psychology of childhood amended

8/2/2019 Psychology of Childhood Amended

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Sociology of Childhood 1

Running Head: SOCIOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD

Sociology of Childhood

[Name of Institution]

[Name of Student]


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Sociology of Childhood

Introduction

Childhood is a period of time which has a long lasting effect on the attributes of a person.

The future attitude of any child has its roots from the learning of this age. Therefore researchers

over the years have given special importance to the trainings done in this age.

Because the relationship between educational success and the schooling systemwith its

policies, instructional strategies, and assessmenthas long been recognized, there have been

many attempts such as educational reforms, policy changes, interventions, and research to close

the achievement gap. This report thus analyses the impact of childhood sociology on the

mentioned audience.

This report is not, however, a study of cultural artifacts from the Middle Ages and the

discovery of childhood, as Aries would have it. Nor is it an overview of expert opinion on child

rearing through the ages. The focus of this report is on the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, on the birth of statistical reasoning, and on how measurement and graphing techniques

permitted classifying, monitoring, and regulating children and parents. Science, as this report

tells, was invoked as the means to bring order and understanding to the "chaos" of childhood

(Alanen, 2001, 1122).

Childhood As One Identity, And How Class, Gender And Race Affect The Experience Of

Childhood


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Childhood - the stage of ontogenetic development of man, including the period from his

birth until the possibility of including it into adulthood. Usually a childhood comprises of

isolated periods, early childhood, preschool and early school age.

Childhood is, and has been, the basic turning point of any childs psychology and

learning. The experiences and feeling taken from this age formulate the attitude for the rest of his

life. These experiences include his interaction with class mates, fellow lads, teachers and other

people. Everybody leaves a separate impression on the childs life, it can be his language, his

action or even his approach.

The "childhood collective," consisting of parents, teachers, pediatricians, nurses, and a

variety of social reformers, adopted developmental thinking as the preeminent cognitive form

describing normal growth as a series of predictable stages. Children were thereby reduced to

numerical representations, to height-weight-age charts and visual distributions of other traits,

including intelligence and character. Means and average scores tabulated by age were used to

impute normal growth - as well as to define worrisome indicators of pathology or abnormality.

The proliferation of seemingly innocent charts and graphs led to the developmental conception

of growth and maturation, and propelled what this report refers to as "the rationalization of

childhood" in modern societies (Law, 2002, 86-92).

Emergence of Sociology Of ChildhoodResearchers believe that childhood is socially constructed. They argue that we must sever

the link between biology and childhood. The diversity in historical and crosscultural experiences

of children reveals that childhood is a social product, rooted in a culture's ideas and social


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practices, and not the biological immaturity of children. In other words, like gender, childhood is

socially contingent.

Children are often constructed as the passive recipients of social forces, with little or no

agency. This results in a failure to appreciate children's active participation in their lives.

Researchers examine the implications of the predominant Western construction of childhood. For

example, Western assumptions that children are physically and emotionally vulnerable locate

children in the private sphere and make them dependent on adults (Alanen, 2001, 1122).

Through this report we assert that while these statistical methods were widely used by

early sociologists, the sociological gaze turned away from childhood rather quickly. Psychology

became the discipline most intimately involved with human development, while sociology was

left with studying the family or schools. Simplistic theories of socialization predominated in

sociology, presuming that "society" imposed norms, values, and behavioral expectations on the

young who internalized them, thus ensuring social reproduction. Children were, however, largely

irrelevant as either a social group or as social actors. Children reentered the sociological domain

only in the last decades of the twentieth century. Anthropologist acknowledge recent efforts to

construct a "new" sociology of childhood, with children's agency and viewpoint as primary

issues, but his interests revolve around historical processes and the social technologies that

construct childhood and constrain both children and parents to be "normal." (Cherlin, et al, 1991,

138689)

While previous sociological approaches have often ignored children, seeing them as

apprentice adults or considering their subordinate social status as natural due to children's

biological immaturity, the "new" sociology of childhood has questioned these assumptions.


