Using the Source and Your Wider Sociological Knowledge, Explain How Schools Are Agencies of Social Control (8)

Using the source and your wider sociological knowledge, explain how schools are agencies of social control (8)

Social control is the concept sociologists use to discuss the relationship between the individual and society. This refers to the way in which society shapes and determines the norms and values of the individual in society.

Education is fundamental to our lives and personal development and growth. By the age of 16, an individual that has been born and bred in Britain has spent approximately 15,000 hours in a classroom. This is because in the UK from the ages of 4-16 formal education is compulsory. Other factors such as consequences and career/job focus also are significant. There are 3 stages to our growth and development; impressionable years, informative years and the critical years and majority of that time is spent in school.

Schools reinforce social control by socialising students into behaving in socially acceptable ways. Students are taught the restrictions of acceptable behaviour. Teachers reinforce the capitalistic ideology to be submissive to authority and treat it as a norm to do as you are told. To support this, Bowles and Gintis (1976) argue from a Marxist perspective that schools pass on the norms and values of the ruling class and schools teach conformity, obedience and deference to authority through the informal curriculum. Similarly Althusser (Marxist) argues that schools are an Ideological state approach; schools are instruments of control and brainwashing.

Feminists argue that schools reinforce gender role socialisation. This can be seen through the subject choice divide of females dominating the social sciences and males dominating the natural sciences. Skelton (2002) studied how schools maintain gender stereotypes of boys and girls behaviour learned at home through teacher expectations.