Question: There are some who believe that the current education system in Canada needs dramatic change given the inequities in educational success and attainment levels. Key variables that matter incl

Structural-Functionalist Perspective

According to structural-functionalism, the educational institution accomplishes important tasks for society, including instruction, socialization, the sorting of individuals into various statuses, and the provision of custodial care. Many social problems, such as unemployment, crime and delinquency, and poverty, may be linked to the failure of the educational institution to fulfill these basic functions (see Chapters 4, 10, and 11). Structural-functionalists also examine the reciprocal influences of the educational institution and other social institutions, including the family, the political institution, and the economic institution.

Instruction

A major function of education is to teach students the knowledge and skills necessary for future occupational roles, self-development, and social functioning. Although some parents teach their children basic knowledge and skills at home, most parents rely on schools to teach their children to read, spell, write, tell time, count money, and use computers. The failure of schools to instruct students in basic knowledge and skills both causes and results from many other social problems.

Socialization

The socialization function of education involves teaching students to respect authority—behaviour that is essential for social organization (Merton 1968). Students learn to respond to authority by asking permission to leave the classroom, sitting quietly at their desks, and raising their hands before asking a question. Students who do not learn to respect and obey teachers may later disrespect and disobey employers, police officers, and judges.

The educational institution also socializes youth into the dominant culture. Schools attempt to instill and maintain the norms, values, traditions, and symbols of the culture in a variety of ways, such as celebrating holidays (Remembrance Day, Thanksgiving); requiring students to speak and write in English and French; displaying the Canadian flag; and discouraging violence, drug use, and cheating.

Whether schools function well in Canada may be a matter of vantage point. As the number and size of racial and ethnic minority groups have increased, Canadian schools have had to account for practices that directly contradict official policy on multiculturalism in Canada and for practices that trivialize non-dominant cultures. For example, Canadian sociologist Jasmin Zine (2002) argues that a variety of racist and Eurocentric practices still serve dominant groups while marginalizing particular groups in schools across the country. Among the commonplace, but problematic practices that Zine draws attention to are the following:

• A narration of history that focuses almost exclusively on Europe, as with “Medieval Times” curricula that entirely neglect flourishing civilizations from the time in China, Africa, and Spain.

• Calling upon ethnically and/or racially “other” students to perform their culture for their classmates while Anglo-Canadian children are not called upon to perform their British heritage.

• Having all the complexity of your heritage and culture reduced to “saris, samosa and steel bands” trotted out for school festivals, while simultaneously knowing that we don’t learn Canadian history via bagpipes and meat pies. (Zine 2002: 37)

Practices such as these, which developed alongside multicultural policy in the 1970s, Zine argues, are incredibly damaging for minoritized students: they learn in unequivocal terms that their cultures don’t count, that their richness does not have to be acknowledged. Instead of perpetuating Eurocentric curricula and attitudes, Zine proposes a multi-centric approach, one in which diversity operates not as an “add on,” but as “a starting point for knowledge integration, in which the historical achievements of all societies are examined, validated and respected” (p. 38).

Sorting Individuals into Statuses

Schools sort individuals into statuses by providing credentials for individuals who achieve various levels of education at various schools within the system. These credentials sort people into different statuses—for example, “high school graduate,” “Rhodes scholar,” and “Ph.D.” Further, schools sort individuals into professional statuses by awarding degrees in such fields as medicine, nursing, and law. The significance of such statuses lies in their association with occupational prestige and income—in general, the higher one’s education, the higher one’s income (Ghalam 2000). Table 12.1 shows the correspondence between education levels and income over 25 years from 1980 to 2005.

Table 12.1

Median Earnings, in 2005 Constant Dollars, of Male and Female Recent Immigrant Earners and Canadian-Born Earners Aged 25 to 54, with or without a University Degree, Canada, 1980–2005

NOTE: The numbers refer to all earners, whether or not they worked on a full-time basis for a full year. Individuals with self-employment income are included while those living in institutions are excluded.

SOURCE: Statistics Canada, Earnings and Incomes of Canadian over the Past Quarter Century, 2006 Census, Cat. 97-563-XIE2006001, May 2008; http://www.statcan.gc.ca/bsolc/olc-cel/olc-cel?catno=97-563-XIE2006001&lang=eng#formatdisp.

Custodial Care

The educational system also provides custodial care (Merton 1968), which is particularly valuable to single-parent and dual-earner families, and the likely reason for the increase in enrolments of 3- and 4-year-olds. The school system provides free supervision and care for children and adolescents until they complete secondary, or “high,” school—almost 13 000 hours per pupil. Some school districts are experimenting with offering classes on a 12-month basis, on Saturdays, and as part of longer school days. Working parents, the hope that increased supervision will reduce delinquency rates, and higher educational standards that require more hours of study are some of the motivations behind the “more time” movement (Wilgoren 2001).

