Introduction

Education has often been very much so seen as a fundamentally optimistic human endeavour
characterized by aspirations for progress and betterment. It is understood by many to be a
means of overcoming handicaps, achieving greater equality, and acquiring wealth and social
status. Education is perceived as a place where children can develop according to their unique
needs and potential. It is also perceived as one of the best means of achieving greater social
equality. Many would say that the purpose of education should be to develop every
individual to their full potential, and give them a chance to achieve as much in life as their
natural abilities allow (meritocracy). Few would argue that any education system
accomplishes this goal perfectly. Some take a particularly negative view, arguing that the
education system is designed with the intention of causing the social reproduction of
inequality. The cultural capital of the dominant group, in the form of practices and relation to
culture, is assumed by the school to be the natural and only proper type of cultural capital and
is therefore legitimated. It demands ―uniformly of all its students that they should have what
it does not give‖ [Bourdieu]. This legitimate cultural capital allows students who possess it to
gain educational capital in the form of qualifications. Those lower-class students are
therefore disadvantaged. To gain qualifications they must acquire legitimate cultural capital,
by exchanging their own (usually working-class) cultural capital. This exchange is not a
straight forward one, due to the class ethos of the lower-class students. Class ethos is
described as the particular dispositions towards, and subjective expectations of, school and
culture. It is in part determined by the objective chances of that class. This means that not
only do children find success harder in school due to the fact that they must learn a new way
of ‗being‘, or relating to the world, and especially, a new way of relating to and using
language, but they must also act against their instincts and expectations. The subjective
expectations influenced by the objective structures found in the school, perpetuate social
reproduction by encouraging less-privileged students to eliminate themselves from the
system, so that fewer and fewer are to be found as one journeys through the levels of the
system.
It should be based on the needs, demands and aspirations of the society for it to function
properly. It should be related to the level of culture, industrial development, and rate of
urbanization, political organization, religious climate, family structures, and stratification. It
should not only fulfill the individual‘s and society‘s needs but their future aspirations.
Sociology of Education:

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Briefly, sociology of education is defined as a study of the relations between education and
society. It is an investigation of the sociological processes involved in an educational
institution. To Ottaway (1962), it is a social study and in so far as its method is scientific, it is
a branch of social science. It is concerned with educational aims, methods, institutions,
administration and curricula in relation to the economic, political, religious, social and
cultural forces of the society in which they function. As far as the education of the individual
is concerned, sociology of education highlights on the influence of social life and social
relationships on the development of personality. Thus, sociology of education emphasizes
sociological aspects of educational phenomena and institutions. The problems encountered
are regarded as essentially problems of sociology and not problems of educational practice.
Sociology of Education, therefore, may be explained as the scientific analysis of the social
processes and social patterns involved in the educational system. Brookover and Gottlieb
consider that ―this assumes education is a combination of social acts and that sociology is
an analysis of human interaction.‖ Educational process goes on in a formal as well as in
informal situations. Sociological study of the human interaction in education may comprise
both situations and might guide to the development of scientific generalizations of human
relations in the educational system. The sociology of education is the study of how public
institutions and individual experiences influence education and its outcomes. It is most
concerned with the public schooling systems of modern industrial societies, including the
growth of higher, further, adult, and continuing education. It is a philosophical as well as a
sociological concept, indicating ideologies, curricula, and pedagogical techniques of the
inculcation and management of knowledge and the social reproduction of personalities and
cultures. It is concerned with the relationships, activities and reactions of the teachers and
students in the classroom and highlights the sociological problems in the realm of education.
Reproduction and Correspondence Theories

