The Sociology of Education
Every day in the United States 72.7 million people gather in auditoriums, classrooms,
and laboratories, in the open air and in online chat rooms, to learn things from 4.5
million teachers, teaching assistants, lab assistants, instructors, and professors (Digest
of Educational Statistics,2006). They can learn an endless variety of subjects: Baby-
lonian cuneiform and nuclear physics, short-story writing and motorcycle repair, con-
versational Portuguese and managerial accounting, symphony conducting and cartoon
animation, existential philosophy and the gender politics of modern Japan.
Most people spend a quarter of their lives (or even more) becoming educated. If
you live to be 70, you will devote 19 percent of your life to preschool, elementary
school, and high school, and another 6 percent to college (assuming you graduate in
four years). A PhD might easily take another eight years. You would then finish your
education at age 30, with 43 percent of your life over.
Education doesn’t end at high school, college, or graduate school. Many people
return to school after they received their degree, for additional degrees, courses, and
certificates. Some want to learn a new skill or develop a new interest. And many oth-
ers depend on education for their livelihood: They become teachers, administrators,
and service personnel; they write and publish textbooks; they build residence halls
and manufacture three-ring binders; they open restaurants and clothing shops in col-
lege towns to draw student business. In the United States, we spend $550 billion a
year on elementary and secondary schools and another $200 billion on colleges and
universities (Department of Education, 2006).
Why do we do it? How does it work? How does it both enable and restrict our
own mobility?Education as a Social Institution
Sociologists define educationas a social institution through which society provides
its members with important knowledge—basic facts, job skills, and cultural norms
and values. It provides socialization, cultural innovation, and social integration. It is
accomplished largely through schooling, formal instruction under the direction of a
specially trained teacher (Ballantine, 2001).
Like most social institutions, education has both manifest (clearly apparent) and
latent (potential or hidden) functions. The manifest function is the subject matter:
reading and writing in grade school, sociology and managerial accounting in college.
Latent functions are by-products of the educational process, the norms, values, and
goals that accrue because we are immersed in a specific social milieu: Students tak-
ing ancient Greek probably differ from those taking managerial accounting in their
conceptions of what’s important in life, how people should behave. Education teaches
both a subject and a hidden curriculum:individualism and competition, conformity
to mainstream norms, obedience to authority, passive consumption of ideas, and
acceptance of social inequality (Gilborn, 1992).
In addition to teaching a subject matter and various sorts of hidden norms and
values, education establishes relationships and social networks, locating people within
social classes. Randall Collins (1979) notes that the United States is a credential
society:You need diplomas, degrees, and certificates to qualify for jobs; you can only
open a medical practice if you have a M.D. degree, regardless of how smart you are;
and you have to pass the state bar exam to practice law, regardless of how much law
you know. Diplomas, degrees, certificates, examination scores, college majors, and
the college you graduate from say “who you are” as much as family background. They
tell employers what manners, attitudes, and even skin colors the applicants are likely556 CHAPTER 17EDUCATION