Ch 14 Education, health and medicine PDF

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chapter 14 notes education health and medicine ...

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Chapter 14: Education, Health, and Medicine

Education: Major social institution for transmitting knowledge and skills, as well as teaching cultural norms and values. Knowledge, basic facts, job skills, and cultural norms and values are learned through education. Schooling: formal instruction under direction of specially trained teachers Schools are there to educate students and to socialize them Preindustrial society: education is informal and occurs within the family Industrial society: systems are formed to educate and teach children. What we have

US Equal opportunutiy and practical learning. US first countries to seat a goal of mass education Problems: Functional illiteracy: inability to read or write well enough to function in society Innumeracy: having insufficient math skills to function in society Theories Structural-Functional Theory: The Functions of Schooling Structural-functional theory highlights major functions of schooling, including socialization, cultural innovation, social integration, and the placement of people in the social hierarchy. Latent functions of schooling include providing child care and building social networks. Symbolic-Interaction Theory: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Symbolic-interaction theory shows us that stereotypes can have important consequences for how people act. Students who think they are academically superior are likely to perform better; those who think they are inferior are likely to perform less well. Social-Conflict Theory: Schooling and Social Inequality Social-conflict theory links schooling to the hierarchy involving class, race, and gender. Formal education serves as a means of generating conformity to produce obedient adult workers. Standardized achievement tests have been criticized as culturally biased tools that lead to labeling less privileged students as personally deficient; tracking has been criticized as a program that gives privileged youngsters a richer education.

Largely due to the high cost of college, only 66% of U.S. students enroll in college directly after high school graduation. Tracking: assigning students to different types of educational programs Health Health: social issue because personal well-being depends on a society’s level of technology and its distribution of resources. A society’s culture shapes definitions of health. With industrialization, health improved dramatically in Western Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. A century ago, infectious diseases were leading killers; today, most people in the United States die in old age of chronic illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, or stroke. Poor nations suffer from inadequate sanitation, hunger, and other problems linked to poverty. Life expectancy in low-income nations is about twenty years less than in the United States; in the poorest nations 10% of children die within a year of birth, and almost 25% die before the age of thirty Medicine: the social institution that focuses on fighting disease and improving health Health: a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being Social epidemiology: the study of how health and disease are distributed throughout a society’s population Eating disorder: a physical and mental disorder that involves intense dieting or other unhealthy method of weight control driven by the desire to be very thin Euthanasia: assisting in the death of a person suffering from an incurable disease; also known as mercy killing Holistic medicine: an approach to health care that emphasizes prevention of illness and considers a person’s entire physical and social environment Socialized medicine: a medical care system in which the government owns and operates most medical facilities and employs most physicians direct-fee system: a medical care system in which patients pay directly for the services of physicians and hospitals Health maintenance organization (HMO): an organization that provides comprehensive medical care to subscribers for a fixed fee Sick role: patterns of behavior defined as appropriate for people who are ill...