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Education, Power and Race

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Please help in describing the specific ways in which, according to the conflict perspective, powerful groups use educational institutions to enhance their own position. What observation would you make concerning the relationship between race and education in the United States?

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This solution describes the specific ways in which, according to the conflict perspective, powerful groups use educational institutions to enhance their own position. It also explores the relationship between race and education in the United States.

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1. Please help in describing the specific ways in which, according to the conflict perspective, powerful groups use educational institutions to enhance their own position.

The conflict perspective, maintains that conflict is a fundamental aspect of social life itself that can never be fully resolved. At best, according to this perspective, formal agencies of social control merely coerce the un-empowered or the disenfranchised to comply with the rules established by those in power. From the conflict point of view, BOTH EDUCATION AND LAWS become a tool of the powerful, useful in keeping others from wresting control over important social institutions. (1)

Social order rests upon the exercise of power through law. Laws also apply to education and who does and does not enter the educational system; or once they are in the educational system, controlled through various placements and programming e.g. desegregation, affirmative action, special education, gifted and talented education, tracking, high-stakes accountability, school finance, bilingual education, and legacy admissions. (2) For example, the high cost of education can control the populace through educating the rich and not the disenfranchised. From this perspective, those in power must work ceaselessly ...

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