Sociology Ch.14

is defined as the social institution guiding a society's transmission of knowledge — including basic facts, job skills, and cultural norms and values — to its members.

is formal instruction under the direction of specially trained teachers. 1.In preindustrial societies, formal schooling is usually available only to the wealthy. 2.Industrial societies embrace the principle of mass education, often enacting mandatory education laws, the legal requirement that children receive a min-imum of formal education

C.In India, many children work, greatly limiting their opportunity for schooling. About half of the Indian population is illiterate. D.Japan's educational system is widely praised for producing some of the world's high-est achievers. In Japan, schooling reflects personal ability more than it does in the United States, where family income plays a greater part in a student's college plans. E.Class differences in Great Britain are more important in determining access to quality education than they are in Japan or most other industrial societies. F.Reflecting the value of equal opportunity, a larger proportion of Americans attend col-leges and universities than do citizens of any other nation. U.S. education also stresses practical learning.

looks at how formal education enhances the operation and stability of society.

A.Socialization: teaching skills, values, and norms. B.Cultural innovation through research. C.Social integration: forging a mass of people into a cultural whole. D.Social placement. E.Latent functions of schooling. 1.Child care. 2.Establishing relationships and networks. F.Critical review. The structural-functional approach stresses the ways in which educa-tion supports the operation of an industrial society, but ignores the persistence of ine-quality in education.

People who expect others to act in certain ways often encourage that very behavior, thus setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy. Jane Elliott carried out a simple experiment that showed how a self-fulfilling prophecy can take place in the classroom.

The symbolic-interaction approach explains how we all build reality in our everyday interactions with others. One limitation of this approach is that people do not just make up such beliefs about superiority and inferiority.

Social-conflict analysis argues that schools routinely provide learning according to students' social background, thereby perpetuating social inequality.

A.Social control. Schools stress compliance and punctuality through the hidden cur-riculum, subtle presentations of political or cultural ideas in the classroom. B.Standardized testing is frequently biased in favor of affluent white students. C.Tracking is the assignment of students to different types of educational programs; in practice, it often benefits students from higher class backgrounds disproportionately.

1. Public and private schools. Most private school students attend church-affiliated schools, especially Catholic parochial schools. A small number at-tend elite preparatory schools. Studies show that private schools commonly teach more effectively than do public schools. 2.Inequality in public schooling. Most suburban schools offer better education than most central city schools, a fact which has led to busing programs. However, research suggests that increased funding alone will not be enough to improve students' academic performance.

a.Low tuition b.Special importance to minorities c.Attract students from around the world d.Community college faculty are rewarded for teaching, not research

The social-conflict paradigm links education with social inequality, but it minimizes the extent to which education has provided the opportunity for upward mobility.

A.Discipline and violence. Almost everyone agrees that schools should teach personal discipline, but few think schools are succeeding. B.Student passivity is promoted in five ways in large bureaucratic school systems.

a.Rigid uniformity. b.Numerical ratings. c.Rigid expectations. d.Specialization. e.Little individual responsibility

C.The dropout rate has declined slightly in recent decades; currently 7.1 percent of peo-ple between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four have dropped out of school. D.Academic standards. According to A Nation At Risk, the quality of U.S. education has declined sharply and functional illiteracy, reading and writing skills insufficient for everyday life, is widespread.

In more than ten years since California voters approved an initiative to limit bilingual education in public schools, English learners' performance on standardized tests has not improved. This article explores the debate over bilingual education vs. English immersion and reports on success rates of several California schools that have experimented with dual-language programs.

A.School choice proponents advocate such developments as magnet schools, schooling for profit, and charter schools. B. Home schooling is gaining popularity across the United States, but it has its critics as well as its supporters. C. Schooling people with disabilities often involves mainstreaming, or integrating spe-cial students into the overall educational program. D.Adult education. The share of U.S. students aged twenty-five and older has risen sharply in recent years and now accounts for 40 percent of students in degree-granting programs. E. Low salaries, frustration, and retirement, as well as rising enrollment and reductions in class size, have combined to create teaching vacancies.

is the study of how health and disease are distributed throughout a society's population.

1.Age and gender. a.Death is now rare among young people, with the exception of mortality resulting from accidents and from AIDS. b. Across the life course, women fare better in terms of health than men. 2.Social class and race. a.Infant mortality is twice as high for disadvantaged children as for children born to privilege. b.Poverty among African Americans helps explain why African-American people are more likely to die in infancy and, as adults, suffer the effects of violence, drug abuse, and illness.

The rapid rise in eating disorders in Fiji after the introduction of U.S. television shows the power of the mass media and culture to shape the patterns of health.

1.Gonorrhea and syphilis. 2.Genital herpes. 3.AIDS is the most serious of all STDs.

The highest rates of infection are found in southern Africa.

