Sociological Imagination: How to Gain Wisdom about the Society in which We All Participate and for Whose Future We Are All Responsible (part 45)

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.

Nadine Gordimer

The earliest social scientists were deeply interested in understanding the full importance of modern economic institutions. In fact, since the eighteenth century almost all attempts to understand large-scale social change have dealt with the question of how economic institutions operate. But the age-old effort to understand economic institutions has not been merely an academic exercise. The fate of societies throughout the world has been and continues to be strongly influenced by theories about how economic institutions operate, or fail to do so, in nation-states with different types of political institutions. The major economic ideologies thus are also political ideologies, and economics is often called political economics (Heilbroner, 1995, Putting Economics in Its Place. Social Research, 62, 883-898). In this post we review three economic ideologies: mercantilism, capitalism, and socialism---and some variations of them.

Political Economic Ideologies

Mercantilism The economic philosophy known as mercantilism, which was prevalent in the 16th and 17th centuries, held that a nation's wealth could be measured by the amount of gold or other precious metals possessed by the royal court. The best economic system, therefore, was one that increased the nation's exports and thereby increased the court's holdings of gold.

The mercantilist theory had important consequences for economic institutions. For example, the guilds or associations of tradespeople, that had arisen in medieval times were protected by the monarch, to whom they paid tribute. The guilds controlled their members and determined what they produced. In this way they were able to produce goods cheaply, and those goods were better able to compete in world markets, thereby increasing exports and bringing in more wealth for the court. But the workers were not free to seek the best jobs and wages available. Rather, the guilds required them to work at assigned tasks for assigned wages, and the guildmasters fixed the price of work wages, entry into jobs, and all working conditions. Land in mercantilist systems was not subject to market norms either. As in feudalism, land was thought of not as a commodity that can be bought and sold---that is, a commodity subject to the market forces of supply and demand---derived from feudal grants.

Laissez-Faire Capitalism The idea of laissez-faire capitalism attacked the mercantilist view that the wealth of nations could be measured in gold and that the state should dominate trade and production in order to amass more wealth. The lassez-faire economists believed that a society's real wealth could be measured only by its capacity to produce goods and services---that is, by its resources of land, labor, and machinery. And those resources, including land itself, could best be regulated by free trade and world markets (Smith, 1965/1776, The Wealth of Nations).

The ideology of laissez-faire capitalism also sought to free workers from the restrictions that had been imposed by the feudal system and maintained under mercantilism. Thus it is no coincidence that the first statement of modern economic principles, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, was published in 1776. Revolution was in the air---not only political revolution but the Industrial Revolution as well. And some of the most revolutionary ideas came from the pens of people like Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, who understood the potential for social change contained in the new capitalist institutions of private property and free markets.

Private property as opposed to communal ownership is not merely the possession of objects, but rather, a set of rights and obligations that specify what their owner can and cannot do with them. The laissez-faire economists believed that the owners of property should be free to do almost anything they liked with their property in order to gain profit. Indeed, the quest for profit would provide the best incentive to produce new and cheaper products, and therefore required free markets in which producers could compete to provide better products at lower prices.

These economic institutions are familiar to us today, but the founders of laissez-faire capitalism had to struggle to win acceptance for them. No wonder they thought of themselves as radicals. In fact, their economic and political beliefs were so opposed to the rule of monarchs and to feudal institutions like guilds that they could readily be seen as revolutionary. They believed that the state should leave economic institutions alone (which is what laissez-faire means). In their view, there is a natural economic order, a system of private property and competitive enterprise that functions best when individuals are free to pursue their own interests through free trade and unregulated production.

Smith opens The Wealth of Nations by describing how wealth and prosperity are created through a self-regulating system of markets in which participants enter into contracts to buy and sell without outside influences or constraints. This classical model of capitalism and free markets hinges on three primary characteristics:

1. Freedom: the right to produce and exchange products, labor, and capital.
2. Self-interest: the right to pursue one's own business and appeal to the self-interest of others.
3. Competition: the right to compete in the production and exchange of goods and services.

