Education and Medicine

1
Education and Medicine
2
Education vs. Schooling

• Education
• The social institution through which society
  provides its members with important knowledge,
  including basic facts, job skills, and cultural
  norms and values
• Schooling
• Formal instruction under the direction of
  specially trained teachers

3
Functions of Schooling

• Socialization
• Primary schooling
• Basic language and mathematical skills
• Secondary schooling
• Expansion of basic skills to include the
  transmission of cultural values and norms
• Cultural innovation
• Educational systems create as well as transmit
  culture
• Social integration
• Brings a diverse nation together
• Social placement
• The enhancement of meritocracy

4
Latent Functions of Schooling

• Schools as child-care providers
• Schools consume considerable time energy-
  activity thus fostering conformity
• Engages young people at a time in their lives
  when jobs are not plentiful
• Sets the stage for establishing relationships
  networks
• Link between particular schools and career
  opportunities

5
Critical Analysis

• Functionalist approach overlooks that the quality
  of schooling is far greater for some than for
  others.
• U. S. Educational system reproduces the class
  structure in each generation
• System transforms privilege into personal
  worthiness and social disadvantage into personal
  deficiency

6
Schooling and Social Inequality

• Social control
• Mandatory education laws encouraged compliance,
  following directions, and discipline
• Hidden curriculum subtle presentations of
  political or cultural ideas in the classroom
• Standardized testing
• Is it biased based on race, ethnicity, or class
• School tracking
• Assigning students to different types of
  education programs
• Does it segregate students into winners and
  losers?
• Inequality between schools
• Public vs. Private schools
• Parochial schools operated by Roman Catholic
  Church
• Suburban vs. Urban districts

7
Critical Analysis

• Social conflict approach minimizes the extent to
  which schooling upward social mobility for
  talented men and women from all backgrounds
• Todays college curricula (including sociology
  courses) challenges social inequity on many fronts

8
Access to Higher Education

• Money is largest stumbling block to higher
  education
• Even for state-sponsored schools
• Family income is still best predictor for college
  attendance
• Families making at least 75,000 send 64 of
  their children to college
• Families making under 10,000 send 21.1 of their
  children to college
• On average, a person with a college degree will
  add almost 500,000 to his or her earnings over a
  lifetime
• A woman with a bachelors degree will earn
  two-and-a-half times as much as a woman with
  eight or fewer years of schooling

9
National Map 14-1 (p. 374)College Attendance
across the United States
10
Credentialism

• Evaluating a person on the basis of educational
  degrees
• Diplomas and degrees are viewed as evidence of
  ability
• Over-education is often the case when people are
  overqualified for the job at hand

11
Problems in SchoolsMany Believe That a So Called
State of Emergency Best Characterizes Our
System of Education These Days

• School discipline
• Many believe schools need to teach discipline
  because it isnt addressed within the home
  setting
• Violence in schools
• Students and teachers are assaulted
• Weapons are brought to school
• Societys problems spill into schools
• Answer
• Adjust attitudes so learning is the focus
• Skillful and committed teaching
• Firm disciplinary standards enforced
• Administrative and parental support

12
Cooling Out the Poor Transforming
Disadvantages Into Deficiency

• Just as schools can transform social privilege
  into personal merit, they can transform social
  disadvantages into personal deficiency
• Cooling out
• The self-fulfilling prophecy by which poor
  students end up settling for no more than society
  offered them when they were first born
• Some believe that community colleges play an
  important part in the cooling out process
• Allowing students to fail in community college
  allows society to point the finger at them and
  ask them to accept personal responsibility for
  blowing their opportunities
• Are the students at fault here, or is the
  educational system guilty of not caring enough?

13
Theodore Sizers Ways in Which Bureaucratic
Schools Undermine Education

• Rigid uniformity
• Insensitive to cultural character of community
• Numerical ratings
• Success defined in terms of numbers on test
  scores
• Rigid expectations
• Age and grade level expectations
• Specialization
• Many courses, many teachers
• No one teacher knows a student
• Little individual responsibility
• Little empowerment to learn on ones own
• Dont upset or accelerate learning for fear of
  disrupting system

14
The Silent Classroom the Norm Is to Not Talk
in Class, andStudents Can Get Upset at Others
Who Talk Too Much

• No matter what the class size
• Only a handful of students speak
• Passivity is the norm
• It is deviant to speak up in class
• What makes a difference
• Female instructors tend to call on men and women
  equally, whereas male instructors tend to call on
  men
• Reasons
• Students are conditioned to listen
• Instructors come to class with lectures prepared
  and students do not wish to get sidetracked

15
Many Students Expect Learning to Be Delivered and
Dont Realize They Are Part of the Process

• Apathy is high among students
• Reasons
• Television
• Parents
• Schools
• Other students
• High tech may hold one key for sparking interest
• Bringing multimedia into the classroom

