Using Material from Item a and Elsewhere Assess the View That the Education System Exists Mainly to Select and Prepare Young People for Their Future Work Roles.

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Using material from item A and elsewhere assess the view that the education system exists mainly to select and prepare young people for their future work roles. The education system is the social institution in which children are taught formal knowledge, which includes reading, writing and arithmetic, and also they are taught the norms, values and morals of society. The education system plays a vital role in wider society as it prepares young people and equips them with everything they need to become fully functioning members of wider society. One way to select and prepare pupils for their future work roles is by selecting and allocating pupils of education a role in society, as mention in item A: “it also selects and allocates them to their future work roles” this means that social inequality is justified because of the Hierarchal system in society – someone is on top as the head and someone has to be at the bottom as taking orders and obeying to the head. This ideology is said to be derived from having a society based on meritocratic principles where everyone has an equal opportunity that is provided to them in education and then in the workplace. Some sociologists would argue that, yes, the education system is mainly existent to select and prepare young people for their future work roles. Marxists see the state as by which the capitalist ruling class (bourgeoisie) maintain their dominant position and would mostly agree with the statement. Louis Althusser (1971) believes the education system is an important ideological state apparatus (an element by which the bourgeoisie can maintain their dominant position by controlling people’s ideas, values and beliefs). He argued that the education system’s two main functions are to reproduce class inequality by transmitting it from generation to generation and that education legitimates (justifies) class inequality by
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