Functionalists view education as a system that fulfills crucial societal needs. It transmits cultural values and knowledge (socialization), prepares individuals for various roles (social integration), promotes order and stability (social control), and equips individuals with workforce skills (economic development).
Key Takeaways
- Functionalism: Society’s institutions and roles all serve a function. Durkheim was the first sociologist to formalize this functionalist view.
- Durkheim: Education reflects a society’s own needs and customs. It instils shared values, socializes children, and teaches the skills a division of labor requires.
- Schultz: Education is also an investment people make in themselves, to gain access to higher-paying, higher-status jobs.
The Functionalist View of Society
Functionalism is what sociologists call a structural-consensus theory. By structural, sociologists mean that functionalists argue that there exists a social structure that shapes individual behavior through the process of socialization.
Functionalists believe that all of the institutions, roles, norms, and so on of a society serve a purpose beneficial, if not indispensable for, the long-term survival of the society.
The theory rose to prominence in the works of 19th-century sociologists who viewed societies as organisms.
Emile Durkheim, for instance, argued that it was necessary to understand the needs of the social organism to which social phenomena correspond (Pope, 1975).
1. Socialization and Social Solidarity (Durkheim)
Emile Durkheim believed that schools are essential for imprinting shared social values into children. The education system meets a functional pre-request of society by passing on the culture and values of society.
This is achieved through the hidden curriculum and PSHE lessons. The hidden curriculum is the informal learning embedded in a school’s everyday routines, distinct from the taught academic content.
This helps to build social solidarity: a sense of belonging to, and commitment toward, the wider society. It teaches students the core values of society.
Durkheim discussed the phenomenon of education as a social fact. He considered education social in nature, origins, and functions. He opposed the idea of one perfect educational system for all societies.
Instead, Durkheim argues that education varies at each stage of a society’s development. Every society needs its own system, fitted to its own needs and customs (Durkheim, 1956).
This can be studied sociologically. Education, Durkheim held, is the influence adult generations exert on the young, who are not yet ready for social life.
Its aim is to develop the child’s physical, intellectual, and moral character. Both society as a whole, and the specific role a child will occupy, demand this (Durkheim, 1956).
By this definition, education methodically socializes the younger generation. It does so in two ways: it transmits society’s shared values, and teaches the skills a division-of-labor economy needs (Durkheim, 1956).
Durkheim believed this created enough homogeneity for society to survive. It did so by instilling social solidarity: a sense of belonging to wider society, a commitment to its goals, and a felt connection to it.
Durkheim argued that, to become attached to society, children must feel intimately connected and committed to the society. He believed that teaching history in particular accomplished this (Durkheim, 1956).
Teaching Social Roles
Durkheim also argued that schools in complex societies teach children how to cooperate with people who are neither kin nor friends. Neither family nor friendship groups can teach that lesson.
Thus, school is the only institution that can prepare children for membership in wider society. It applies one set of rules to every child.
Much of this training happens through the hidden curriculum: the informal learning, distinct from the taught academic content, embedded in a school’s everyday routines, rules, and relationships. Sociologist Philip Jackson (1968) coined the term, describing it as the “unpublicised features of school life.”
Functionalists read routines like queuing, following a timetable, and deferring to a teacher’s authority as necessary training for adult life. This is not busywork.
Learning that competitions have winners and losers prepares children for a competitive labour market. Learning to work in groups builds the capacity to cooperate in teams later on.
Marxist and feminist writers see it differently. To them, it is ideological control, not useful training. On the functionalist reading, though, the hidden curriculum is simply the informal half of Durkheim’s socialization project: the values a school teaches without ever putting them on a syllabus.
2. The Division of Labor
Durkheim argued that education’s crucial function in an advanced industrial economy is the teaching of specialized skills required for a complex division of labor.
In traditional, pre-industrialised societies, skills could be passed on through family or direct apprenticeships. This means that formal education in school was not necessary.
However, because factory-based production involves the application of advanced scientific knowledge, years of formal education in schools became more necessary.
Education was also essential to modern societies in Durkheim’s view because social solidarity is largely based on the interdependence of specialized skills.
Just as social solidarity rests on cooperation between people with different skills, school offers an ideal environment for that. It teaches children to work together. They also learn to socialize with people from different backgrounds.
3. Developing Human Capital (Schultz)
Another functionalist perspective on education is that of T.W. Schultz. Schultz viewed the function of education as the development of human capital.
