The school-society relationship

In sociological thinking, the relationship between the formal educational process and class society is viewed from various perspectives.

In Dewey’s conception, for example, education is a necessity that guarantees the continuity of human life, through the constant transmission of the experiences accumulated by the group to the new generations, which must fulfill the social function of producing a “fully developed” human being. That is why it is considered by him a positive social instance.

Dewey stresses the importance of education that integrates natural development with social efficiency. Such a conception of man, combined with a conception of education that produces this man, would occur in a broader context of defining the ideal society, the democratic society. In this society, socialization would be the process that exposes the individual to scientific thinking, leading him to a more rational view of the world.

At the other extreme, some theorists denounce the reprehensible results of the educational process, according to them, the school plays an ideologizing role, that is, through a subtle imposition, it leads students to acquire a vision of the world compatible with the maintenance of class society; thus, it is at the service of the interests of the groups that in this social formation monopolize economic, social, political and cultural power.

Underlying these two extreme ways of conceiving the social role of school education are the two most representative theoretical tendencies of sociological thought.

Functionalism, which has its most important representative in Durkheim, is integration as its constitutive principle. It is historical materialism, formulated by Marx and continued by others, which has as its constitutive principle the principle of contradiction.

For Durkheim, education has the function of constituting a solidary social being in each new individual, “there is no people in which there is not a certain number of ideas, feelings and practices that education should inculcate in all children”. On the other hand, educational diversity is fully justified in a society in which it is imperative to train different individuals to perform different functions. And, in Durkheim’s thinking, the criterion for allocating a student to a certain type of education is not his social origin, but his individual aptitudes (coherence with his organic model of explaining the social).

The economic doctrine of those who defend the free development of individual interests, without state limitation, as a system to achieve social and private well-being is liberalism, which has individualism as a corollary. Doctrine in which the deep roots of Brazilian educational thought are found.

Beliefs embraced by liberalism are that it is possible to create a class society in which individuals voluntarily choose the path that leads to a particular social position in life. In liberal ideas, the concept of freedom translates at a political level into the concept of democracy.

Liberal ideals passed to educational plans (the role that the school would play in class society) through public instruction projects that had as their basic assumption the belief that equal opportunities would be promoted through free, compulsory and egalitarian public instruction. It would be up to the state to assume the debt of national education to control education and instruct, guaranteeing everyone the right to education.

Education would therefore be the great equalizer of conditions among men, the neutralizing factor of social inequalities, made possible by the state.

In the thinking of liberal philosophers, social ascension depends solely and exclusively on individual abilities, and there cannot be social equality among men because this equality does not exist at the individual level, that is, social inequalities in a liberal social regime are attributable to individual inequalities natural.

The myth of equal opportunity, guaranteed by state-funded education, has taken deep root in educational thinking. This version of social life is at the heart of the most influential educational doctrines of the day.

If, for Durkheim, the fundamental characteristic of “complex societies” is organic solidarity and the integration of the social whole resulting therefrom, for Marx, these societies are based on a contradiction: the existence of the proletariat and the capitalist, of those who produce and those who they appropriate the result of production, whose interests are irreconcilable.

Marx departs from the material world towards understanding the mental and cultural universe, demonstrating that it is not men’s ideas about the world and about themselves that determine the way they act socially, but that it is their social action that determines these ideas. Consciousness is the product of real conditions of existence and the economic infrastructure determines the cultural dimension.

In materialist thought, the world of action is not separate from the world of ideas, nor is it determined by it. Man does not just produce objects; at the same time that he produces objects, he produces social relations and produces ideas that justify these relations.

Where relations of domination govern, culture is not a heritage common to all, an undivided set of norms and standards that express collective thought, but “a dimension of domination”, which takes on the task of making the real order intelligible and promotes it according to its historical logic, by covering it with meaning for the agents of domination relations.

The class that has the means of material production also has the means of intellectual production, producing ideas that regulate the production and distribution of the thoughts of its time.

