Social Class and Education

From The Upshot, Ny Times, this interactive site allows you to see what percent of students from the top 1% and bottom 60% attend each school of higher education.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html

This graph shows where students from different social classes end up after high school:

Review for Final

Here is a list of concepts to review.  Talk through them.  Explain them to someone.  Also, read through my explanation of the course narrative.  Hopefully that helps you put the concepts into perspective.

Terms for Review:

social construction of reality

sociological imagination

sociological Mindfulness

ingroups

categories/generalizing

stereotypes

sociological research

culture

norms

folkways

mores

taboos

values

socialization

nature and nurture

agents of socialization

gender

masculinity

femininity

deviance

social class

race

racism

explicit bias

implicit bias

Course Narrative

Unit 1:  Introduction to the Sociological Perspective

            The sociological perspective is viewing individuals as members of different groups and recognizing how these groups shape individuals.  There are a number of theories that help establish this perspective.  Social construction of reality is the idea that society/people create how we feel about things and how we experience the world.  Sociological imagination is the connection between history and biography, or a person is who they are because of when and where they live.  Sociological Mindfulness is taking our knowledge of sociology and applying them to our own life; it is realizing that we are impacted by society and we also play a role in society.  Another way that sociologists understand how individuals are influenced is by looking at the groups that individual’s belong to.  Each group is an ingroup for the individual and it shapes them.  These groups are categories which we make generalizations about if we use scientific methods to study the group.  If the generalizations are not accurate or are applied too broadly, they may become stereotypes.

Unit 2:  Culture

            Culture is perhaps the most pervasive group membership that shapes individuals.  It is so omnipresent that it affects all groups the individual is part of.  Because of that, culture is important to understand and to take a step back from in order to see the whole picture.  Culture shapes everything about how individuals act and even think.  The second part of this unit focuses specifically on culture in the United States and how students have been shaped by the values of our culture.

Unit 3:  Socialization

            After learning the importance of understanding culture, socialization helps students understand how the process of being shaped takes place.  The process of socialization begins even before childbirth and continues throughout one’s life.  Many taken-for-granted aspects of being human are really learned from a young age.  This is true in how we learn about our gender as well.  Females and males learn to act differently and learn that there are different expectations for them from childhood.  We explore the negative impact that our constructions of masculinity and femininity have on young men and women.  Then we examine how to change individuals drastically once they are shaped by society – that change is resocialization. 

Unit 4: Deviance and Social Class

            This unit begins with an understanding of what deviance is; that is, when someone breaks the norms of society.  In other words, deviance is when individuals go against the socialization process.  Using William Chambliss’s study called The Saints and the Roughnecks, I connect deviance to social class and perception.  Using this connection, we explore how the prison system has exploded over the last 20 years especially with those from lower income social classes.  This leads into what creates social class and how individuals are affected by it, especially how the poor are affected by their poverty.

Unit 5:  Race

            Race is, like gender, a taken-for-granted social construction that people assume is natural or biological.  However, there is no scientific way to discretely categorize humans into distinct racial groups – not through DNA or any other traits.  Race is a social construction that changes depending on where or when you live.  However, even though race does not exist biologically, it does exist as a social construction which has enormous impacts on individuals.  The impacts can be in the form of prejudice or discrimination and explicit or implicit bias.  One type of implicit bias is through institutional racism.  This is also a form of white privilege.