Smith's observations of markets convinced him that these three characteristics would produce a "natural harmony" among workers who contribute their labor power, landlords who rent land and other property, and capitalists who buy and build the machines and equipment and develop new enterprises to produce goods and services. When free to buy or sell their products or services in unfettered markets, the self-interest of millions of individuals create an orderly and wealthy society without the need for central direction from the state government. As Smith wrote:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self love. . . . Every individual . . . [who] . . . employs capital . . . and laborers . . . neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. . . . He is . . . led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society. 

This doctrine of enlightened self-interest, often called "the invisible hand," is the central idea of laissez-faire or classical economics. As we will see, it is an idea that is continually invoked by those who wish to make markets the primary institution regulating economic and other transactions within and across the world's nations (Skousen, 2001, The Making of Modern Economics).

Socialism As an economic and political philosophy, socialism began as an attack on the concept of private property and personal profit. These aspects of capitalism, socialists believe, should be replaced by public ownership of property and sharing of profits. This attack on capitalism was motivated largely by horror at the atrocious living conditions caused by the Industrial Revolution. The early socialists thought of economics as the "dismal science" because it seemed to excuse a system in which a few people were made rich at the expense of the masses of workers. They detested the laissez-faire economists' defense of low wages and wondered how workers could benefit from the Industrial Revolution instead of becoming "wage slaves." They proposed the creation of smaller scale, more self-sufficient communities that would produce modern goods but would do so within a cooperative framework.

Karl Marx taught that the socialist state must be controlled by the working class, led by their own trade unions and political parties, which would do away with markets, wage labor, land, and private ownership of the means of production. These aspects of capitalism would be replaced by socialist economic institutions in which the workers themselves would determine what should be produced and how it should be distributed.

Marx never completed his blueprint of how an actual socialist society might function. That chore was left to the political and intellectual leaders of the communist revolutions---Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg---and, finally, to authoritarian leaders like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro. They believed that all markets and all private industry must be eliminated and replaced by state-controlled economic planning, collective farms, and worker control over industrial decision-making. Unless capitalist economic institutions were completely rooted out, they believed, small-scale production and market dealings would create a new bourgeois class. 

In the socialist system as it evolved under the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and China, centralized planning agencies and the single legal party, the Communists, would have the authority to set goals and organize the activities of the worker collectives, or soviets. Party members and state planners would also devise wage plans that would balance the need to reward skilled workers against the need to prevent the huge income inequalities found in capitalist societies. In soviet-style societies, markets were not permitted to regulate demand and supply; this vital economic function was supposedly performed by government agencies. Societies that are managed in this fashion are said to have command economies. The state commands economic institutions to supply a specific amount (a quota) of each product and to sell it at a particular price. (Note that not all command economies are dominated by communist parties. Germany under the Nazis and Italy under the fascists were also command economies.)

The Soviet system was notorious for the inefficiency of its economic planning and industrial production. Under the command system, factory managers must continually horde supplies, or raid supplies destined for similar factories in other regions, in order to meet their production quotas. Or they must trade favors with other factory managers to obtain supplies, a system that creates a hidden level of exchange based on bribes and favoritism. And because there are no free markets, goods that are desired by the public often are not available simply because the planners have not ordered them. In fact, in the Soviet-style economies there were always clandestine markets that operated outside the control of the authorities and supplied goods and services to those with means to pay for them. These underground markets thereby increased inequality in those societies and generated greater public disillusionment with command economies and one-party communist rule.

The massive social upheavals of 1989 and 1990 brought an end to the communist command economic system. Today Russia has a mixed economy. It has come a long way since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union and its command economy. Today the government owns only the oil and gas industries (Amadeo, K., 2020, Aug. 19, How Russia's Pipeline Politics Holds the EU Hostage. The Balance).

Democratic Socialism A far less radical version of socialism than that attempted in the Soviet Bloc is known as democratic socialism. This economic philosophy is practiced in the Scandinavian nations, especially Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, as well as in Holland and to a lesser extent in Germany, France, and Italy. It holds that the institution of private property must continue to exist because people want it to, and that competitive markets are needed because they are efficient ways of regulating production and distribution. But large corporations should be owned by the nation or, if they are in private hands, required to be run for the benefit of all citizens, not just for the benefit of their stockholders. In addition, economic decisions should be made democratically.