Investment in education benefits the wider economy, as education can provide properly trained, qualified and flexible workforce.
To Schultz, human capital was the acquisition of all of the useful skills and knowledge needed for a deliberate investment. Schultz considered much of the investment that people do to be for human capital.
For example, direct expenditures on education and health, as well as earnings foregone by mature students attending school and workers doing training on-the-job are all examples of human capitals.
Human capital is one such investment. It refers to the useful skills and knowledge a person builds through schooling and training.
This idea was controversial at the time. People make this investment to gain access to better-paying jobs, spend less time unemployed, and move faster into the career they want (Wahrenburg & Weldi, 2007).
Schultz was arguing against the economic orthodoxy of his time. It treated spending on education and health as pure consumption. He proposed instead that such spending is an investment, comparable in kind to investment in machinery or land (Schultz, 1961).
The comparison is deliberate.
Human-capital theory gives the functionalist account of education its clearest link to economic growth. Durkheim asked what education does for social cohesion. Schultz asked what it does for growth, output, and individual earnings (Schultz, 1961).
The theory has attracted its own scrutiny. Signalling and credentialist critiques argue that a qualification may simply be a costly-to-fake signal of ability, rather than proof that school built the skill being certified.
The link between years of schooling and individual economic success is, in fact, far weaker than Schultz’s model implies (Wahrenburg & Weldi, 2007).
4. Role Allocation (Davis and Moore)
The education system provides a means to selecting and sifting people into the social hierarchy. In a meritocratic society access to jobs and power, wealth and status are directly linked to educational achievement.
Davis and Moore examined education through the lens of role allocation: the way the education system sifts and sorts people by demonstrated ability. They believed education matches people to fitting roles.
For example, the higher monetary and status rewards for those who have the jobs of, say, a doctor or a pilot encourage competition.
Accordingly, Davis and Moore believed that education sifts and sorts people according to their ability (Grandjean & Bean, 1975).
Their argument, one of the most influential and most disputed in the whole functionalist tradition, is worth setting out in full.
- Aim: Davis and Moore (1945) set out to explain why social stratification (the unequal distribution of a society’s rewards across social positions) is a universal feature of every known human society, rather than an accident or an injustice.
- Method: the paper is theoretical, deductive sociology, not an empirical study. Davis and Moore reasoned from a premise: some social positions are functionally more important to a society’s survival than others, and filling them requires scarce talent plus a long, costly period of training.
- Findings: because able people will only endure demanding training if compensated for the effort and delayed earnings involved, society must attach differential rewards, higher pay, prestige, and power, to its more important positions. The education system performs this sifting and sorting, identifying talent through exams and qualifications and allocating people to the role that matches their demonstrated ability (Grandjean & Bean, 1975).
- Conclusion: stratification, and the education system that services it, is a functional necessity rather than a dysfunction to be reformed away.
- Evaluation: the theory has been contested since its publication, because its logic seems to supply a ready-made justification for existing inequality. Grandjean and Bean’s (1975) empirical study of popular attitudes to stratification found only partial support for Davis and Moore’s reasoning. A further problem is circularity: the theory infers a position’s “functional importance” largely from the size of the reward attached to it, which risks assuming the very conclusion it sets out to prove.
5. Bridge between Family and Society
Parsons believed that schools provide a link between the family and wider society. This lets students move from the ascribed status and particularistic values of the home to the meritocratic and universalistic values of wider society.
Parsons viewed education as part of meritocracy. In a meritocratic system, everyone has equality of opportunity.
Achievements and rewards are based on effort and ability (achieved status), rather than on the situation of one’s birth and upbringing (ascribed status). Education, on this view, instills competition, equality, and individualism.
Ascribed and Achieved Status
Education is a secondary agent of socialization. It builds a bridge between family and society. Within the family, children are judged by their own parents’ standards.
In wider society, however, people are judged by universal standards that apply to everyone, regardless of kinship (Parsons, 1937). A child’s status inside the family is ascribed: fixed by birth.
Status in adult life is, in part, achieved instead. Occupational skill is one example.
Children must move from their family’s ascribed status to the achieved, universal status of wider society. School manages this transition, Parsons argued, by representing society in miniature.
Schools also instill the values of achievement and equal opportunity that advanced industrial societies need from a motivated, skilled workforce. Both low and high achievers accept the system as fair.
