Social Class and Quality of Education Essay

Social class plays a big role in educational opportunity in the United States. It is obvious that people in working class receive lower education system and opportunities than people in middle and upper classes. People in working class also have harder times in economic, social and occupational circumstances than middle and upper classes. Social class affects educational opportunity in many ways such as environment, neighborhood, type of education systems and parental support.

The Vallance Journal by Elizabeth Vallance is about the hidden curriculum of public schooling and how it has grown to what it is today and how it was created throughout the centuries. Schooling was initially created as a form of social control and a place to teach family values. The initial goals of the hidden curriculum are identified as the inculcation of values, political socialization, training in obedience and docility. Schooling would soon replace family and tradition. Education was considered a “remedy”. Also an important aspect is “the hidden curriculum became hidden only when school people were satisfied that it was working” (pg 78). Hidden Curriculum can be known as student teacher interaction unit, classroom socialization, maintenance of class structure.

The View that Schools and What Happens Within Them are the Main Causes of Social Class Difference in Educational Achievement

People of higher socioeconomic status are more likely to be politically active because there better educated than lower status people. Also depending on their occupation, higher socioeconomic people who are professional workers will be more politically active than unemployed, lower status people. Higher socioeconomic people tend to vote more on the basis of Issues because they are well informed about what’s going on, they know how to influence the system, they have a better understanding of how the system works and they know why participating in politics is important. They also have time to possess the resources and time to be politically active.

Hidden Curriculum and Processes Within Schools Produce Inequalities Between Children of Different Social Classes Through many different researches, it has been shown that working class students are underachieving compared to that of their middle class peers. Middle class pupils are obtaining better grades, and more of them are staying on in education past the compulsory age. The difference that is noticeable is that they are from different social class backgrounds, and therefore they are socialised differently. In order to find out more about this, we need to discuss the reasons for differences between the ways in which the different social classes are taught in schools.

Social Class and Education (Sime & Getty, 1939) Objectives ● To be aware that class can have an influence on school attainment ● To identify some of the issues regarding social class and education ● To recognize that traditional patterns of class attainment are difficult to change The effects of social class on educational attainment ● There is a clear relationship between poverty and children’s failure in school (Desfourges & Abouchaar, 2003). • One in four children in the UK grows up in poverty • Children from poor backgrounds are half as likely to get five good GCSEs (General Certificates in Secondary Education) • Children from poor are less likely to go onto higher education • White working-class pupils are among the lowest performers in

Research shows that socioeconomic status is associated with a wide array of health, cognitive, behavioral, and socioemotional outcomes. A person with a low socioeconomic status must often face challenges that create significant stress in their lives, with effects that begin prior to birth and continue into adulthood.

Throughout history, the use of class in a negative light was not an unfamiliar situation, but using class in a positive light was not so much either. This use of class in order to better one race and not the other was prominent, and that is what the readings we have discussed bring to the light. Eric Lott, Ronald Takaki, and Evelyn Nakano Glenn focus on exactly what social class means to being white and black and how that was addressed within certain practices of either laws or labor. There was a, what you would call, “terrible transformation” between citizenship and labor itself. Indentured servitude quickly changed to slavery in their transformation to a better labor system; which, thus, made that social class system even more skewed.

The neo-Weberian class analysis explains the interconnections defined by the employment relations in labour and production markets, and the processes through which individuals are placed among these social locations over time, and how their life chances result in their class position. According to Gidden (1973, 130-1) life chances can be explained as “the chances an individual has for sharing in the social created economic or cultural ‘goods’ that typically exist in any given society,’ or more simply, the chances of gaining access to scarce and valued outcomes that an individual has.

Sloan, R. P., Huang, M. H., Sidney, S., Liu, K., Williams, O. D., & Seeman, T. (2005).

According to Manza, J. (2013) “One major function of schooling is socializing young people into the habits, attitudes, and practices of contributing members of a community, religion, or nation.” (p. 416). This process of socialization is what sociologists call the hidden curriculum. Education is where, as children we are taught natural behaviors, such as, raising your hand to ask a question, to stand in a straight line, and learn to put things away when instructed. In socialization, in order to grow as individuals we need to learn different attitudes and values In order to be productive people in society.

The education system has been a controversial issue among educators. Requirements of school do not let student choose what they want to study for their future. It’s a big issue to force student study specific curriculums, which don’t help them improve, and what they like to create something. Educators choose a general system for education to all students which based on general knowledge. Intelligent or genius students have to be in that system of education, which doesn’t let them improve their creativity. Educators attempt to change that system to make it better, but their changing was not that great to be an example for the world. Also, did that change qualify education system to compete other systems or not? In some examples and

The social conditions that are responsible for diabetes or diabetes-related death in East Harlem community are class and ethnicity (Cockerham). Class relates to the order of the society that divided individuals into sets based on their social and economic status. Socioeconomic status is a social condition that has allowed some of the residents to give into bad habits that bring about the disease. The residents of East Harlem are low-income earners and are economically disadvantaged and because of this, they lack access to better nutrition (Cockerham ). The residents are more concerned about how to get jobs and pay their rent thus focus on healthy practices disappears. They do not consider the impact of unhealthy lifestyles and push it to another day. They live in poverty making them lead a negative health lifestyle, practice bad eating habits, and not properly exercise (Cockerham). The shops and businesses available also do not have healthy foods for the residents to purchase. The negative lifestyle allows the residents to indulge in high sugar and high-fat foods that trigger diseases. The children also grow up in that environment immersing themselves in the culture that encourages fast foods, lack of adequate opportunity to exercise, the television advertisement that encourages consumption of junk foods (Cockerham ). This makes them susceptible to diabetes.

Socioeconomic status is the social class of an individual or group. It is often measured as a combination of education, income and occupation. Socioeconomic status can affect an individual’s quality of life attributes, opportunities and privileges. Finn outlines different socioeconomic levels that exist in schools while diving into the educational practices that are common for each school. These types of schools include executive elite, affluent professional, middle class, and working class schools. Executive elite schools had students whose family were top corporate executives in multinational corporations or Wall Street. Affluent professional schools had students whose family were doctors, TV and advertising executives and other highly paid professionals. Middle class schools had students whose family were a mixture of highly skilled, well paid blue and white collar workers that included teachers. Working class schools had students whose family were blue collar workers and unemployed.

Historically and Culturally within Australia, education has been viewed as a right, as previously discussed. Although Australia perpetrates the myth of an egalitarian society, it has been cultivated to conceal the unequal life chances of disadvantaged individuals (Jamrozik, 2009). This is central to the political and cultural differences/conflicts and the bases of knowledge in which our education system is being built upon. Within schools certain students are being labelled