Functionalist and Conflict Theories

- criticized as being highly abstract and whose emphases are on social structure and processes which are at
a macro-level.
- argued that while those two levels of analysis helps us to understand education in the big picture or at a
macro level, they hardly provide us with an interpretable snapshot of what schools are like on a day-to-
day basis, or what transpires in the classroom between teacher and students and between students and
students.