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Tools Used In Sociological Analysis And ResearchResearchers argue that the developmental paradigms that emerged in the early twentieth

century endure as predominant descriptions of present-day children even though they are no

longer appropriate. No doubt statistical tabulations and graphs cannot capture the diversity of

contemporary childhoods, but exactly how conceptions based on age specific averages are

inadequate is never made clear. There is little evidence that such data constitute the basis for

either intervention or authoritative advice to parents, and even less that it is actually followed.

Less than 25 percent of all pediatricians report using standardized developmental indicators as a

means for understanding or advising parents, even though their files are replete with such

information. How can either parents or children be regulated or "constrained" by developmental

data when the majority of practitioners ignore it? (Law, 2002, 86-92)

The study of children and youthor childhood studiesinvolves researchers from

diverse disciplines who theorize and conduct research on children and adolescents. Woodhead

aptly explains,

Interest in Childhood Studies is for many born out of frustration with the narrow versions of the

child offered by traditional academic discourses and methods of inquiry, especially a rejection of

the ways psychology, sociology, and anthropology traditionally partition and objectify the child

as subject to processes of development, socialization or acculturation (Cherlin, et al, 1991, 1386

89).

Since the late 1980s, sociologists have made sizable contributions to the study of children

and youth, and the field of childhood studies has become recognized as a legitimate field of

academic enquiry. Increasingly, childhood is used as a social position or a conceptual category to

study. Like women's studies, the study of children has emerged as an interdisciplinary field.


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Researchers of children from established disciplines, such as anthropology, education, history,

psychology, and sociology, have found a meeting place in this emergent interdisciplinary field of

childhood studies.

As schools reflect the ever-increasing diversity in the world, the number of students with

diverse ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds has increased dramatically

over recent decades in many countries. Many students are at risk for education failure. The gap

in academic achievement persists between minority and disadvantaged students and their White

counterparts, and this has become one of the most pressing education challenges that societies

currently face. The issue of improving these students' academic performance has become the

concern of the public, policymakers, educators, parents, and researchers and has resulted in

numerous educational reforms, debates, and studies.

Culture And Its Negotiation With Social Relationships

Culture can be understood as the traditions, customs, beliefs, values, norms, and

perspectives that are learned through shared behavioral patterns and cultural practices passed

down from generation to generation. Culture is learned implicitly, though it is the foundation for

meanings we attribute to our perceptions and it influences how we describe events. At its most

fundamental level, culture is reflected in the attitudes and behaviors that characterize a group of

people who share implicit norms and rules. Unpacking these implicit norms and rules can be

accomplished by investigating the primary components of culture: code, communication, and

community. These primary components are interrelated in constructing culture. For example, a

code is a system of rules, practices, and meanings for individuals in a specific culture. Thus, any

code is conveyed through communication among individuals belonging to the same


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communitythose individuals who demonstrate an affiliation with the implicit norms, rules, and

beliefs of one's culture. Although often associated with ethnicity, culture can be defined on many

different levels (such as by nationality, corporately, etc.). We exist as cultures within cultures

(Hardman, 1973, 8599).

Cultural and Social Construction Approaches to Childhood Studies

Anthropological cultural studies have laid important groundwork for research on

children, and sociologists have extended these initial boundaries to develop a social construction

of childhood. Anthropological research first noted that children should be recognized as an

autonomous community free of adult concerns and filled with its own stories, rules, rituals, and

social norms. Sociologists then have used the social construction approach, which draws on

social interaction theory, to include children's agency and daily activities to interpret children's

lives. Childhood is viewed as a social phenomenon. With this perspective, meaning is interpreted

through the experiences of children and the networks within which they are embedded.

