Sociology 1020 Chapter Notes - Chapter 17: The Hidden Curriculum, Hidden Curriculum, Assortative Mating
22 Oct 2016
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Document Summary
Schools endow young people with the key capacities of communication, coordination, and economic productivity. School accomplishes two main functions: homogenizing and sorting. The homogenizing aspect of school is creating homogeneity from a group of diverse students and instructing them under a common curriculum. Common standards that serve as cultural common denominators are enforced. Sorting favours students who develop the greatest facility in the common culture while confining those of lesser skills to subordinate work roles and lower ranks in the class structure. Education system has displaced organized religion as main purveyor of formal knowledge, and is the second most important agent of socialization. Universal mass education is a recent phenomenon and limited to wealthy and developed countries, but overall there is an upwards trend in the world towards education. Training in families was decentralized, unorganized and uneven in quality. Training in religious associations were widely available and tended to set people apart from the surrounding community.
