How does education create and perpetuate social inequality? Support your answer with examples.
What will be an ideal response?
Answers will vary. From preschool to graduate school, conflict theorists maintain, education creates and perpetuates social inequality based on social class, race, and ethnicity. Schools are also gatekeepers that control and maintain the status quo.Conflict theorists maintain that education restricts mobility because of a hidden curriculum, credentialism, and privilege. Schools in low-income and working-class neighborhoods tend to stress obedience, following directions, and punctuality so that students can fill low-paid jobs (e.g., restaurants, nursing homes, and hospitals) that require these characteristics (Kozol, 2005). Schools in middle-class neighborhoods emphasize proper behavior and appearance, cooperation, conforming to rules, and deference to authority because many of these students will go to college and work in bureaucracies that require such attributes (Hedges, 2011). In contrast, selective schools encourage leadership, creativity, independence, and people skills-all prized characteristics in elite circles. In effect, then, the hidden curriculum reproduces the existing class structure and provides workers for jobs and occupations in the stratification hierarchy.
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Which of the following scenarios exemplifies Freud's theories?
A. A person spendsyears of scientific research studying hundreds of subjects in order to understand and cure mental illness. B. A young male's behavior is dismissed due to the argument that girls develop a strong sense of morality, while boys do not. C. A person attends psychotherapy to cure his mental illness. D. A person who suffers from mental illness is told that a head injury caused the condition. E. A young mother with post-partum depression is told that the best cure would be to have another baby.
Which of the following illustrates corporate capitalism?
A. Companies install a scrubber that would clean chemical pollutants from emissions rather than causing air pollution. B. Companies employ locals as employees to increase employment in the area rather than employing illegal immigrants at wages lower than the minimum wage. C. Companies use explosives and a handful of workers to dig rather than employing hundreds of workers to dig coal from underground. D. Companies use unadultered coal to generate electricity rather than mixing pure coal with charcoal to make the materials cheaper.
In Peek's study of Muslim Americans after 9/11, what was the relationship between young adults' embracement of a Muslim identity and their going off to college?
a. college was a time to learn about new religions and many Muslims rejected their Muslim identity during these years. b. they encountered so much prejudice and discrimination in college that they found themselves hanging out exclusively with other Muslims. c. college was a time when they re-discovered their Muslim roots and were more likely to seek out friends who were Muslims. d. none of the people who Peek interviewed attended a college with a Muslim student organization, so it was unlikely for them to meet others like themselves.
New biological technologies such as fetal DNA mapping
a. require blood and urine samples from both parents. b. make kinship of sperm donors more difficult to determine. c. can raise ethical issues with regard to abortion. d. are designed to cure genetic diseases prenatally.