Researchers generally use ethnographic methods to attain reflexivity and include children's

voices. In this section, I will first discuss the social constructivist approach of childhood research

in two areas, children's lives within institutional settings such as day care centers and schools,

and children's worlds as they are constructed through material culture (Steedman, 1990, 121-

138).

Evidence suggests that young children actively add meaning and create peer cultures

within institutional settings. For example, observations of toddler peer groups show preferences

for sex emerge by two years of age and race can be distinguished by three years of age. Research

also indicates that play builds on itself and across playgroups or peer groups. Even when the


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composition of children's groups changes, children develop rules and rituals that regulate the

continuation of the play activity as well as who may join an existing group. Knowledge is

sustained within the peer group even when there is fluctuation.

Role Of Key Institutions In Children Lives

The institutions see childhood as an element of social structure, a system of hierarchy

based on age, similar to other hierarchies of class, gender, or race. For example, because of their

inferior status children are denied autonomy, political representation, and economic wellbeing. In

other words, children are an unrecognized social minority. It considers theories of late

modernity, such as the risk society, that are very popular in contemporary British sociology

(Hardman, 1973, 8599).

Institutions have doubtless impact on child rearing and on the culture of childhood.

However, anthropologist content that categorization and visualization provided essential

normative devices influencing parent-child relations is unpersuasive. Moreover, the concept of

developmental thinking is much too broad and all-inclusive to lead to the standardization of

views or practice.

Researchers argues that much that has been written about social problems involving

children rooted in Western assumptions that children belong to the private sphere because they

are physically and morally vulnerable. For example, they argue that street children and children

using the Internet are both considered social problems because children are outside of adult

supervision and control. The state's responsibility to protect children is also linked to

assumptions of children's vulnerability.


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Reviewing Own Life Experiences And Reflecting Them On Academic Contexts Issues

In the view of local audience, the role of social science in constructing our views of

children and childhood is of great importance. While psychology and sociology have very

different approaches to understanding children, researchers argue that psychological theories of

child development share some important assumptions with structural functionalist

understandings of socialization. Both perspectives deny children their ontology by viewing them

as adults in training. A child is a human "becoming" rather than a human "being". Both

theoretical approaches view children from the perspective of the future. For example, issues such

as abuse are viewed for their impact on the future adult instead of focusing on its contemporary

impact.

We in our life explore the ways that many of the ideas of social science have been

incorporated into the education system. Because children are viewed as adults in training, school

is a requirement for Western children, as witnessed by the popularity of compulsory education in

Western societies. As apprentice adults, children have little or no input into their school

experiences (Kirst, 1993, 613616).

Local audience also considers what it means to recognize children as social agents. For

example they review ethnographic research that emphasizes children's roles as active creators of

culture. He also re-evaluates fears about new consumer technologies and finds that children are

using such technologies to create new relationships and ascribe new meanings in resistance to the

agenda of marketers. The report considers issues of researching children. It argues for a shift

from doing research on children to research with children. Its main interest is the creation of

research models that highlight and embrace children's social agency.


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The next research considers the controversial issue of children's rights. There are two

arguments that structure debates on children's rights: welfare rights versus the right to self-

determination. The welfare rights approach argues that children are entitled to food, shelter, and

other means of wellbeing. Such an approach assumes that children need to be protected and gives

adults an active role in this process. By contrast, the right to self-determination approach implies

that children should be political actors in their own right. This approach is most challenging to

conventional ways of viewing children (Kirst, 1993, 613616).

Effectively Reviewing Academic Texts

Theoretically, the report is written as an expos, but without a villain, much as Foucault

analyzes professional mentalities and social change without specifying mechanisms of social

control. I cannot get outraged or even particularly indignant when shown how pediatricians used

rather weak science to cajole or browbeat parents into taking nutrition and hygiene seriously.