Status is supposedly earned, after all, under conditions of equal opportunity (Parsons, 1937).
Parsons’s wider theory holds that every society must meet four functional prerequisites: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency.
He placed education chiefly under integration: reducing conflict and building belonging across a diverse population. He also placed it under latency.
This meant transmitting and maintaining society’s shared values through socialization (Parsons, 1937; Parsons & Bales, 1956).
Is the Meritocracy Real? The Saunders–Breen/Goldthorpe Debate
Parsons’s account rests on an empirical claim: that schools really do allocate status mainly by achievement, not family background. Sociologist Peter Saunders tested this claim directly.
- Aim: Saunders (1996) set out to test whether Britain genuinely operates as a meritocracy, where occupational success reflects ability and effort rather than the class a person was born into.
- Method: Saunders analysed the National Child Development Study, a large British birth-cohort study that had also measured childhood ability and later effort. This let him model how much of the link between class origin and class destination survives once ability and effort are taken into account.
- Findings: once measured ability and effort were controlled for, Saunders found the direct effect of class origin on class destination was comparatively small.
- Conclusion: Saunders concluded that Britain’s occupational hierarchy was, to a substantial degree, allocated by merit rather than by birth.
Richard Breen and John Goldthorpe (1999) reanalysed the same dataset and reached a different conclusion. Ability and effort mattered, they agreed, but a strong direct effect of class origin remained even after both were controlled for.
Two children with identical ability and effort, but different class backgrounds, still faced very different odds of reaching a high-status position. The exchange matters.
Breen and Goldthorpe’s reanalysis is generally seen as the more careful of the two, and it has shaped social-mobility research since.
Parsons’s meritocratic bridge, in other words, is not a settled fact. It is a live, contested claim, decades after Parsons first proposed it.
6. New Right and Neoliberal Perspectives on Education
A related tradition, the New Right (also called neoliberal sociology of education), shares functionalism’s view of what education is for. It disagrees sharply, though, about how education should be organized.
The disagreement runs deep.
New Right thinkers and functionalists both want education to keep pace with the economy and produce a technically competent workforce. Both also want it to transmit a shared cultural identity and instil competition and hard work. They part company over the role of the state.
Functionalists such as Durkheim and Parsons assumed that a state-run system, staffed by trained professionals, is well placed to deliver these things. New Right thinkers argue instead that state-run education is inefficient, unresponsive to parents and employers, and prone to serving educators rather than pupils.
Chubb and Moe: The Case for Market-Based Schools
The American political scientists John Chubb and Terry Moe (1990) developed the most influential New Right case for restructuring state education along market lines. Their argument was blunt.
State schools, they said, answer to no one.
They argued that state education in the United States had become unresponsive to students, parents, and the wider economy. This failure, they said, contributed to high youth unemployment by failing to prepare an employable workforce.
Something had to change.
Privately-funded education must please its “customers” to survive. That is the whole point. Market discipline, the threat that dissatisfied parents will take their custom elsewhere, forces schools to keep improving.
On this basis, Chubb and Moe recommended giving parents education vouchers to spend at a school of their choosing, forcing state schools to compete for funding or close. This shift toward treating parents as consumers of education became known as parentocracy.
New Right Policy in Britain
Britain took note.
New Right thinking shaped British education policy substantially from the 1980s onward. Vocational education was reformed to try to equip young people with the skills employers wanted, aiming to cut youth unemployment.
England’s 1988 Education Reform Act introduced marketisation into state education. Funding formulas were changed so that popular schools received more money, while funding was withdrawn from “failing” schools, creating competitive pressure between institutions.
Like functionalists, New Right educationalists also supported a national curriculum, meant to transmit a shared national cultural identity alongside citizenship values.
The approach has drawn two main lines of criticism. Parental choice, Marxist critics argue, tends to reproduce existing class inequality rather than level the playing field. Middle-class parents are best placed to use their resources to secure places at the best schools.
The record is mixed. More directly, evidence from the UK and US has generally failed to support the claim that marketisation reliably raises standards. Many academies and charter schools set up under these reforms have themselves been criticised for poor-quality education.
Criticisms of the Functionalist Perspective on Education
Functionalist perspectives on education have been criticized for several reasons:
General Criticism
Firstly, functionalists ignore dysfunctional aspects of education, such as negative conflict. Sociologists have also noted that the functionalist view is more applicable in societies with a single dominant and shared culture.
