1. Schools as Organizations
2. Curriculum and Pedagogy
3. Equality of Opportunity
4. Educational Inequality
5. Educational Reform
6. Ch. 2 - Politics of Education
6.1. Purposes of Schooling
6.1.1. The Intellectual - To teach basic cognitive skills such as reading, writing, and mathematics, and to help students acquire higher order thinking skills such as analysis and evalluation.
6.1.2. The Political - To prepare citizens who will participate in the political order, and to teach children the basic laws of the society.
6.1.3. The Social - To help solve social problems, to ensure social cohesion. The process of socialization, a key ingredient to the stability of any society.
6.1.4. The Economic - To prepare students for their later role in occupation. To train individuals into the division of labor, or, to prepare students to work.
6.2. Political Perspectives
6.2.1. The Conservative Perspective - Looks at the social evaluation the enables the strongest individuals or groups to survive. The belief that the free market of capitalism is the most economically productive system that is most respectful of human needs.
6.2.2. The Liberal Perspective - Concerned primarily with balancing the economic productivity of capitalism with the social and economic needs of the majority of the people in the U.S.
6.2.3. The Radical Perspective - Does not believe in free market capitalism, but it believes that democratic socialism is a more fair economic political system. they believe that the capitalist system is the center of the U.S. social problems.
6.3. The Role of the School
6.3.1. The school's role is directly concerned with the aims, purposes, and functions of education in a society.