Nor do I think that parents were or have been intimidated or forced to alter their relationships

with their children because they were apprised of their children's percentile position in height,

weight, or even school performance. To be sure, the theoretical discourse is largely

developmental, but this seems preferable to a deterministic account. It strikes me as much more

humane to have counselors and clinicians tell parents that their children are in danger of

becoming delinquents or may run afoul of the law without better supervision than to have

religious leaders label them as corrupted by Satan at birth so that even decent parents are unable

to be sufficiently strict. Raising children is inherently uncertain and anxiety provoking; scientific

charts and graphs seem, however, less likely to terrify and harass parents than hearing dire

pronouncements from the pulpit about original sin (Mayall, 2002, 45-51).


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Conclusion

Overall, this report does a great job of demonstrating the importance of ideas in how we

structure children's lives. Despite inclusion of structuralism in section 2, social constructionism

guides most of the book, and by implication, the sociology of childhood. One weakness of the

book is a lack of consideration of cultural diversity. While the report takes great pains to

emphasize that childhood is culturally contingent, I am left with the belief that there is so much

more that could be written on non-Western constructions of childhood. A consideration of the

anthropology of childhood would be a valuable addition to this reports work, and perhaps for

the sociology of childhood (Mayall, 2002, 45-51).

Researchers summarise an enormous amount of historical work on the development of

measurement and data collection on and about children. He is not convincing that this defines

child development or that it leads unavoidably to criteria for normalcy or standards for

evaluating and monitoring child rearing.


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Education inequality

Introduction

It takes a village to raise a child. This ancient African proverb is particularly applicable

to the Nonprofit sector's approach to and involvement with education from pregnancy through

early childhood. Decades of research have demonstrated the need for education services for

young children and families as a preventive measure against later school failure and behavioral

problems. In fact, high-quality early childhood education services can contribute to better school

and life success. Longitudinal studies have demonstrated long-lasting effects of such programs,

and Nonprofit organizations have been heavily involved in the providing them.

Throughout history, and like many other countries such as the United States, education in

England has been a key equalizer by which people from disadvantaged position get a chance to

move up in the hierarchical social system. However, educational opportunity has never been

equal in the first place. Data on education opportunities across the world, whether national or

international, do not in any way show equality of opportunity in education. Instead, in most

cases, almost in every society, education (Ambert, 1995, 177205).

Educational Inequality

Education inequality, seen as a demoralizing and potential inhibiting factor, is viewed by

many as a major roadblock to a nations modernization. There has been an ongoing debate over

the growing disparity on education accessibility. Problems such as higher illiteracy rate among

children of rural impoverished regions and lower educational attainment of migrant workers in

cities present major problems for Chinese society. 26 Scholars have credited government


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commitment and social demand in tackling unfavorable circumstances, as two major factors for

the tremendous progress that developing countries have made in the period of 1960s to 1980s,

both in the number of people educated and enrollment rates.

History

In England, for the past six decades, the government has maintained a centralized

system, with a ideology for equality, and tried to create wide access to some form of education

for all people. To achieve educational equality it set up a state- run system regulated by the

central government in terms of funding, curriculum development, institute management, inner-

instructional system such as syllabi and textbooks, and even recruitment and job placement of

graduates. The policy was aimed to provide education for all citizen and opportunity extended to

all classes or status groups. Various strategies had been adopted to expand education

accessibility for all citizens. Although the doors to schools were ostensibly open to the masses

regardless of social economic backgrounds, the chances of advancing in the educational world

were still strongly affected by a persons socioeconomic status despite the governments efforts

for more accessible education for the masses and centralized control of educational resources.

There still existed significant differences in education opportunities between urban and rural

areas, between more developed coastal regions and interior regions, caused by various political,

economic and cultural factors (Jenks, 2004, 7795).

Report Brief

Colleges and universities adopted open admissions policies in the 1970s to increase

minority enrollment. The policy of the EDUCATION system has been studied since it began in


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1970. Criticized by many for opening the doors of the university to unqualified students, the

system had to justify why they were doing this and how it was working. The policy was

implemented after student protests in 1969 demanding admission of more minority students.

