How do in and out of school fa
How do in and out of school faInequalities exist an all aspects of life. The nature and result of such inequalities shapes our social as well as economic lives. As people progress through their educational life certain inequalities will result in different outcomes of schooling for different sets of people. “In post war Britain pupils from a working class background are constantly found to gain fewer academic qualifications, to be under represented in institutions of higher education and to end up in jobs offering little opportunity for social advancement” (Brown 1987 p11). It is inequalities such as these that are present both in and out of school that will determine life chances of individuals. It is commonly accepted that education is the main determinant of where someone will find himself or herself in later life, certain experiences at different stages of the life cycle with regard to education will therefore have an effect on life chances. This essay will examine these in and out of factors and how at different stages in the life cycle they affect life chances.
One of the main contributing factors to life chances is education. What someone achieves in his or her academic career exhibits much inequality. It has been a long running trend in employment that those from working class backgrounds will enter into occupations of manual or low-skilled nature. Conversely those from middle-class backgrounds tend to enter more into administrative and or professional occupations. Despite government reforms to limit inequalities in education and the effect of class differences but since trends in employment and educational achievement still persist there is still a strong link between social class and life chances. The schooling system has been regarded by some Marxist writers who feel “school is primarily a means of reproducing the existing structure of social and economic inequalities” (Brown 1987 p15). In this manner it can be argued that the way children are schooled neither takes away or adds to the current inequalities but merely adds to them. One of the ways this can be illustrated is when school leaving ages are examined. In order to enter into higher prestige jobs further educational qualifications are generally required where as manual and low-skilled work does not demand an equivalent level of qualification. According to Courntney 1989 quoted in Furlong 1993 p 8 6 out of 10 children left school at the minimum leaving age in 1986 and moreover these minimum aged school leavers tend to be predominately working class. This distribution of the working class into lower prestige jobs can be accounted for by a number of factors that shall be discussed later. The inequality that exists here regarding school leavers is one that results in an economic inefficiency since the talent of many working-class pupils could have been transferred into higher skilled jobs yet due to certain other factors the talent in a crude...
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