Democratic socialists look to societies such as Sweden and Holland for examples of their economic philosophy and practice (Harrington, 1973, Socialism). In Sweden, for instance, workers can invest their pension benefits in their firm and thereby gain a controlling interest in it. This process is intended to result in socialist ownership of major economic organizations.

In the United States there is a long history of conflicted relations between workers and owners of capital. Cooperative systems in which authority and even ownership are shared are developing, but more slowly than in the social democracies of Europe. Social scientists who study the U.S. economy note that in recent years there has been a reaction among owners of capital against the principles of democratic socialism, especially those that stress cooperation between labor and management and the right of workers to organize unions and engage in collective bargaining (Freeman, 2000, What Workers Want). Employers have also shown diminished commitment to welfare capitalism, the political economic model that until recently has had a great deal of influence in the non-communist modern economies (Harrison, 1994, When Government Gets It Right. Technology Review, 97, 66).

Welfare Capitalism Emerging to some extent as a response to the challenge posed by the Russian Revolution (which called attention to many of the excesses of uncontrolled or laissez-faire capitalism), welfare capitalism represented a new way of looking at relationships between governmental and economic institutions. Welfare capitalism affirms the role of markets in determining what goods and services will be produced and how, and it also affirms the role of government in regulating economic competition (e.g., by attempting prevent the control of markets by one or a few firms).

Welfare capitalism also stresses the role that governments have always played in building the roads, bridges, canals, ports, and other facilities that make trade and industry possible. Expanding on this rule, the theory of welfare capitalism asserts that the state should also invest in the society's human resources---that is, the education of new generations and the provision of a minimum level of healthcare. Welfare capitalism also guarantees the right of workers to form unions in order to reach collective agreements with the owners and managers of firms regarding wages and working conditions. It creates social welfare institutions like Social Security and unemployment insurance. And in order to stimulate production and build confidence in times of economic depression, welfare capitalism asserts that governments must borrow funds to finance large-scale public works projects like the construction of the American interstate highway system during the 1950s. 

The theory of welfare capitalism is associated with the writings of John Maynard Keynes, Joan Robinson, John Kenneth Galbraith, and James Tobin, all of whom contributed to the revision of laissez-faire economic theory. Welfare capitalism dominated American economic policy from World War II until the 1970s, when a succession of economic crises---inflation, energy shortages, and unemployment turn the thoughts of many Americans once again toward laissez-faire capitalism. Today, however, the increasingly evident gap between the haves and the have-nots in U.S. society has created renewed interest in enhancing the institutions of the welfare state---unemployment insurance, health insurance, low income housing, public education, and others. At the same time, fear of governmental control over people's lives, and it's costs in the form of higher taxes, has generated a revolt against the welfare state in many segments of the population in the United States and other industrial Nations. This trend has resulted in conservative electoral victories and unprecedented reductions in social spending. What is not clear is whether the public's desire for relative security from economic stress will outweigh the desire for lower taxes and reduction in the scope of government bureaucracies. 

*MAIN SOURCE: KORNBLUM, W., (2003), SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., PP. 593-596*

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Sociological Imagination: How to Gain Wisdom about the Society in which We All Participate and for Whose Future We Are All Responsible (part 44)

I really want to go back to school and finish up my sociology degree.

Alicia Sacramone

The hallmark of an individual society is the production of commodities and services to be exchanged in markets. In London, Hong Kong, New York, and other major cities throughout the world there are markets for gold, national currencies, stocks and bonds, and commodities ranging from pork bellies to concentrated frozen orange juice. However, not all societies have economies dominated by industry and markets. Subsistence economies, in which people live in small villages, do not have highly developed markets. In such economies people seek to produce enough food and other materials to enable them to meet their own needs, raise their children, and maintain their cultural traditions. The basic unit of production is the family, rather than the business firm as is the case in a capitalist economy. But there are few, if any, purely a subsistence economies in the world today. Most subsistence economies must engage in some trade in international markets to obtain goods such as medicine or tools. These markets are dominated by the large firms and entrepreneurs of the global capitalist economy.

