Education Essays – Educational Lottery

Is it truly the harder you work the further you get in instruction or is it an “ educational lottery ” whereby your academic hereafter is pre-determined before birth.
Abstraction
This paper aims to look at the extent that the instruction system in the UK can best be regarded as a meritocracy based on difficult work and diligence or a societal lottery whereby pupils are channeled into socially pre-determined functions and degrees of accomplishment. In order to organize my research in a manner that is commensurate with methodological and expositional unity I will try to prove my hypothesis through a typical thesis-antithesis-synthesis construction ; detailing foremost the history environing province instruction, secondly the assorted strains of Liberal teaching method that assert its meritocratic character and thirdly how Marxist and Neo-Conservative theory refutes this and positions province run instruction as a mechanism of societal control and work force filtering.

Throughout I will put these theoretical impressions into a current political context utilizing a assortment of beginnings that includes informations refering the sum of preschool topographic points available to kids in interior metropolis and hapless countries, the educational disparities between the races and genders and the degrees of Higher instruction support that is allocated by organic structures such as the AHRC. I will besides do usage of the many authorities documents and paperss that have been published since 1997.
Introduction: State Run – State Issues
The Introduction to this paper will concentrate on the peculiar jobs and issues that arise when instruction is inducted into the province. The modern instruction system, in Britain, can be said to hold begun with theElementary Education Actof 1870 ( Haralambos and Holborn, 2004 ; Curtis and Boultwood, 1967 ) , it was this Act that foremost advocated a system of school boards that oversaw the course of study and teaching method of local schools and led finally to theFisher Actof 1918 that made school compulsory ( McKibbin, 1998 ) .
The recent authorities paperssYoung person Matters( 2005 ) and the model for theNational Skills Academy( 2005 ) represent what is a changeless hostility in British pedagogical policy ; on the one manus asseverating the primacy of a Liberal educational foundation and on the other the demand to bring forth a work force for all the assorted degrees of employment strata. This subdivision of the paper will analyze this hostility as it manifests itself in current authorities thought, pulling on these two recent policy paperss every bit good as other cardinal beginnings ( Salisbury and Riddell, 2000 ; Cole, 2000 ; Smithers and Robinson, 2000 ; Levinson, 1999 ) .
It is hoped that this debut will give a house anchoring in current Government policy and will besides supply a stable footing for the treatment to come.
Chapter One: The Liberal Ideal
This chapter will supply the thesis component of my paper and will take the signifier of an expounding upon Liberal educational theory and how it is reflected in the modern system. In many ways the Government’sYoung person Matters( 2005 ) papers can be seen as an entry point into such Broad theory that centres around impressions originally developed by John Dewey in the early portion of the 20th century ( Dewey, 2005 ; Dewey, 2000 etc. ) .
This point of view non merely asserts the intrinsic value of instruction but besides sees advancement as a merchandise of difficult work and diligence irrespective of gender, category or race ( DfES, 2005: 9 ) . Commensurate with this argument is the review of the three-party system of instruction that comprised of grammar, secondary modern and proficient colleges and that formed the footing of the work of Halsey, Floud and Anderson ( 1961 ) .
In order to prove such theories I will analyze Government statistics on non merely exam consequences ( DfES, 2004 ) but besides the National Curriculum appraisals ( DfES, 2005 [ Provisional ] ) , Student Loan information ( DfES, 2005 ) , Higher Education Grants ( DfES, 2005 ) and a host of other Government published documents that assert the proliferation of what I have termed the ‘Liberal Ideal’ . This chapter aims, through a treatment of Broad policy, to foreground the extent that current instruction system does so intend that the harder you work to foster you acquire.