Outline and assess Marxist explanations of the role of education in society (50):
Marxists believe that education is an important part of the superstructure of society, it is there to serve the needs of the economic base which contains everything to do with production in society. Marxists also state that education performs two main functions in a capitalist society, one is that it reproduces the inequalities and social relations of production of a capitalist society and the other is that it serves to legitimate these inequalities through the myth of meritocracy. A criticism of this comes from Althusser (1971) who is a Neo-Marxist, they disagree that the main function of education is to reproduce inequalities and to justify them, they believe that education’s main function is transmit common values and argue that it is the Ideological State Apparatus that legitimates and serves these inequalities. Marxists also believe that education reproduces the conditions needed for capitalism to flourish without having to use some force, which would then expose it as oppressive. They assert that instead, ideology gets the same results which exerts its influence subconsciously, this is apparently done through the hidden curriculum. The hidden curriculum is basically what students pick up and learn throughout their time in school, it is not formally taught to them. They learn things like; hierarchy, conformity and status. This makes them much more aware of what society is like outside of school. A criticism of this is that Marxists very much just focus on the inequalities relating to class inequalities, they tend to have much less of a focus on inequalities relating to gender and ethnicity. Marxists like Bourdieu have called the ways in which the working class are tricked into accepting their failures and their limited social mobility in comparison to middle class or upper class