Socialist economies like Cuba or China also buy and sell products in international markets. Within their societies, however, they usually try to limit the influence of markets. Prices for essential goods, especially foodstuffs, are not entirely subject to the laws of supply and demand; often they are prevented by law from rising too high or falling too low. Many types of goods and services, including firms themselves, cannot be sold to private buyers because they are said to belong to all the people of the society. We will return to the conceptual differences among these types of economies in later posts. For now, remember that few contemporary societies conform to one or another of the basic economic types. Most nations encompass capitalist markets, subsistence economies, and elements of socialism as well. Nevertheless, the market is an increasingly dominant economic institution throughout the world.

The Nature of Markets

Markets are economic Institutions that regulate exchange behavior. In a market, different values or prices are established for particular goods and services, values that vary according to changing levels of supply and demand and are usually expressed in terms of a common measure of exchange, or currency. A market is not the same thing as a marketplace. As an economic institution, a market governs exchanges of particular goods and services throughout a society. This is what we mean when we speak of the housing market, for example. A marketplace, on the other hand, is an actual location where buyers and sellers make exchanges. Buyers and sellers of jewelry, for instance, like to be able to gather in a single place to examine the goods to be exchanged. The same is true for many other goods, such as clothing and automobiles.

Market transactions are governed by agreements or contracts in which a seller agrees to supply a particular item and a buyer agrees to pay for it. Exchanges based on contracts are a significant factor in the development of modern societies. As the social theorist Talcott Parsons pointed out, the use of contracts makes interpersonal relations possible. Contracts neutralize the relevance of the other roles of the participant, such as kinship and other personal relationships, that govern exchanges in non-market situations. In contractual relations, for example, the fact that people are friends or kin does not, in principle, change the terms of their agreement and the need to repay debts (Parsons, 1991, The Integration of Economic and Sociological Theory. Sociological Inquiry, 61, 10-60).

Among hunting-and-gathering peoples and in relatively isolated agrarian societies before the 20th century, markets in the modern sense of the term did not exist. In Social scientific terms, a society cannot be said to have a fully developed market economy if many of the commodities it produces are not exchanged for a common currency at prices determined by supply and demand.

The spread of markets into nonmarket societies has been accelerated by political conquest and colonialism as well as by the desire among tribal and peasant peoples to obtain the goods produced by industrial societies.

Markets and the World Economic System

In the late 15th and early 20th centuries, according to sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (1999, The Heritage of Sociology, the Promise of Social Science. Presidential address, XIVth World Congress of Sociology, Montreal, July 26, 1998, Current Sociology, 47, 1-43), a "European world-economy" came into existence. The new economy was a kind of social system that the world had not known before. It was based on economic relationships, not on political empires; in fact, it encompassed empires, city-states, and the emerging nation states.

Great empires had been a feature of the world scene for at least five thousand years before the dawn of the modern era. But the empires of China, India, Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East were primarily political rather than economic systems. Wallerstein argues that because the great empires dominated vast areas inhabited by peoples who lacked military and political power, they were able to establish a flow of economic resources from the outlying regions to the imperial centers. The means used were taxation, tribute (payments for protection by the imperial army), and trade policies in which the outlying societies were forced to produce certain goods for the imperial merchant. 

But this system---exemplified most clearly in the case of the Roman empire---required a huge military and civil bureaucracy, which absorbed much of the imperial profit. Local rebellions and wars continually increased the expense of maintaining imperial rule. Political empires thus can be viewed as a primitive means of economic domination. “It is the social achievement of the modern world,” Wallerstein (1974, The Modern World System) comments, “to have invented the technology that makes it possible to increase the the flow of the surplus from the lower strata to the upper strata, from the periphery to the center, from the majority to the minority (p. 16) without the need for a military conquest.