Althusser (1972) criticizes the bourgeois idea that the social whole is only divided into
segments, some of which are resistant to the impact of ideology, in his well-known piece
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. He views education as merely one facet of the
socio-cultural whole, along with other elements, and views the State as the main agent of
ideology. Education is the arena in which the State transcends itself and uses its many
ideological apparatuses to assert its power, rather than a neutral sphere where inputs and
outputs occur as a result of inherent immanence. According to Althusser's ongoing argument,
education is just one of the exterior practices of influence thatDrawing on the contributions of
French structuralists Althusser and Bourdieu, reproduction or correspondence theories -as
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developed and presented by the work of Bowles & Gintis (1976) Schooling in Capitalist
America- “emphasized the macro and structural dimensions of educational institutions”
within society (Sultana, 1989, 287). Departing from Marx’s definition of class; that is, class is
a group of people who find themselves in the same sociopolitical and economic conditions,
Bowles and Gintis (1976) say that schools are training young people for their future
economic and occupational position according to their current social class position. Students
of working-class origin are trained to take orders, to be obedient, and are subject to more
discipline whereas children of professionals are trained using more progressive methods,
which gives them internal discipline and self-presentation skill. People have no choice
because their futures are determined for them by the economic structure and their position
within it. Many scholars like Jean Anyon adopted reproduction theory during 1970s. For
Anyon (1981), schools serving working class communities and affluent professional
communities produce and reproduce the social and cultural norms of those communities
through the differential distribution of knowledge. Thus, this creates sort of reproduction
process. Both the working class and affluent professional school expose students to the
knowledge needed to stay within the social class they are born.

It is noteworthy here to mention that there is not one form of reproduction (Willis, 1981). In
this sense, although many aspects of reproduction theories have been largely criticized by
several scholars (Apple, 2000, Wexler, 1987, Giroux, 1983), they are nonetheless developed
and widely used in the interpretations of social inequalities enforced through schooling, as
well as the production and distribution of knowledge (Anyon, 1980; Weis, 1990; McLeod,
2004). It, therefore, would be a misconception to use haphazardly different forms of
reproduction on different levels of analysis and/or theorizations interchangeably without
being aware of the distinction among them. Social reproduction, for example, that “works
through cultural production is quite open –not closed as pessimistic as other theories of
reproduction are (correctly) held to be. It has elements of challenge, change and liberation
built into it” (Willis, 1981, .66). This definition of social reproduction has dimensions
different from and more than what Bowles and Gintis (1976) have developed and exemplified
in their work. Following Willis’s (1981) conceptualization, social reproduction is an
outcome of class relations and capitalist division of labor whereas cultural reproduction,
hinging on complex cultural and ideological processes exists in a society, emerges from some
other mechanisms such as gender, race, and ethnicity. These two forms of reproduction,
however, usually go hand in hand to maintain the status quo. We have witnessed how social

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reproduction theories with regards to cultural production outlived Willis’s (1977) long lasting
book Learning to Labour.

Resistance Theories

Resistance theory originated within British Cultural Studies by scholars at the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Starting with the seminal study of Willis (1977),
resistance theory has received theoretical development by Giroux (1983), and has flourished
in sociological books and journals. The last fifteen years have witnessed a generation of
ethnographic studies that explore process of schooling through qualitative field methods in
this neo-Marxist framework. Spawning a now-voluminous literature since its bold entrance,
resistance theory has been the object of much theorization, discussion, modification and
critique. (Giroux 1983, Apple, 1976) and has informed numerous empirical studies of
classrooms and youth (Anyon, 1981).

The concept of resistance is used in educational research in order to explain the existing
tensions between students and schooling processes. Resistance studies mainly focused on
oppositional behaviors that lead students, consequently, academic failure (Apple, 1982,
Giroux, 1983). The other focus of these studies is rebellious student behaviors that pass
beyond passive political stance against educational practices.

Resistance as a political stance (Giroux, 1983), emanates from the perception of schooling as
a reproduction process rather than an equalization process. Resistance theories introduce the
active role of human agency in the institutional context that reproduces social inequality.

Simply put, working class students are said to condemn themselves to working class futures
because they develop oppositional cultural responses to school, the essential irony being that
it is in contesting their subordination. They reproduce themselves as a class (Willis, 1977).
Resistance theory is currently a renowned ethnographic approach in the sociology of
education. This neo-Marxist theory, currently among the predominant cultural explanations
of class inequalities in education, contains the claim that these disparities occur in part
through a working class cultural resistance to schooling (Davies, 1995).

Davies (1995) argues that Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour (Willis, 1977) became a
sociological classic soon after its 1977 publication. Though the book’s influence in Britain
may have waned in recent years, it continues to enjoy great prominence across the Atlantic.
North American sociologists invariably cite Willis as not only the quintessential depiction of

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rebellious students in Britain, but also as an authorative account of working-class responses
to capitalist schooling in general.

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