What important insights about schooling do we gain from structural-functional analysis, symbolic-interaction analysis, social-conflict analysis, and feminist analysis?
What can you learn from each approach that helps you see ways to improve education in the United States?
What is an Ideal response?
• Structural-functional theory: Schooling performs numerous functions, including transmitting knowledge and skills needed for work, social placement based on individual talents and interests, and uniting the population through common values and beliefs. Also has latent functions such as providing child-care for working parents.
• Symbolic-interaction theory: The meanings and understandings people construct in everyday social interactions. The experience of schooling is different for every individual. How a school labels a particular child is likely to shape that child's experience of schooling and that child's personal identity.
• Social-conflict theory: Schooling linked to social inequality. Highlights how schooling reflects existing divisions in society and patterns of social inequality. And helps perpetuate this inequality by passing these differences from one generation to the next.
• Feminist Theory: Schooling is a system of preparing young people to take on adult responsibilities. To the extent that society defines men and women as different types of people, the extent and content of schooling for the two sexes will differ. Schooling guides the learning and personal development of young people according to broad patterns of gender stratification.
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