to authority and conformity to mainstream norms. Conflict theorists stress that the hidden curriculum helps to perpetuate social inequalities.
Correspondence principle: This term means that a nation’s schools correspond to (or reflect) the characteristics of their society.

13. Homeschooling has come a long way
Homeschooling has come a long way. These children are performing in a musical at the annual Homeschool Theater Workshop in Lexington, Kentucky.

14. Stressing that education reproduces a country’s social class system, conflict theorists point out that the social classes attend separate schools. There they learn perspectives of the world that match their place in it. Shown here are students at a private school in Argentina. What do you think this school’s hidden curriculum is?

15. From your experiences in grade school, can you tell if or how your teachers unintentionally helped perpetuate social class divisions?

17. Of the students who scored the highest on tests, 90 percent of those from affluent homes went to college, but only half of the high scorers from low-income homes went to college. Of the least prepared—those who scored the lowest—26 percent from affluent homes went to college, while only 6 percent from poorer homes did so.

18. You can see that, compared with whites, African Americans and Latinos are less likely to complete high school and, for those who do, less likely to go to college.

19. From this table, you can see African Americans are the most likely to attend private colleges. This does not support the conflict perspective. You can also see that Latinos are the least likely to go to four-year colleges. This supports the conflict view. The primary exception that conflict theorists have a difficult time explaining is the success of Asian Americans.

20. The Symbolic Interactionist Perspective: Teacher Expectations
The Rist Research
The Rosenthal-Jacobson Experiment
How Do Teacher Expectations Work?
Symbolic interactionists focus on face-to-face interaction. In examining what occurs in the classroom, they have found that student performance tends to conform to teacher expectations, whether they are high or low.
Using participant observation research, Rist found that after only eight days in the classroom, a kindergarten teacher felt she knew the children’s abilities well enough to assign them to three separate worktables. Rist concluded that each child’s journey through school was determined by the eighth day of kindergarten!
Rosenthal and Jacobson demonstrated that regardless of their abilities, students who are expected to do better generally do better, and those who are expected to do poorly do poorly.
Using a stratified sample of students in a large school district in Texas, Farkas found that teacher expectations produce gender and racial–ethnic biases. On the gender level: When boys and girls have the same test scores, girls, on average, are given higher course grades. On the racial–ethnic level: Asian Americans who have the same test scores as the other groups average higher grades.

21. Problems in U.S. Education—And Their Solutions
Mediocrity
Raising Standards
Cheating
Violence
The major problems are mediocrity (low achievement as shown by SAT scores), grade inflation, social promotion, functional illiteracy, faked data reported by school administrators, and violence.
Grade inflation is so pervasive that 50 percent of all college freshmen have an overall high school grade point average of A. This is about twice what it was in 1980.
Easy grades and declining standards have been accompanied by social promotion, passing students from one grade to the next despite their failure to learn the basic materials. One result is functional illiteracy, high school graduates who have never mastered things they should have learned in grade school.
To restore high educational standards, we must expect more of both students and teachers. School administrators can be required to use a single reporting measure based on objective, verifiable data. Although we cannot prevent all school violence, for an effective learning environment, we must provide basic security for students and teachers.

22. You can see how fast and far the SAT scores dropped from the 1960s to 1980.

23. On average, students in Roman Catholic schools score higher on national tests than students in public schools. Is it because Roman Catholic schools have better students, or because they do better teaching? The text reports the sociological findings.

24. This chart highlights the abysmal job we are doing in this competition for talent. On the SATs, education majors score lower than average for both reading and math.

25. This frame from a home video shows Eric Harris (on the left) and Dylan Klebold (on the right) as they pretend that they are searching for victims. They put their desires into practice in the infamous Columbine High School shootings.

26. Despite the dramatic school shootings that make the screaming headlines, as you can see from Table 17.2, shooting deaths at schools are decreasing.

27. Technology and Education
Most Changes are Minor Adjustments to a Flawed System
Each is a Cosmetic Adjustment to the Details of a Flawed System
Most changes in education represent minor, even trivial, tinkering with an existing system. Distance learning, in contrast, indicates a major change in education, one that will transform the way students are educated and, likely, the content of their learning.

28. MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) are one way that technology is transforming education. The philosophy course taught by this professor at Duke University enrolled an amazing number of students.