Key Quotations in Sociology

EDUCATION

The educational system helps integrate youth into the economic system, we 1 believe, through a structural correspondence between its social relations and those of production. The structure of social relations in education not only inures the student to the discipline of the workplace, but develops the types of personal demeanour, modes of self-presentation, self-image, and social-class identification which are the crucial ingredients of job adequacy. Specifically, the social relationships of education—the relationships between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and students, and students and their work—replicate the hierarchical division of labour.

The difficult thing to explain about how middle class kids get middle class 2 jobs is why others let them. The difficult thing to explain about how working class kids get working class jobs is why they let themselves.

Teachers themselves are very often unaware of the way they allocate their 3 time and it is not uncommon to ask teachers whether they give more attention to one sex than the other, and to have them vehemently protest that they do not and that they treat both sexes equally. But when their next lesson is taped it is often found that over two-thirds of their time was spent with the boys who comprised less than half of the class. Most teachers do not consciously want to discriminate against girls, they say they do want to treat the sexes fairly, but our society and education is so structured that ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ mean that males get more attention.

Two general types of code can be distinguished: elaborated and restricted. 4 They can be defined on a linguistic level, in terms of the probability of predicting for any one speaker which syntactic elements will be used to organize meaning across a representative range of speech. In the case of an elaborated code, the speaker will select from a relatively extensive range of alternatives, and the probability of predicting the organizing elements is considerably reduced. In the case of a restricted code the number of alternatives is often severely limited and the probability of predicting the elements is greatly increased…

Children socialized within the middle class and associated strata can be expected to possess both an elaborated and a restricted code, whilst children socialized within some sections of the working-class strata, particularly the lower working class, can be expected to be limited to a restricted code. If a child is to succeed as he progresses through school it

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