What technologies made the new world system possible? They were not limited to tools of trade, such as the compass or the ocean going sailing vessel, or to tools of domination like the Gatling machine gun. They also included organizational techniques for bringing land, labor, and local currencies into the larger market economy: ways of enclosing and dividing up land in order to charge rent for its use; financial and accounting systems that led to the creation of new economic institutions like banks; and many others. We discuss the role of science and technology in social change more thoroughly in later posts, but it is important to note here that the term technology refers not only to tools but also to the procedures and forms of social organization that increase human productive capacity (Faulkner, 1997, Karl Polanyi Meets the Masters of the Universe. Contemporary Sociology, 26, 688-692; Polanyi, 1944, The Great Transformation). 

Although the European colonial powers (and the United States) often used political and military force to bring isolated societies into their markets, in the twentieth century they allowed their former colonies to gain independence yet still maintained economic control over them. This occurred because the economies of the colonial societies had become dependent on the technologies and markets controlled by the Western powers. Today former colonies are struggling to develop independent economic systems, but their ability to compete effectively in world markets is limited by the increasing power of multinational corporations, or multinationals, economic enterprises that have headquarters in one country and conduct business activities in one or more other countries (Barnett, 1994, Dec. 19, Lords of the Global Economy. The Nation, 754-758).

Multinationals are not a new phenomenon. Trading firms like the Hudson's Bay Company and the Dutch East India Company were chartered by major colonial powers and granted monopolies over the right to trade with national native populations for furs, spices, metals, gems, and other valued commodities. The exploitation of the resources of colonial territories has been directed by multinational corporations for over two centuries. Modern multinationals do not generally have monopolies granted by the state, yet these powerful firms, based primarily in the United States, Europe, and Japan, are transforming the world economy by exporting manufacturing jobs from nations in which workers earn high wages to nations in which they earn far less. This process, which is particularly evident in the shoe, garment, electronics, textile, and the automobile industries, has accelerated the growth of industrial working classes in the former colonies while greatly reducing the number of industrial jobs in the developed nations.

Economic Globalization and Deregulation

Economic globalization can be broadly defined as a worldwide shrinkage of economic distances (costs of doing business between nations). It includes two closely related processes: the globalization of production and trade, and the globalization of flows of finance (funds) and capital (tools, equipment, and services). These aspects of globalization have been greatly facilitated in recent decades by three important changes:

1. Innovations and advances in transportation (e.g., jet travel and air freight) and communications (computers and the Internet), which allow extremely rapid exchanges of people, funds, and capital between regional markets.
2. Global economic liberalization---especially the reduction of national tariffs that may create barriers to the free flow of trade and investment funds---is encouraged through global trade institutions, particularly the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the case of world trade in goods and services, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the case of global finance and capital flows.
3. Use of market incentives that encourage people to rely on supply and demand rather than government enforced quotas, regulation, or treaties to regulate economic behavior to speed up the development of production and trade everywhere in the world (Rajan, 2001, April, Globalization. ASEAN Economic Bulletin, pp. 1-11). 

According to its advocates, especially in the business sector, the modern market economy encourages constant change and innovation. Some of that change, however, involves risk to jobs and incomes. If one region produces steel at a higher cost than another region, for example, a market free of protective tariffs will make the lower-cost steel more competitive and create plant closings and layoffs in the region where labor costs (wages and benefits) are higher. Advocates of worldwide free trade and rapid globalization believe that nations that lose out in market competition will find ways of adapting and changing their economies so that workers in uncompetitive industries will eventually find work in more dynamic sectors of the economy.

Globalization's opponents, including many trade union members, environmentalists, and critics of unregulated market forces, argue for fair trade rather than free trade. By that they mean trade that does not eliminate protections against exploitation and environmental pollution in the rush to deregulate all markets. For example, if steel workers in the United States are able to form unions and bargain for higher wages and decent benefits, should they be vulnerable to competition from companies and nations where workers are forbidden or systemically discouraged from joining unions and are severely exploited and paid extremely low wages? Fair trade would insist that certain standards, such as bans on child labor, the right to form unions, and regulations on pollution, be applied to all trade treaties and that nations or regions that do not have such regulations be barred from markets in nations that do have these protections. (Wayne, 2001, For Trade Protestors, "Slower, Sadder Songs." New York Times, sec. 3, p. 1).