Until the 1970s, the EDUCATION system was primarily composed of white students. The

protest focused on City College in particular because of its location in Harlem.

David Lavin has spent his career studying open admissions policies at EDUCATION.

The 1979 study presented here follows the first three classes admitted under the policy. This

study documents the history of EDUCATION's success for children of immigrants as well as the

growing concern in education during the late 1960s about students' preparation for college. The

open admission policy guaranteed admission to one of the city's colleges for all students who had

graduated from a London City high school. As the decade progressed, other programs were

instituted to track or stratify the system once again. Students were placed in community colleges

or vocational programs. Remediation was necessary for students who were not prepared for

college courses (Jenks, 2004, 7795).

Significance

The Lavin study provides much data for supporters and critics of the open admissions

policies at EDUCATION. Admissions to the freshman class rose dramatically, as would be

expected. The class of 1970 was "75 percent larger than it had been in the previous year and the

increase was almost entirely attributable to the new policy." These new students were mainly

African British and Hispanic. The percentage of minority students more than doubled between

1969 and 1975 at most of the EDUCATION institutions. While percentages show one number,

raw numbers indicate a different picture. Open admission students who were Catholic or Jewish


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outnumbered those who were African British or Hispanic. Lavin's numbers are important when

tackling the arguments made by the critics. The critics of the system thought that standards

would be lowered for the open admission minority candidates.

Other important factor that this study notes is that students admitted under open

admissions compare favorably to their national counterparts. A difference that is significant is

that the students in the EDUCATION system were staying in school longer, even to finish a two-

year degree. This shows that the students valued the opportunity they received and remained in

school at least part time until they did finish.

The policies had already begun to change by the time this Lavin study was published.

Further changes have taken place in the ensuing decades. Educational policy and decisions are

ultimately political in nature. The policy at EDUCATION began after protests by student groups.

In the 1990s the policy ended due to protests by politicians. By the late 1990s the system had

grown to encompass a diverse system that included six community colleges, seven four-year

colleges, and four colleges that offered both an associate and bachelor's degree. Debates about

the system appeared in the popular and academic press. Mayor Giuliani formed a task force to

study the open admissions policy and the role of city funding. Open admissions and remedial

education were phased out at EDUCATION in 1999.

SYNOPSIS

Open Admissions could be described as another one of the grand educational experiments

of the 1970s. As early as 1975 the EDUCATION Board of Higher Education was trying to

dismantle the structure that allowed opportunities for students who may not have had the

opportunity to attend college.


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In 1970 the University of London (EDUCATION) adopted a policy which guaranteed

admission to every graduate of the city's high schools. Designed to increase the proportion of

minority students in the university and to slow the reproduction of social inequality,

EDUCATION's open-admissions policy has been criticized as a threat to academic standards and

as an unnecessary expense during periods of economic scarcity. In this article, David Lavin,

Richard Alba, and Richard Silberstein argue instead that there has been no definitive evidence of

a decline in standards and that the policy has been successful in reducing educational inequality.

Basing their conclusions on a detailed study of the first three classes admitted under this policy,

the authors examine its effects on the university's ethnic composition and integration at various

levels, and on the academic performance of different ethnic groups (Jenks, 2004, 7795).

In the spring of 1969 a series of angry and ominous confrontations broke out on the

campus of the City College of London, the oldest and most famous of the fifteen colleges then

comprising the University of London (EDUCATION). The confrontations focused on a list of

demands issued by groups favoring increased access to City College for minority students,

especially Blacks and Hispanics.

The demands had a forceful logic given the history of the University. The University, and

particularly City College, had played a unique role in the lives of the children and grandchildren

of European immigrants, especially for Jews coming from eastern Europe at the end of the

nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. And it was largely as a result of these

students that, by the 1920s and the 1930s, City College students were regarded as among the

most able in the nation, and the college was often referred to as the "proletarian Harvard." The

list of its graduates' accomplishmentsin academia, in business, and in public lifecontributed

to faith in University as an open door to the middle class (Woodhead, 1999, 1 -20).