16
Academic Standards

• A Nation at Risk - a 1983, governmental
  commission
• Troublesome findings concerning what students are
  and are not learning in school
• 40 of those screened could not draw inferences
  from written materials
• 33 of those screened could complete multi-step
  mathematical problems
• Other insights
• Functional illiteracy a lack of reading and
  writing skills needed for everyday living
• Lack of interest in the importance of education
  apathetic attitudes toward classes, course
  materials, doing assignments, and attendance
• Belief that good grades need not be earned, but
  rather just rewarded (as if they had a right to
  them)

17
Academic Standards

• Global performance
• U.S. Eighth graders still placed 17th in the
  world in science and 28th in mathematics!
• Recommendations from A Nation at Risk - a 1983,
  governmental commission
• All schools should require several years of
  English, math, social studies, general science
  computer science
• No more social promotion of failing students
  from grade to grade
• Teacher training and salaries should improve

18
Figure 14-3 (p. 379)Functional Illiteracy in
Global Perspective
19
School Choice

• Introduction of competition to public schools and
  giving parents options might force all schools to
  do a better job
• Critics charge that these programs erode our
  nations commitment to public education
  especially in inner city schools
• Magnet schools schools that offer special
  facilities and programs to promote educational
  excellence in a particular area, i.e. Arts,
  computers,foreign language, etc
• Charter schools public schools that are given
  more freedom to try out new policies and programs
• Schooling for profit school systems operated by
  private profit-making companies (including public
  schools)

20
MainstreamingIntegrating Students With Special
Needs Into the Overall Educational Program

• Five million students are classified as mentally
  or physically disabled
• Many of the five million receive marginal
  classroom experiences
• Inclusive education maintains that it is good to
  integrate all children
• Mainstreaming needs to be approached with a
  measure of common sense
• In cases in which one has to serve the severe and
  profound populations, a segregated classroom may
  be best

21
21st Century Schooling

• Computers and other high-tech tools will become
  increasingly important
• The amount and quality of high-tech equipment may
  become one of the new marketing tools for schools
  to out-perform one another
• Computers, however, only hold part of the answer.
  We need humans to put into place a program that
  aims at providing high quality education
• Will the education system play a role in dividing
  people into two groups in the future
• Those literate and illiterate in computer skills
• Will we become a country of haves and have nots
  divided along lines of high-tech competencies

22
Medicine and Health
23
Health

• A state of complete physical, mental, and social
  well-being (World Health Organization)
• Health is as much a social as a biological issue
  for sociologists
• Illness have their roots in the organization of
  society

24
Society Shapes the Health of Peoplein 5 Major
Ways

1. Cultural patterns define health
2. What is considered healthy is what people hold
   to be morally good
3. Cultural standards of health change over time
4. A societys technology affects peoples health
5. Social inequality relates to health

25
Health a Global Survey

• Health in history
• Industrialization changed the patterns of health,
  medical care
• Health in low-income countries
• One billion people (globally) have serious
  illness due to severe poverty
• Poor sanitation, malnutrition and minimal medical
  care
• Health in high-income countries
• Infectious disease is less of a threat,
  concentrate on chronic illnesses

26
Leading Causes of Death U.S.A.

• 1900
• Influenza and pneumonia
• Tuberculosis
• Stomach/intestinal diseases
• Heart disease
• Cerebral hemorrhage
• Kidney disease
• Accidents
• Cancer
• Disease of infancy
• Diphtheria

• 2000
• Heart disease
• Cancer
• Stroke
• Lung disease (non-cancerous)
• Accidents
• Diabetes
• Pneumonia and influenza
• Alzheimers disease
• Kidney disease
• Blood disease

27
Who Is Healthy?

• Social epidemiology how health and disease are
  distributed throughout a societys population
• Factors include
• Age
• Gender
• Social class
• Race

28
National Map 14-2 (p. 384)Life Expectancy
across the United States (continued on next slide)
29
National Map 14-2 (cont.)
30
Age Gender

• Death is now rare among young people
• Accidents and aids are two exceptions
• Across the life course, women fare better than
  men
• Men have higher death rates for accidents,
  suicide and violence
• Our cultural conception of masculinity pressures
  men
• Coronary prone behavior

31
Class and Race

• Infant mortality rates are twice as high for poor
  as for wealthy
• The poorest in America can die from diseases that
  strike children in countries like the Vietnam and
  Lebanon
• African Americans are three times more likely to
  be poor compared to whites
• Poverty condemns people to live in crowed
  unsanitary conditions that breed infectious
  disease
• Life expectance for white children born in 2000
  is six years greater than for African Americans
• Poverty also breeds stress and violence
• In 1999, 2,674 African American males were killed
  by others of their own race

