To What Extent Did The 1944 Education Act Promote

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To what extent did the 1944 Education Act promote equality of opportunity for all in? Post-war Britain? During the 1950’s, shortly after World War II, there was an emphasis in the sociology of education. There was a concern about the relationship between education and social mobility of an individual. The political orientation of the researchers was liberal, and the research method was the mapping of social inequalities in educational outcomes using quantitative techniques to measure social mobility. Such an approach was 'liberal' in that inequality was opposed but its source was not, unlike the Marxists, located in the social structure. Modern societies were seen as inherently progressive and it was only archaic elements, such as class, that inhibits progress. Modification of these difficulties would produce restructure. The difficulty with this approach, as it later became clear, was that the problems identified by liberal sociologists set many educators to work in opposition to working class cultural practices. What happened with the liberal view of education is that culture is seen as a cause of inequality rather than as one of the effects. However, an advantage that liberal sociology did had was governmental confidence, as is often the case with quantitative research, and as a result, it enjoyed the freedom to engage in empirical research and had a chance to influence educational reform. The origins of the sociology of education in England grew directly out of the research interests of a number of sociologists who were primarily interested in social mobility, and in particular, with the way that arrangement of inequality persisted in education. Many studies where carried out that concentrated on the relationship between class and educational opportunity. Sociologist where very optimistic about the power education had when it came to transform society.

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