Conflict theorists emphasize that the educational institution solidifies the class positions of groups and allows the elite to control the masses. Although the official goal of education in society is to provide a universal mechanism for achievement, educational opportunities and the quality of education are not equally distributed.

Conflict theorists point out that the socialization function of education is really indoctrination into a capitalist ideology. In essence, students are socialized to value the interests of the state and to function to sustain it. Such indoctrination begins in kindergarten. Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1972) coined the term the organization child to refer to the child in nursery school who is most comfortable with supervision, guidance, and adult control. Teachers cultivate the organization child by providing daily routines and rewarding those who conform. In essence, teachers train future workers to be obedient to authority.

Further, to conflict theorists, education serves as a mechanism for cultural imperialism, or the indoctrination into the dominant culture of a society. When cultural imperialism exists, the norms, values, traditions, and languages of minorities are systematically ignored. For example, in his analysis of the development of the educational system in Ontario in the mid-1800s, Neil McDonald emphasized how education was seen as crucial for maintaining dominant ideologies. He notes that the chief architect of the Ontario school system, Egerton Ryerson, purposefully set out to create a system in which “young people would remain loyal to the Crown … never participate in the kind of rebellion which had been put down in Upper Canada in 1837, and … cooperate with one another, regardless of their social class backgrounds.” Through education, the working class were to be persuaded that “their interests were also those of the middle and upper classes and that, as a collectivity, there was a ‘common’ or ‘public good’ towards which all must work” (McDonald, as cited in Curtis and Lambert 1994: 12). As Curtis and Lambert (1994: 12) remark, “In short, Ryerson’s objective was social control, and he charged the schools with the responsibility of inculcating the beliefs and attitudes of mind that would accomplish it.”

Traditionally, the school curriculum has not given voice to the perspective of minority groups, including women. Moreover, the cultural genocide promoted within the residential schools for Canada’s Indigenous peoples must be recognized as one of the bleakest notes in the history of Canadian education. As only one example, Native students who dared to speak their own language were routinely punished by having a sewing needle pushed through their tongue. This practice was known as the “needle torture.”

In her 1993 book Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School, Celia Haig-Brown provides a historical overview of the goals of pre-Confederation Canada, and the colonial view that European culture was superior to that of the Native groups already established in Canada. Haig-Brown reports that the province of Canada in 1847 published a report that set the directions in policy for Indian Education. Clearly expressed in the report is a perceived-as-obvious need “to raise [aboriginal people] to the level of the whites” (Province of Canada report quoted in Haig-Brown 1993: 29). Haig-Brown summarizes the general recommendations of the report that Indians were to be held under jurisdiction of the Crown rather than of colonial provinces, that efforts to convert Native peoples to Christianity continue to be asserted, and that schools were to be established under the guidance of missionaries. In essence, cultural genocide was written in educational policy. Within the discussion of the recommendations is the following comment:

• Their education must consist not merely of the training of the mind, but of a weaning from the habits and feelings of their ancestors, and the acquirements of the language, arts and customs of civilized life. (Haig-Brown 1993: 29)

These goals, initially set by the colonial province of Canada with the specific and targeted objective of the acculturation of Indigenous people, remained in operation until the last residential schools in Canada closed in 1996 in Saskatchewan, where they were still operating as the last holdouts of colonialist education programs aimed at erasing Indigenous culture and language in Canada. In other words, although the popular, shared memory in dominant Canadian circles usually imagines residential schools as a thing of the distant past, a large population of young adult Native people in Canada are contemporary survivors of the genocidal aims of the residential school system.

Finally, the conflict perspective focuses on what Kozol (1991) calls the “savage inequalities” in education that perpetuate racial inequality. Change must come in classroom practices that recognize cultural variability. As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explains, every child arrives in the classroom with his or her own very rich cultural capital, which includes language, artistic tastes, specific knowledge, and links to community and to resources outside the school (Brooks and Thompson 2005). However, the cultural capital of all students is not equally valued; it is a matter not of student shortcomings, but of highly constraining curricula that do not value what children from marginalized groups have to offer the classroom. Brooks and Thompson (2005: 49) explain:

• Focusing on the academic curriculum to the exclusion of the social curriculum constricts learning for all students. But it does the most harm to students of low socio-economic status, who may depend on teachers to bridge the gap between their own cultural capital and the mainstream …

Although we are faced with increasingly tight curricula and testing measures, Brooks and Thompson argue that we can still incorporate considerations about social justice. We can invite and include student contributions on, for example, the important people and occupations in their communities, even if those positions are not accorded “high status” in the mainstream view.