32
Figure 14-4 (p. 386)Life Expectancy for U.S.
Children Born in 2000
33
Cigarette Smoking

• Most preventable hazard to health
• By 1999, 24 of Americans smoke
• Generally speaking divorced, separated,
  unemployed, in the military less schooling a
  person has tend to be smokers
• 430,000 men women die prematurely each year as
  a direct result of smoking
• That number exceeds the combined death toll from
  alcohol, cocaine, heroin, homicide, suicide, auto
  accidents aids

34
Figure 14-5 (p. 387)Cigarette Smoking in
Selected Countries
35
Eating Disorders

• An intense form of dieting or other unhealthy
  methods of weight control driven by the desire to
  be very thin
• 95 of those suffering from anorexia and bulimia
  are women, white and affluent
• The beauty myth tells women to exaggerate the
  importance of physical attractiveness to the
  point of risking their health
• Pressures come from society, parents, the media,
  as well as women themselves

36
Sexually Transmitted Diseases

• Sexual revolution of the 1960s saw a rise in
  std rates Generated a sexual counter-revolution
• Gonorrhea syphilis
• Easily treated with antibiotics
• Genital herpes
• Treatable but incurable
• Aids acquired immune deficiency syndrome
• Caused by human immunodeficiency virus HIV
• Incurable, almost always fatal
• Specific behaviors increase risk anal sex,
  sharing needles and drug use

37
Ethics Death

• When is a person dead?
• When an irreversible state involving no response
  to stimulation, no movement or breathing, no
  reflexes, and no indication of brain activity
• Do people have the right to die?
• 10,000 people in the u.S.A. Are in a permanent
  vegetative state
• What about mercy killing?
• Thousands face terminal illnesses that will cause
  horrible suffering
• Right to die a person with an incurable disease
  has a right to forgo treatment which may prolong
  their life
• Active euthanasia a person may enlist the
  services of a physician to bring on a quick death

38
Figure 14-6 (p. 389)Types of Transmission for
Reported U.S. AIDS Cases as of 2000
39
The Medical Establishment

• The social institution focuses on combating
  disease and improving health
• The rise of scientific medicine
• AMA American Medical Association founded in
  1847
• By early 1900s state boards agreed to certify
  only AMA approved
• M.D.s D.O. (Osteopaths) on one level
• Other healers kept tradition but occupy lesser
  role
• Chiropractors, herbalists, midwives, etc.

40
Holistic Medicine

• Holistic medicine an approach to health care
  that emphasizes prevention of illness and takes
  into account a persons entire physical and
  social environment
• Patients are people
• Concern for the environment in which the person
  lives and their lifestyle
• Responsibility, not dependency
• Favors an active approach to health encouraging
  patients take health-promoting behaviors
• Personal treatment
• Favoring a more personal relaxed environment,
  such as the persons home

41
Medicine in Socialist Societies

• China
• Government controls most health care operations
• Barefoot doctors in rural areas, traditional
  healing arts, acupuncture, medicinal herbs and
  holistic concern
• Russian federation
• Medical care is in transition, but it is held the
  all citizens have a right to basic medical care
• Tax funds are used to provide care
• Disparities in medical care increase among
  segments of the population

42
Medicine in Capitalist Societies

• Sweden (1891)
• Compulsory, comprehensive government medical care
  system offered to all socialized medicine
• Great Britain (1948)
• Duel system of public health services (national
  health service) for all citizens and may also
  purchase private services
• Canada (1972)
• A single-payer model for all citizens government
  program (insurance company)
• But, like Britain , purchase private services
• Japan
• Physicians have private practice
• Paid like much of Europe, combination of
  government programs (80 of costs) and private
  insurance

43
Figure 14-7 (p. 394)Extent of Socialized
Medicine in Selected Countries
44
Medicine in the U. S.

• Direct fee system
• The patient pays directly for services provided
  by doctor and hospitals
• Private insurance
• 63 of Americans have access to medical care
  benefits through their work or union
• 8 purchase private coverage on their own
• Few programs pay all medical costs
• Public insurance programs
• Medicare for those over 65, Medicaid for those in
  poverty and for veterans
• 24 of Americans receive medical attention via
  some form of government program, though many also
  have some private insurance
• Health maintenance organizations
• An organization that provides comprehensive
  medical care to subscribers for a fixed fee
• Preventive approach to health Makes a profit if
  subscribers stay healthy

45
Theoretical Analysis

• Structural-functional analysis
• Talcott Parsons the sick role
• Illness suspends routine duties
• A sick person must want to get well
• A sick person must seek competent help
• The doctor patient relationship as hierarchical
• Symbolic-interaction analysis
• We socially construct our ideas of health and
  illness How we define it becomes real
• We socially construct our ideas of treatment
• Social-conflict analysis
• Issues of
• Limited access, the profit motive, and the
  politics of medicine
• Interests of one group versus others