Globalization and free trade may also threaten the values of people in nations where cultural products like music, movies, fast food, and fashions seem to promote deviance from strict religious and gender norms. Thus orthodox religious leaders in many nations continually protest against free markets that bring American or European movies that question religious authority, or fashions that reveal women's bodies, or music and foods that depart from local traditions and norms.

Controversies over free trade vs. regulated fair trade, or whether there should be tariffs to protect some industries or some environments, are not new issues, even though rapid globalization makes them ever more urgent. These issues raise old questions about laissez-faire vs. welfare economies and other approaches to combining economic growth with social justice, as we see in the next post.

*MAIN SOURCE: KORNBLUM, W., 2003, SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., PP. 587-591*

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4. The Greenland Vikings - Land of the Midnight Sun

Sociological Imagination: How to Gain Wisdom about the Society in which We All Participate and for Whose Future We Are All Responsible (part 43)

Don't settle; don't compromise. Freeze your eggs, get your sociology doctorate, worry more about war and pestilence and the incredible inequality of geographical birth than finding your soulmate.

Nia Vardalos

A significant barrier to educational reform is the bureaucratic nature of school systems. Sociologists view the school as a specialized structure with a special socializing function and that it is also a good example of a bureaucratic organization. As any student knows, there is a clearly defined status hierarchy in most schools. At the top of the hierarchy in primary and secondary schools is the principal, followed by the assistant principal and/or administrative assistants, the counselors, the teachers, and the students. Although the principle holds the highest position in the system, his or her influence on students usually is indirect. The teacher, on the other hand, is in daily command of the classroom and therefore has the greatest impact on the students. In this post we discuss several aspects of the structure of educational institutions and attempts to change those institutions.

Schools as Bureaucracies

As the size and complexity of the American educational system have increased, so has the tendency of educational institutions to become bureaucratized (Torres & Mitchell, 1998, Sociology of Education). The one-room schoolhouse is a thing of the past; today's schools have large administrative staffs and numerous specialists such as guidance counselors and special education teachers. Teachers themselves specialize in particular subject areas or grade levels. Schools are also characterized by a hierarchy of authority. The number of levels in the hierarchy varies, depending on the nature of the school system. In large cities, for example, there may be as many as seven levels between the superintendent and school personnel, making it difficult for the superintendent to control the way policies are carried out. Similarly, in any given school it may be difficult for the principal to determine what actually happens in the classroom.

School bureaucracies are often criticized for being top-heavy with administrators who do not teach and whose regulations seem to stifle creativity at the classroom level. What accounts, then, for the prominence of these complex administrations and their influence on the conduct of schooling? In attempting to answer this question, we need to consider several aspects of what makes a successful school system in a city, town, or rural area.

First, in addition to everything else they are, schools are a collection of buildings, sports fields, laboratories, and real estate. They require capital funds for building and maintenance, planning for new facilities, budgeting and accounting for fiscal oversight, and much more. Teachers, students, and parents want to know that buildings are safe and designed to facilitate learning, but they do not have the time or ability to take care of these needs themselves. School administrators must work with potential leaders and parent groups to get the physical work of the district done, and they often labor under extremely difficult conditions of budgetary constraints and ideological conflict.

A second social force that tends to expand educational bureaucracies is their need to respond to so many different public needs and values. Children with learning disabilities need special programs; sports teams demand budgets and leagues; federal and state authorities demand compliance with new requirements for testing, record-keeping, school security, student health standards, and much more. Every demand on a school system that administrators are expected to fulfill adds to their workload and produces a need for more administrative personnel. Some school administrations become large because political leaders want to place their allies in jobs (this is known as patronage) or because of cronyism within the administration (appointing people to jobs as a favor), but much of the growth of school administrations is caused by demands that citizens and their representatives place on the school system. 

