SOCIAL-CLASS EFFECTS ON EDUCATION AND SOCIALIZATON.
Education is one of the pivotal institutions in terms of sociology. Since humans lack highly developed instincts and inborn knowledge, the knowledge and the technology necessary to make life easier must be transmitted to each new generation. Before modern times, the family was most responsible for this transmission. It consists mainly of the teaching of skills necessary for survival in the society. As a result of transition from agricultural societies to industrialized societies, the education institution needed a big transformation as well as other pivotal institutions among which are the family, religion, government and economy. Because family members could not teach all that a child needs to know, formal education, known as schooling, took most of the mission of the family during that time. This process seems to go forward; the more complex the society, the more lengthy the educational process. Idealistically, in modern societies, a central element of the education is the belief that schools offer an equal opportunity for all individuals. This paper is devoted to exhibit that, in reality, our modern democracy is much more far away from this ideal. In the first part of the paper, the two major perspectives of sociology, functionalist and conflict, are compared to show how they approach this issue. In the second part, it is exemplified how social class differences play a role on the socialization of the individual from the birth of the child and during the education years.
It appears that educational success generally rises with family income, many sociologists see material deprivation as the major cause of inequality in educational success. Students from higher social backgrounds are much more likely to stay in the education process (Hess, 1995). A major reason for this is the cost of staying in education, and this denied many working class people from gaining higher-level educational qualifications.