In multicultural societies with, say, different ethnic groups with different cultures and values, it may be difficult to reconcile differences through education.
Furthermore, functionalists tend to assume that education successfully socializes individuals. However, numerous studies suggest that not all pupils conform to the values taught by school.
Marxists have put forth a notable critique of functionalism. Bowles and Gintis (1976) argued that education perpetuates a “meritocracy myth”: that success or failure reflects only one’s own effort. That claim is false: factors such as race and class heavily shape a person’s opportunities and achievement.
Feminists have taken up another Marxist idea: the hidden curriculum. This is the notion that schools teach values through their structure, not just through what is explicitly taught. This maintains and reinforces patriarchy, not meritocracy (Acker, 1987).
Outside of Marxism, the sociologist Wong criticized functionalism for seeing children as passive puppets of socialization when the process is much more complex and involves teacher-pupil relationships.
There is also, ultimately, a weak link between educational achievement and economic success (Wahrenburg & Weldi, 2007).
Criticism of Durkheim
There are several reasons why scholars have criticized Durkheim’s functionalist perspective on education. For example, postmodernists question Durkheim’s assumption that society needs shared values at all.
In many countries, such as the United States, it is debatable whether a single culture exists at all. Some communities remain largely cut off from the mainstream.
Marxists, meanwhile, criticize the relationship Durkheim assumes between school and work. Durkheim treats school as a neutral institution that transmits values and skills so economies can function.
Marxists disagree. They argue that schools teach working-class children to be passive and to submit to authority, making them easier to exploit later in life (Bowles & Gintis, 1976).
Criticism of Parsons
The main criticisms of Parsons’ view on education come from Marxism, and particularly the idea that schools are meritocratic. In reality, even in situations where schools may treat pupils the same way, inequalities within the class structure result in unequal opportunities.
For example, a working-class child may have less access to quality education than a child from a wealthier family. The gap is not academic; it is economic.
Wealthier parents can pay for tutoring and enrollment in elite schools and preparatory institutions.
Ultimately, this widens pre-existing class inequality. Wealthy parents maintain their hold on intergenerational wealth by giving their children stronger economic opportunities through higher educational achievement (Morrow & Torres, 1995).
Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital helps explain why this gap persists even when schools apply the same formal rules to everyone. Middle-class children arrive at school already equipped with the tastes, language, and habits the school rewards.
Contemporary Research
Classical functionalists mostly assumed that education either does, or should, allocate status by merit. The most recent wave of empirical sociology asks a different question: why do people go on believing education is meritocratic, regardless of whether the system actually is fair?
One study anchors the answer.
Why Do People Believe Education Is Meritocratic?
Mijs (2021) drew on twenty-five years of International Social Survey Programme data, spanning dozens of countries, to track how citizens explain economic success and failure. He measured how far people attribute outcomes to individual merit versus structural factors such as family wealth and connections.
The finding is counterintuitive. The more unequal a society becomes, the more, not less, likely its citizens are to explain success and failure in meritocratic terms. This pattern held consistently across societies and time periods.
The pattern surprised researchers.
Mijs (2021) argues that rising inequality gains legitimacy precisely through this growing belief that outcomes are fair and merit-based. Inequality becomes easier to accept, in other words, once people believe winners and losers simply deserve their positions.
How Belief in Meritocracy Shapes Attitudes to Inequality
Batruch, Jetten, van de Werfhorst, Darnon, and Butera (2022) sharpened this mechanism at the level of the school itself. Across a correlational study, an experiment, and two large international surveys covering more than 88,000 respondents in over 40 countries, they tested this mechanism directly.
The scale is unusual.
A stronger institutional belief in school meritocracy, they found, is linked to reduced perceived unfairness of inequality. Belief matters.
Believers were also less supportive of both affirmative-action policies and policies aimed at reducing income inequality. Read together, the two studies converge on an uncomfortable conclusion for functionalism: belief in educational meritocracy is not just a description of how schools sort pupils.
It is an active ingredient that shapes how citizens judge, and tolerate, the inequality that results.
References
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Batruch, A., Jetten, J., van de Werfhorst, H. G., Darnon, C., & Butera, F. (2022). Belief in school meritocracy and the legitimization of social and income inequality. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 14(5), 621–635. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506221111017
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