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Although the University had done much for earlier groups coming from Europe, it failed

to do the same for new arrivals from the British South and the Caribbean. In the post-World War

II period the major clients of the University continued to be the descendants of European

immigrants, even though the ethnic demography of London was changing rapidly as a result of

newer migrations. Southern Blacks and Puerto Ricans had settled in London in large numbers

but were virtually excluded from the University's four-year colleges, primarily because they

could not pass the increasingly stringent entrance requirements. While City College was an open-

access institution in the nineteenth centuryany high-school graduate could attend free of

chargeby the 1960s it required a high-school average in the mid-to upper-eighties for

admission. Although a special admissions program for minority students was initiated in 1966

with city and state funding, Blacks and Hispanics continued to be underrepresented.

Although the problem existed throughout the city system, the situation was especially

dramatic in the case of City College. Sitting high on a hill in Harlem, it appeared insulated from

the hopes and dreams of the people below. It was not surprising then that, in the spring of 1969, a

group of minority students along with some activist whites occupied campus buildings and

issued a set of demands, including one for a drastic increase in minority enrollment. After

lengthy and complex negotiations between the dissidents and various segments of the City

College faculty and administration, and after hearings held by the Board of Higher Education, a

decision was made to guarantee to all graduates of London City high schools places at the

campuses of the University, beginning in the fall of 1970 (Lee & Barbara, 2003, 10525).

Paradoxically, the open-admissions policy began at EDUCATION at the same time that

doubts were growing about the ability of educational systems to remedy inequality. The Coleman

Report, published in 1966, had begun a decade of debate over the role of education in British


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society. The immediate doubts created by that report and other worksmost notably Christopher

Jenck's Inequalityconcerned the effects of schooling. The Coleman Report concluded that the

characteristics of the schools students attended and, presumably, the quality of the education

they received in them, seemed remarkably ineffective in accounting for academic success. In

particular, differences between races in test results could not be explained by the characteristics

of schools. The analysis of Jencks and his coworkers not only supported these conclusions, but

also indicated that school characteristics and amount of education explain little of the subsequent

inequalities of occupational status or income.

Responding in part to the findings of Coleman and Jencks, a number of social theorists

began to examine the functions of the educational system from a critical perspective. Perhaps the

most prominent of these critics were Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, whose Schooling in

Capitalist America emphasized education's functions in reinforcing the existing system of social

stratification. In their view, education is closely harnessed to British capitalism and serves the

needs of its hierarchical division of labor.

In this critical interpretation, open access to higher education does not guarantee social

mobility, especially for the poor, because such access is offset by increases in the internal

stratification of the system. Higher educational systems are divided into tracks distinguished by

the curricula they provide and the occupations for which they destine students. Students are

assigned to tracks by apparently meritocratic criteria, such as scores on standardized tests. Since

lower-class Black and Hispanic students tend to score lower on these measures, they are

confined largely to community colleges or vocational schools that train them for clerical and

technical jobs near the bottom of the white-collar world. Middle-class white students on the other

hand are more apt to be placed into four-year colleges with liberal arts curricula that may lead to


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professional careers. This interpretation concludes that, rather than alleviating inequality, open

admissions may strengthen it by providing the illusion of equal opportunity to those destined for

the lowest level white-collar jobs (Gittins, 2004, 2538).

Thus, there is ample room to doubt the impact of the EDUCATION open-admissions

policy and need for a detailed analysis of its results. In this article we will examine the academic

fate of students from different ethnic groups under open admissions at EDUCATION. The

program was aimed at minority students, primarily lower-class Blacks and Hispanics, but, to a

degree not generally recognized, it also benefited working-and middle-class whites. In particular,

it attracted a substantial number of Jewish and Catholic students, the former predominantly of

eastern European background, the latter frequently of Irish or Italian descent.