1.When does death occur? 2.Do people have a right to die? 3.What about mercy killing? a.Mercy killing is the common term for euthanasia, assisting in the death of a person suffering from an incurable disease

is an approach to health care that emphasizes prevention of illness and takes account of the person's entire physical and social environment. These are its foundations: 1.Patients are people. 2.Responsibility, not dependency. 3.Personal treatment.

a. The People's Republic of China. The government controls most health care. Traditional healing arts are still widely practiced in China. In addi-tion, a holistic concern for the well-being of both mind and body charac-terizes the Chinese approach to health. b. The Russian Federation. Medical care is in transition. Nonetheless, the idea that everyone has a right to basic medical care remains widespread.

a.The Swedish system is often described as socialized medicine, a medical care system in which the government owns and operates most medical fa-cilities and employs most physicians. b.Great Britain. The British created a \"dual system\" of medical service. c.Canada. Canada has a \"single payer\" model of health care. But Canada al-so has a two-tiered system like Great Britain's, with some physicians working outside the government-funded system and setting their own fees. d.Japan. Physicians in Japan have private practices, but a combination of government programs and private insurance pays medical costs.

1.Private insurance programs. 2.Public insurance programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid. 3.Health Maintenance Organizations, organizations that provide comprehensive medical care to subscribers for a fixed fee

1.Starting right away, all families will pay an insurance tax. 2.Six months after enactment of the new law, insurance companies could no long-er legally drop customers because they get sick or legally refuse coverage to children because of preexisting conditions. 3.Insurance companies cannot set caps on the amount of money they will pay to any individual for medical expenses over a lifetime. 4.Parents can use their health care plans to include children up to the age of twen-ty-six. 5.By 2014, insurance companies will no longer be able to refuse coverage to any-one of any age due to preexisting health conditions. 6.By 2014, all families will be required to purchase insurance coverage. 7.Starting in 2014, the bill provides penalties for people who do not buy insur-ance.

1.Talcott Parsons suggests that people often respond to illness by assuming the sick role, patterns of behavior defined as appropriate for people who are ill. The sick role has three characteristics: a.Illness exempts people from routine responsibilities. b.A sick person must want to be well. c.A sick person must seek competent help. 2.The physician's role. Parsons saw the doctor-patient relationship as hierar-chical. Yet this pattern varies from society to society.

1.The social construction of illness. How people define a medical situation may actually affect how they feel. 2.The social construction of treatment. Understanding how people construct re-ality in the examination room is as important as mastering the medical skills required for treatment. 3.Critical review. This approach reveals the relativity of sickness and health, but seems to deny that there are any objective standards of well-being.

1.Access to care. The access problem is more serious in the United States than in other industrialized societies because our country has no universal medical care system. 2.The profit motive. Some conflict analysts argue that the real problem is the character of capitalist medicine itself. 3.Medicine as politics. Scientific medicine frequently takes sides on significant social issues. 4.Critical review. This perspective minimizes the improvements in health brought about by the present system. 5.The Genetic Crystal Ball: Do We Really Want to Look? Advances in genetics have brought us some diffi-cult ethical questions to answer.

A.The health of Americans overall will continue to improve in this century. B.To a significant extent, people can take responsibility for their own health. However, certain health problems will continue to plague U.S. society. C.The U.S. falls short in addressing the health of marginalized members of our society. D.Problems of health are far greater in low-income nations than they are in the United States.

-Over the course of recent decades, a remarkable trend has taken place in the United States—the average weight of both women and men has steadily increased. Against a global adult average of 137 pounds, the average U.S. woman weighs 166 pounds and the average U.S. man weighs 196 pounds

The story of Omarina Cabrera, a young women struggling in a New York City middle school, illustrates the process

The United States is not the only country in which the rate of obesity is increasing. Kuwait, the Middle Eastern nation, may be facing a weight problem that is even more serious. Estimates suggest that about three-in-four Kuwaiti adults is overweight. In the search for causes of this health challenge, some of the attention is on U.S. fast food. During the Gulf War in the early 1990s, as thousands of U.S. troops came into the country, fast food companies were not far be-hind. Fast food is now very popular—and its presence has shifted Kuwaiti popular culture in ways that threaten to undermine health.

: Rather than students paying for college as they go, they would pay the tuition after graduation. The radical part is that graduates would pay not pay a flat-rate tuition but would pay back a share of what they earn. In practice, according to one version of the plan, a four-year college graduate would pay 3 percent of annual earnings for a period of twenty-four years. Community college graduates would pay at an annual rate of 1.5 percent or half this level.

This effort resulted in tax changes to help disabled persons with disabilities pay for work-related expenses, a new program by the Small Business Administration to assist those who want to start their own businesses, and a call to make the federal government a model employer of the disabled.