Schools and Society

A Sociological Approach to Education

Jeanne H. Ballantine, Joan Z. Spade, Jenny Marie Stuber

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781544302386
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The authors are proud sponsors of the 2020 SAGE Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award —enabling graduate students and early career faculty to attend the annual ASA pre-conference teaching and learning workshop.

This comprehensive anthology features classical readings on the sociology of education, as well as current, original essays by notable contemporary scholars. Assigned as a main text or a supplement, this fully updated Sixth Edition uses the open systems approach to provide readers with a framework for understanding and analyzing the book's range of topics. Jeanne H. Ballantine, Joan Z. Spade, and new co-editor Jenny M. Stuber, all experienced researchers and instructors in this subject, have chosen articles that are highly readable, and that represent the field's major theoretical perspectives, methods, and issues.

The Sixth Edition includes twenty new selections and five revisions of original readings and features new perspectives on some of the most contested issues in the field today, such as school funding, gender issues in schools, parent and neighborhood influences on learning, growing inequality in schools, and charter schools.

Chapter 1 What Is Sociology of Education?: Theoretical Perspectives

A whole new perspective on schools and education lies in the study of sociology of education. How sociologists understand education can contribute to informed decision making and change in educational institutions. Sociologists of education focus on interactions between people, structures that provide recurring organizations, and processes that bring the structures such as schools alive through teaching, learning, and communicating. As one of the major structural parts, or institutions, in society, education is a topic of interest to many sociologists. Some work in university departments teaching sociology or education, others work in government agencies, and still others do research and advise school administrators. Whatever their role, sociologists of education provide valuable insights into the interactions, structures, and processes of educational systems. Sociologists of education examine many parts of educational systems, from interactions, classroom dynamics, and peer groups to school organizations and national and international systems of education.

Consider some of the following questions of interest to sociologists of education: What classroom and school settings are best for learning? How do peers affect children’s achievement and ambitions? What classroom structures are most effective for children from different backgrounds? How do schools reflect the neighborhoods in which they are located? Does education “reproduce” the social class of students, and what effect does this have on children’s futures? What is the relationship between education, religion, and political systems? How does access to technology affect students’ learning and preparation for the future? How do nations compare on international educational tests? Is there a global curriculum? These are just a sampling of the many questions that make up the broad mandate for sociology of education, and it is a fascinating one. Sociologists place the study of education in a larger framework of interconnected institutions found in every society, including family, religion, politics, economics, and health, in addition to education. In this chapter, we examine the basic building blocks for a sociological inquiry into education and the theories that are used to frame ways of thinking about education in society (Ballantine, Hammack, and Stuber, 2017).

With a focus on studying people in groups, sociologists study a range of topics about educational systems. Chapters in this book focus on how sociologists study schools; the environment surrounding schools; the organization of schools and education; the roles people play in schools (teachers, students, administrators, and others); what we teach in schools; processes that take place in schools, including those that result in unequal outcomes for students; how different racial/ethnic groups, genders, and social class backgrounds of students can affect educational outcomes; the system of higher education; national and international comparisons of learning and achievement in different regions and countries; and educational reform. No other discipline has the broad approach and understanding provided by sociology of education.

Theories

Sociologists of education start with perspectives or theories that provide a framework to search for knowledge about education systems. Theories are attempts to explain and predict patterns and practices between individuals and in social systems—in this case, educational systems. Theories are carefully structured explanations or arguments that are applied to real-life situations. Since theories are not descriptions of what is happening in schools but only carefully thought-out explanations of why things happen, we can apply more than one theory to explain educational phenomena. An understanding of several theoretical approaches gives us different ways of thinking about educational systems. Theories guide research and policy formation in the sociology of education and provide logical explanations for why things happen as they do, helping to explain, predict, and generalize about issues related to schools. It is from the theories and the resulting research that sociologists of education come to understand educational systems. This chapter provides an overview of sociological theories as they are related to sociology of education, followed by classical and contemporary readings on the major theories. These theories also appear in readings throughout the book.

Following the open systems model discussed in the Introduction enables us to visualize the school system and its relationships with other organizations in its social context, or environment. By visualizing the dynamics inside a school, we can use theories to explain various situations within schools, such as the roles individuals play in schools and interactions between administrators, teachers, students, and other staff; equal opportunity within individual school organizations; social class dynamics as played out between peers in schools; formal and informal dynamics within schools; and the organization of school systems.

What You Will Find in Chapter 1

The purpose of the first chapter is to introduce you to the sociology of education through some key perspectives and theories in the field. The first reading discusses the relationship between sociology and education, why it is useful to study the sociology of education, who has a stake in educational systems and why they are likely interested in the field, and questions asked by sociologists of education. The second reading, by the book’s editors Jeanne Ballantine and Joan Spade, outlines early theories in sociology of education and how they have influenced contemporary theories and theorists. This provides an introduction to the remaining readings, which include original works in various theories of sociology of education.

Current sociological theories have a long history in sociological thought, flowing from the early works of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx. The excerpts included in this chapter build upon their early ideas in attempting to understand the social world from the perspective of the “new” discipline of sociology in the early 1800s. Durkheim’s study of the impact of the social system on maintaining order in society is considered the basis for functional theory.

The third reading provides a classical excerpt from Émile Durkheim, generally considered to be the first sociologist to write extensively about education. As a French professor of pedagogy at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, he used sociology to study education, a field in which he wrote and lectured for much of his career, until his death in 1917. Durkheim defined the field of sociology of education and contributed to its early content. He was particularly concerned with the functions or purposes of education for society, the relationship between education and social change, the role of education in preparing young people to adhere to societal norms, and the social system that develops in classrooms and schools. In the reading in this chapter, Durkheim discusses the role that schools play in socializing the young. Moral Education, the focus of Durkheim’s excerpt here, and his other works in sociology of education helped lay the foundation for more recent functional theorists. Functions are at the root of discussions of education; you will see them reflected in readings throughout the book. Sociologists using the functional perspective see the survival of society at stake—if a society fails to train its members in the skills and knowledge necessary for perpetuating that society, order and social control will be compromised. Durkheim and other functionalists were concerned with how educational systems work in conjunction with other parts of society to create a smooth-running social system.

Historically, the second major theoretical perspective to develop was conflict theory. It became a dominant theory in response to functional theory’s focus on the need to preserve stability in society, sometimes at a cost to disadvantaged groups in society. Conflict theorists ask how schools contribute to unequal educational outcomes and distribution of people in stratification systems (such as social classes). A major issue for sociologists of education in the conflict tradition is the role education plays in maintaining the prestige, power, and economic and social position of the dominant groups in society. They contend that more powerful members of society maintain the most powerful positions in society, and the less powerful groups (often women, disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups, and lower social classes) are “allocated” to lower ranks.

Karl Marx and Max Weber set the stage for contemporary conflict theories, and the reading in this chapter by Randall Collins (1971) provides an example of this perspective applied to education. Classical conflict theorists argue that those who dominate capitalist economic systems also control other institutions in society, such as education. Capitalists use these institutions to maintain power and enhance their own profits, although not without resistance by some students and community groups. Collins also provides an overview of...