Education, Training and Youth Employment

Abstract

Education in advanced Western economies such as the UK can be conceived in various ways. Some focus on education’s emancipatory possibilities and its power to transform the lives of individuals and groups. For John Dewey (1966), the main functions of schooling can be summarized as providing social stability and integration; promoting moral and personal fulfilment; and offering individuals the opportunity to rise above the social circumstances into which they were born. However, whilst according to Émile Durkheim (1903/1956, p.123) education is a systematic process of socialization which aims, up to a point, to produce a common social and cultural heritage, it also aims to differentiate and select according to the social division of labour. This functionalist critique has been taken much further, especially from Marxist, feminist and critical race theory perspectives, which see education in terms of conflict and domination rather than social consensus. Pierre Bourdieu has argued that ‘It is probably cultural inertia which still makes us see education in terms of the ideology of the school as a liberating force’ (Bourdieu 1974, p.32). More recently, critical race theorists have focused on how education is implicated in the production and reproduction of racial inequality (Gillborn 2008). According to such critiques, the structure and content of education reflects the power and dominance of certain groups. The value society places on certain forms of knowledge reflects prevailing forms of inequality, and the way that education systems are structured and organized plays a significant role in perpetuating patterns of advantage and disadvantage.