The Classroom In most modern school systems the primary school student is in the charge of one teacher, who instructs almost all academic subjects. But as the student advances through the educational structure, the primary school model (which evolved from the one-room school with a single teacher) is replaced by a "departmental" structure in which the student is taught by several different teachers, each specializing in a particular subject. The latter structure is derived largely from that of the 19th century English boarding school. But these two basic structures are frequently modified by alternative approaches such as the "open" primary school classroom, in which students are grouped according to their level of achievement in certain basic skills and work in these skill groups at their own pace. The various groups in the open classroom are given a small group or individual instruction by one or more teachers rather than being expected to progress at the same pace in every subject.

Open classrooms have not been found to produce consistent improvements in student performance, but they have improved the social attendance rates of students from working-class and minority backgrounds. Students in open classrooms tend to express a greater satisfaction with school and more commitment to classwork. The less stratified authority structure of the open classroom and the greater amount of cooperation that occurs in such settings may help students enjoy school more and, in the long run, cause them to have a more positive attitude toward learning.

The Teacher's Role Because the role of the teacher is to change the learner in some way, the teacher-student relationship is an important part of education. Sociologists have pointed out that this relationship is asymmetrical or unbalanced, with the teacher being in a position of authority and the student having little choice but to passively absorb the information provided by the teacher. In other words, in conventional classrooms there is little opportunity for the student to become actively involved in the learning process. On the other hand, students often develop strategies for undercutting the teacher's authority: mentally withdrawing, interrupting, and the like (Darling-Hammond, (1997, Nov.), What Matters Most. Education Digest, pp. 4-10; Rose, 1995, Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education). Much current research assumes that students and teachers influence each other instead of assuming that the influence is always in a single direction (Kornblum, 2003, p. 573).

*MAIN SOURCE: KORNBLUM, W., 2003, SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., PP. 570-574*

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Fall of Rome - Documentary

Sociological Imagination: How to Gain Wisdom about the Society in which We All Participate and for Whose Future We Are All Responsible (part 42)

I'm a huge feminist, I majored in sociology at college, and I care about what I put into the world.

Beanie Feldstein

Education (part C)

by

Charles Lamson

 Attainment, Achievement, and Equality

Although some educational reformers focus on the need to expand learning opportunities through nonschool service experiences, most Scholars and administrators seek improvement in educational institutions themselves. Their efforts often focus on educational attainment, or the number of years of schooling that students receive, and educational achievement, or the amount of learning that actually takes place. Both aspects of education are closely linked to economic inequality and social mobility.

