Q.In what ways does the chapter suggest that schools promote ‘standardisation’ among students? Illustrate with an example.
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →The chapter argues that modern schools promote standardisation -- treating every student, in principle, according to the same rules and content regardless of background -- because modern societies rest on abstract, universalistic values rather than the particularistic values (family, caste, religion) that simpler societies rely on; the school uniform is the chapter's own clearest example.
Modern, complex societies, the chapter argues, rest on abstract, universalistic values -- values meant to apply to everyone in principle, in the same way -- in contrast to simple societies, which rely more on particularistic values rooted in family, kin, tribe, caste or religion, where what applies to a person depends heavily on which specific group they belong to. Schools are one of the central institutions through which societies attempt to instil these universalistic values in the next generation, and they do so partly through deliberate standardisation.
Emile Durkheim's account of education explains why: no society, he argued, can survive without a shared foundation of ideas, sentiments and practices that education must instil in all children indiscriminately, to whatever social category they belong. Standardisation is the mechanism through which schools try to build this shared foundation -- by exposing every enrolled student, at least formally, to the same curriculum, the same rules of conduct and the same routines, schools aim to produce citizens who share enough common ground to function together as one society, rather than remaining divided along the particularistic lines of family, caste or community background they arrived with.
The chapter's own example of this is the school uniform: requiring every student to wear identical clothing, regardless of their family's wealth or background, is a direct, visible expression of the idea that within the school, students are to be treated as formally equivalent to one another. Beyond dress, the same logic extends to a common timetable, a shared syllabus, common examinations, and a single, school-wide code of discipline -- all of which subject every student to an identical set of expectations irrespective of their particular starting point, and which together promote what the chapter calls standardised aspirations among the student body. …
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