Page 418 - Sociology and You

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Unit 4 Social Institutions
Section 1
Development and Structure of Education
Key Terms
• formal schooling
• open classroom
• cooperative learning
• integrative curriculum
• voucher system • charter schools
• magnet schools
• for-profit schools
Section
Section
Bureaucracy in Education
School administration in the early 1900s was based on a factory model of education. Educators believed that children could be and should be educated in much the same way as cars were mass produced.
Schooling came to be seen as work or the preparation for work; schools were pictured as factories, educators as industrial managers, and stu- dents as the raw materials to be inducted into the production process. The ideology of school management was recast in the mold of the busi- ness corporation, and the character of education was shaped after the image of industrial production (Cohen and Lazerson, 1972:47).
Although teachers and administrators work hard today to personalize the time you spend in school, public education in this country remains very much an impersonal bureaucratic process. Schools today are still based on specialization, rules and procedures, and impersonality.
Preview
Preview
Schools are becoming more bureaucratic. Advocates of open class- rooms and cooperative learning contend that bureaucratically run schools fail to take into account the emotional and creative needs of individual children.
The 1954 classroom on the left clearly reflects the traditional mass production approach to education. Recently, as seen in the photo at the right, there has been more of an attempt to personalize education.