Educational Attainment In any discussion of education as a major social institution, the concept of educational attainment (number of years of school completed) holds a central place. Educational attainment is correlated with income, occupation, prestige, attitudes and opinions, and much else. It is essential, therefore, for social scientists to understand the impact of recent trends in school enrollment on the educational attainment of the population as a whole and the various subgroups of the population. The high school completion rate is the highest in U.S. history. For the first time in U.S. history, 90% of the population aged 25 and older have completed high school. This is according to educational attainment data released Dec. 14, 2017 from the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1940, less than half of the population aged 25 and older had a high school diploma. Over the years this has increased to the point where we now have 90% who have completed high school, said Kurt Baumann, a demographer in the social, economic and housing statistics division. That means out of the 217 million people aged 25 and older, 194 million have a high school diploma or higher. Between 2000 and 2017, the percentage of all people aged 25 and older who had not completed high school decreased by more than one-third dropping from 16% to 10% (Dec. 14, 2017, High School Completion Rate Is Highest in U.S. History. The United States Census Bureau).  As high school educational attainment increased for the nation as a whole, attainment for minority populations also increased. Over the same time period, the percentage of blacks age 25 and older who had completed high school increased by 9 percentage points from 78% to 87%. The percentage of Hispanics age 25 and older who had completed high school increased by approximately 13 percentage points from 57% to 71% in the same time period. Non-Hispanic whites increased their high school completion six percentage points, from 88% to 94% (Census.gov).  Barriers to Educational Attainment Tracking and Inequality   The rise of mass education gave the middle and lower classes greater opportunities for upward social mobility through educational attainment. But as early as the 1920s many schools began to use "tracking" systems in which higher-achieving students were placed in accelerated classes while others were shunted into vocational and other types of less challenging classes. Today tracking remains a major problem in public schools. Parents of "gifted" children seek educational challenges for their sons and daughters and do not want them to be held back by slower learners. However, tracking systems can make average students feel less valued, and there is a danger that gifted but alienated students will be labeled as nonachievers. White and Asian students are far more likely than black and Hispanic students to be tracked into high ability groups. Ability grouping is synonymous with tracking. Some social scientists argue that these differences are a result of ability differences among racial and class groups; others assert that they are a consequence of race and class bias (Wolf, 1998, Oct. 25, The Black-White Test Score Gap. New York Times Book Review, p. 15). Because there are far more Hispanic and black students in the lower socioeconomic classes, there is little question that social factors outweigh biological ones in explaining these results. In any case, tracking separates children and is increasingly viewed as leading to educational inequalities. A current trend in educational practice, therefore, is to Institute detracking programs and to provide highly gifted students with additional challenges through cooperative education in which they have opportunities to teach others and through after school programs (Betts, 1998, March. The Two-Legged Stool. Federal Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review, pp. 97-117; Mansnerus, 1992, Nov. 1, Should Tracking Be Derailed? Education Life, New York Times, pp. 14-16). Tracking most often begins in junior high school or middle school, where students do not stay in a single classroom but move from one subject to another. It persists into high school, where it is often made explicit in tracks such as the common, academic, general, and vocational-commercial curricula of many secondary school systems. Teachers and administrators often support tracking systems because they believe that students learn more effectively and develop greater self-esteem when they are grouped with academically equivalent students. These claims may be legitimate, but most of the available research indicates that students are intensely aware of tracking when it exists and that it does not contribute to the academic confidence of those in lower tracks. Research on the lasting effects of tracking gives strong support to the critical "reproduction" theories of schooling. Students in lower tracks tend to end up in lower paid and lower prestige occupations once they finish their schooling. In a study (Broussard & Joseph, 1998. Tracking. Social Work in Education, 20, 110-120), which compared student experience with tracking with careers later in life, the researchers found that almost 41% of those in the academic track were in professional, technical, or managerial careers later in life, as opposed to less than 20% of those in vocational commercial tracks. Tracking does not automatically translate into reproduction of the class system, but these data indicate that it can contribute to maintaining the status quo of class inequality. Dropping Out From 2000 to 2016, the Hispanic status dropout rate decreased from 27.8 to 8.6%, while the black rate decreased from 13.1 to 6.2%, and the white rate decreased from 6.9 to 5.2%. Nevertheless, the Hispanic status dropout rate in 2016 remained higher than the black and white rates. There was no measurable difference between the black and white status Dropout rates in 2016 (Feb. 2019. Indicator 17: High School Status Dropout Rates. National Center for Education Statistics).  The main reason for dropping out of school is poor academic performance, but there are other reasons as well. Students often drop out because of the demands of work and family roles; many are married, or unmarried and pregnant, and are working at regular jobs. Whatever the reason, the effects of dropping out can be serious. Dropouts have less chance of joining the labor force than high school graduates; whatever jobs they find tend to be low-paying ones (Kornblum, 2003, Sociology in a Changing World, 6th ed., pp. 564-565). Degree Inflation The trend toward increasingly higher levels of educational attainment has had an unexpected effect known as "degree inflation" (Pederson, 1997, March 3. When an A Is Average. Newsweek, p. 64). Employers have always paid attention to the educational credentials of potential employees, but today they require much more education than in the past. For example, in the early decades of the twentieth century a person could get a teaching job with just a high-school diploma; now a bachelor's or master's degree is usually required. The same is true of social work. And secretaries, who formerly could get by without a high-school diploma, now are often required to have at least some college education or, in some cases, a college degree. Degree inflation is discouraging to some students and prevents them from continuing their education. It also adds to the expense of education both directly and indirectly in terms of lost income and hence prevents less advantaged students from undertaking advanced studies. Degree inflation also increases the amount of time that must be devoted to formal education. And therefore raises questions about the meaning of educational achievement; that is, the value of the time spent attaining educational credentials. *MAIN SOURCE: KORNBLUM, W., 2003, SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., PP. 562-565* end