Due to the very structural conditions of the capitalist system, democracy, in its bourgeois sense, never reached and will never reach its ideals of equality, freedom and fraternity. But, the dissemination of belief in this possibility, after all, apparently true, in a class society, it is essential to maintain the system and the interests of the groups and the class that hold power.

In this context, “indiscipline”, “disorder” and social conflicts, far from being symptoms of disorganization, crisis or anomie, are inevitable expressions of something inherent to the system: the presence of contradictions.

The process of ideologization is carried out by and in the cultural institutions among which the school is found. It is thanks to this ideologizing action that production relations are reproduced and this is the dominant role of education in a class society and not, as Durkheim wants, that of simply introducing young people into society’s modus vivendi.

The State Apparatus is constituted by the Repressive State Apparatus (the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons) and by the Ideological State Apparatuses, corresponding to a multitude of social institutions, no matter if they are of a public or private (the Church, the School, the Family, the Social Communications and Cultural Institutions, among others) but which have a common denominator: the fact that they function mainly through the dominant ideology, fulfilling the function of ensuring the reproduction of relations of production. This analysis is made by both Althusser and Guilhon.

The school appears as an instrument of special importance in the orchestra of the State Ideological Apparatuses that interpret the same score: that of the dominant ideology. Its importance comes from the fact that it acts daily on individuals, at an age when they are more “vulnerable” to external formative influences.

The school, while teaching techniques and knowledge from the perspective of the dominant ideology, also teaches the rules of good manners or, in Althusser’s words, transmits the dominant ideology in its pure state (morality, civility, etc.).

In addition to fulfilling the role of qualifying the workforce, according to the system’s needs (in this role, distributing citizens among the various types of productive activities existing in society, through mechanisms that are far from neutral or liberal), the school prepares from the point of view from the point of view of attitudes, beliefs and values, agents to respect the social-technical division of labor and the rules of the order established by class domination.

The mechanisms that reproduce this result are concealed by a universal ideological representation of the school as a neutral institution devoid of ideology.

According to Establet and Baudelot, it is important to know that it is in more subtle aspects of school practices that the transmission of bourgeois ideology is more efficient: through school rituals, which transmit in the same way both contents that have a value of knowledge, as those that have an ideological function, thus neutralizing their difference. All contents are taught as school rules, which is equivalent to saying that all school practices are practices of ideological inculcation. This is because the productive use of a rule, which lends it its real knowledge value, is absent from school and school practices. According to Althusser, “knowledge is only used there in the framework of fictitious problems, manufactured within the school practice itself and with a view to its objectives: giving grades, classifying, sanctioning individuals”.

We are facing the split between theory and practice, which has its origins in the separation between manual and intellectual work. Ultimately, whether mathematics is taught or norms and moral values ​​through this split practice, we are transmitting an ideological conception of knowledge, knowledge and science, which has the ultimate effect of preventing knowledge in its truest sense. The most important question is not to know if a certain teaching content is ideological or not, because the very way they are taught guarantees their ideological nature.

The presentation of the dominant ideology as the absolute truth has as a corollary the repression, the subjection, the disguise of the proletarian ideology. Even current terms, such as “failure – success”, “normal – abnormal”, “education”, “instruction”, must be considered masks, as they hide what really happens at school.

It becomes inevitable to conclude, therefore, that the school apparatus is a place of contradiction, in which the “defects” or “failures” of functioning are the necessary reality of its functioning, and in which the use of practices becomes essential. disciplinary and coercive measures of a repressive nature.

PSYCHOLOGY AND IDEOLOGY

Psychology as a science emerges in the same context in which the school-society relationship develops, the context of the development of capitalism and the ideology that justifies it.

Ideology, for Horkheimer and Adorno, is justification, its existence presupposes the experience of a failed social condition. All sciences are born in order to modify, contradict, an existing order or system, for example…