After an introductory discussion of open admissions and an explanation of our data, we

will first consider how the overall ethnic composition of the University was affected by open

admissions. Secondly, we will examine the degree to which the various levels of the University

became ethnically integrated. Finally, we will explore how well the members of the various

groups did, using measures of academic failure or success (such as dropout and graduation rates)

to determine whether open admissions led to a reduction of inequality in the attainment of those

educational credentials required for middle-class occupational careers (Gittins, 2004, 2538).

Structure of the EDUCATION Open-Access Model

Open-access education is hardly new in the United States. Its roots go back to the mid-

nineteenth century when the land grant colleges were first established under the Morrill Act of

1862. These colleges, most of them located in the Midwest, offered admission to all high-school


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graduates. More recently, the California public higher education system received wide notice

after World War II, when its "differential access" version of open admissions developed rapidly.

In light of these precedents, it seems curious that the new EDUCATION admissions

policy received such widespread attention, though a closer look reveals features in the

EDUCATION system not duplicated in the others. One of these was the actual admission

criteria. In 1970, EDUCATION consisted of eight four-year senior colleges and seven two-year

community colleges; by the following year, another four-year and another two-year college had

been opened. Admission to the University was guaranteed by the new policy. Entrance to a

senior college was generally assured if the student had attained a high-school average of at least

80 in academic, college preparatory courses orhad graduated in the top half of the high-school

class. All other high school graduates could enroll in a community college.

At face value, this system was much less stratified than the three-tier California system,

where the university level accepts only the top 12.5 percent of high-school graduates; the state

colleges accept the top third; and the two-year junior colleges accept all the others.

EDUCATION's system formally distinguished only two-and four-year colleges, thus constituting

a two-tier system. Its use of either high-school average or rank to admit a student to the upper

tier was designed to increase minority enrollment in senior colleges, since students with low

averages in predominantly minority high schools could still qualify on the rank criterion.

Increased opportunity was also the apparent goal of a second major feature of the policy, which

guaranteed a place in one of the senior colleges for any graduate of a two-year community

college. At least on paper, then, the community colleges were not designed as "deadend"


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institutions whose primary function was to provide terminal vocational education (Ambert, 1995,

177205).

A third aspect of the EDUCATION plan was the attempt to provide equality of

educational opportunity encompassing not only access but also outcome. Other open-enrollment

systems had been characterized by early and high dropout rates. As Christopher Jencks and

David Riesman have pointed out, in colleges with unselective admissions criteria, the faculty

tends to be skeptical toward freshmen, viewing them as inept until they prove themselves able.

There is usually an exodus of "misfits" by the end of their first year. The EDUCATION plan

attempted to stop, or at least slow, this revolving door by introducing remedial programs,

counseling, and other services on a large scale. The University also decreed that no student could

be dismissed for academic failure during the "grace period" of the freshman year.

Conclusion

Starting from the last two decades of the 20th century, England launched its massive

economic reform and has ever since rapidly raised the economic development level of the

country. At the same time, it also witnessed a growing economic disparity across the country.

While the urban and coastal regions have gained economic prosperity, the inland and rural areas

are experiencing relative deprivation. On the micro level, because of the changed government

policy for market economy and free competition, people who got opportunities for economic

success achieved tremendous wealth, while others in disadvantaged social locations or lack

opportunities stay behind. The influence of economic institutions and political institutions on

educational organization and educational attainment has been shown by scholars as one of the

major determinants (Gittins, 2004, 2538). The economic discrepancies created by the economic


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reform in England have also lead to growing educational inequalities throughout the country and

in multiple levels. First of all, differences in the pre-existed economic development level

between urban metropolitan the inequality in access to education has been a major concern in all

societies across the world. Governments in countries at different industrialization levels have

adopted specific programs to reduce inequality in educational resources and have been trying to

develop policies to promote education equality.


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