Is what we learn in school useful?

After today’s class, I would like to discuss some of Marx’s and Collins’ ideas about education. Marx believed that everyone has a predestined place in the economy. Therefore, children of upper class families would be streamed into more academic courses, whereas children of the working class would end up in classes like shop. I find this to be absolutely ridiculous. For one, who says that children of upper class parents are smarter than those of working class parents? And two, who says shop classes and things ‘better suited for working class people’ are easy? I would consider myself a fairly smart student, however if I was asked to do a task that an electrician or a mechanic could do, there is absolutely no way I would have the knowledge or ability to do it. All these upper class ‘smart’ people have other people do everything for them. So how smart can they really be? I do not believe at all that social class 100% determines where you are going to go in life. Like the functionalist point of view, people with talent should be able to display that, use it, and rise to the top, no matter what social class they come from.

There is also the discussion about the point that there is a weak link between the skills and knowledge obtained from school and what is actually used and useful for jobs. Collins said that a large percent of what you do in school is useless for the job, and that even if skills you learn are relevant to a job, you might not remember them anyways by the time you have the job. On this topic we also watched the video about the ‘5 minute university’. I can’t lie and say that I believe everything we learn in school will be useful to us in the future. I completely agree with the fact that we don’t remember a lot of the things we learn. For example, I could not tell you one bit of information that I studied in anthropology 1000 4 years ago in my first year of university. I obtained an A in the class therefore obviously did well at the time. However if I was asked now, what I learned or did in that class, I wouldn’t be able to say anything. I also don’t believe it is as simple as the 5 minute university although I did find that rather humorous. But there is truth in that we take a lot of courses that aren’t really going to help us with our future jobs. About the comment that we aren’t going to remember most of what we learned 5 years later, if ‘you’ want us to remember what we learn, don’t have a class simply based on tests, especially non-cumulative tests. If for 4 months, all we do is listen to a lecture, take notes, and write a few tests, that is pure memorization and something we most definitely will not remember 5 years later, never mind 5 months or 5 minutes after writing the test. Anyways that is just my opinion. Therefore I partially agree with the conflict theorists, but more strongly agree with the functionalist point of view.