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How Education Shapes Life Chances

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Education in the largest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another. In sociology we have various schools of thoughts or theories and each of these have their own view on the impact of sociology on “life chances” Functionalist one of the “theories” of sociology are mainly concerned with the function of education to society and to seek solution to the following questions, “what is the relevance of education to the social system and “what are the relationship between education and economic system”.
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Marxists also strongly believe that “the hidden curriculum” is being used too strongly by schools. By teaching pupils to follow instructions (e.g. “sir” and “miss” and folding their arms) they are preparing them for the “exploitation” during work of when being asked to do something and then automatically doing it. This means that workers could be “used” in the process and then fined out about the capitalist system that we live in the hard way. While Marxists do share many ideas of functionalists e.g. the fact that education prepares us for out acceptance of the values of society they also see how the education system is alienating children. Functionalists, on the other hand, seem unable to see this and believe that the education system can only do well to children by teaching them norms and values. The interactionist theory believes that the teacher is the most significant tool to pupil’s educational achievement. It implies that teaches assess pupils not by ability or intelligence, but by traits that relates to class, gender and ethnicity, such as attitude, appearance and behavior. According to an internationalist the way pupils are influenced by teachers include: labeling-involves two people in an interaction with one have the power to label stick on the other. For example when teacher tag students as “smart and bright” or as

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