Further, education is an independent factor in social and economic development producing intended and unintended consequences and conflicts of values and goals. Education is an important means of attaining social and economic rewards of society. It has become essential for the economy. Education has now become a large-scale and a highly visible Estimated Reading Time: 9 mins Social Studies Education Essay. The social studies in K–12 education represents the specific area of the curriculum that deals with the social, cultural, and political content of what is being taught. In , the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), the main professional leadership and accreditation group for social studies education in Estimated Reading Time: 7 mins 7/26/ · Only when the people realize what significance it holds, can they consider it a necessity for a good life. In this essay on Education, we will see the importance of education and how it is a doorway to success. Importance of Education. Education is the most significant tool in eliminating poverty and unemployment. Moreover, it enhances the commercial scenario and benefits the country blogger.comted Reading Time: 3 mins
Social Class and Education Free Essay Sample
The sociology of education has provided important insights into the ways in which schools social education essay individuals and groups. Through an examination of the relationship between society and schools, sociologists have uncovered how educational processes affect the way people think, live, and work; their place in society; and their chances for success or failure.
Research in the sociology of education has attempted to understand whether educational systems provide opportunities for all children to achieve based on their merits or whether they reproduce existing social inequalities. Theory and research in the sociology of education seek to understand the limits and possibilities of schooling. In the United States, which has placed enormous faith in the power of schools to ameliorate all types of social problems, including poverty, and has viewed schools as the central institutions social education essay social mobility, the sociology of education provides evidence about the extent to which schools can solve social problems.
The discipline of sociology developed at the end of the nineteenth century amid the promise and problems of industrialization, urbanization, and a developing belief in education in Europe and the United States. During this period, more and more children were required to go to school, and sociologists began to examine the relationship between school and society. As schooling became more available to increased numbers of children, social education essay, many believed that schools would be critical to a modern era where merit, talent, and effort would replace privilege and inheritance as the most significant factors for social and occupational mobility.
Until the s, sociologists for the most part shared this optimism about the role of education in a modern society. Beginning in the s, social education essay, sociologists of education began to doubt that schools, by themselves, social education essay, could solve social problems, social education essay, especially problems of economic and social inequality.
Sociologists of education continued to believe that they could improve social education essay through the application of scientific theory and research. Because of their scientific orientation, they are more likely to ask what is rather than what ought to be, although sociological research has been the basis for trying to improve and change schools. They want to discover what occurs inside of schools and what the effects of schooling are on individuals and groups.
The distinctive feature of the sociology of education is empiricism, social education essay, social education essay the collection and analysis of empirical data within a theoretical context in order to construct a logical set of conclusions. Thus, the sociology of education relies on empirical methods to understand how schools are related to society, social education essay, how individuals and groups interact within schools, and what the effects of schooling are for individuals and groups of children.
Its findings are based on an attempt to be objective and scientific. It examines individuals and groups in their social context and examines the social forces that affect them. The sociological approach to education is crucial because it provides conclusions based on focused and tested observations.
Without such an analysis, one cannot know what is; and without knowing what is, one cannot make what ought to be a reality. The sociology of education has mirrored the larger theoretical debates in the discipline of sociology.
From its roots in the classical sociology of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim to the contemporary influences of symbolic interactionism, postmodernism, and critical theory, sociology of education research has been influenced by a number of different theoretical perspectives. Functionalist sociologists begin with a picture of society that stresses the interdependence of the social system; these researchers often examine how well parts are integrated with each other.
Functionalists view society as a kind of machine, where one part articulates with another to produce the dynamic energy required to make society work. Most important, functionalism stresses the processes that maintain social order by stressing social education essay and agreement. Although functionalists understand that change is social education essay, they underscore the evolutionary nature of change. Furthermore, although they acknowledge that conflict between groups exists, functionalists argue that without a common bond to unite groups, society will disintegrate.
Thus, functionalists examine the social processes necessary to the establishment and maintenance of social order. Based on his research, Durkheim provided a sociological analysis of the effects of modernity on community.
For Durkheim, the processes social education essay industrialization, urbanization, and modernization led to the breakdown of traditional rituals and methods of social control, which social education essay turn led to the breakdown of social solidarity and cohesion. He demonstrated empirically how the breakdown in traditional community resulted in the decline of collective conscience and the rise of individualism, social education essay. Such a breakdown led to what Durkheim called anomie, or social education essay condition of normlessness in individuals and society.
As the bonds that connected individuals to each other and to society became unhinged, modern societies faced disintegration from within. He did not believe that the solution to social disintegration was a return to the past, with its strict forms of social control and regulation. Rather, he believed that modern societies had to develop new forms of social control and cohesion that would allow for the newly developed individualism of modernity to exist within a cohesive modern society.
Such a society would allow for a balance between individualism and community. Durkheim was the first sociologist to apply sociological theory to education. Although he recognized that education had taken different forms at different times and places, he believed that in virtually all societies, education was of critical importance in creating the moral unity necessary for social cohesion and harmony.
For Durkheim, moral values were the foundation of society. Functionalists tend to assume that consensus is the normal state in society and that conflict represents a breakdown of shared values.
In a highly integrated, well-functioning society, schools socialize students into social education essay appropriate values and sort and select students according to their abilities, social education essay.
Educational reform is supposed to create structures, programs, and curricula that social education essay technically advanced and rational and that encourage social unity. Functionalism is concerned with the functions of schooling in the maintenance of social order.
Whereas conflict theory argues that schools function in the interests of the dominant groups in a society, functionalism sees schools as functioning in the interests of the majority of citizens, at least within democratic societies. Therefore, functionalists examine the specific purposes of schooling and their role in society.
These purposes or functions are intellectual, political, social, social education essay, and economic and refer to their role within any existing society.
Functionalists, however, are most concerned with the role of schools in modern, democratic societies. Modern functionalist theories of education believe that education is a social education essay part of a modern society, a society that differs considerably from all previous societies.
Schooling performs important functions in the development and maintenance of a modern, democratic society, especially with regard to equality of opportunity for all citizens. Functionalists argue that inequality was functional and necessary in all societies, as it ensures that the most talented individuals will fill the functionally most important positions.
Nonetheless, modern democratic societies differ from previous, traditional agrarian societies because they are meritocratic; that is, talent and hard work should determine the allocation of individuals to positions, rather than accidents of birth.
Thus, in modern societies, education becomes the key institution in a meritocratic selection process. This democratic-liberal functionalist perspective views education as a vital institution in a modern capitalist society defined by its technocratic, social education essay, and democratic characteristics.
Although considerable inequality remains, society in this social education essay is characterized by the movement from ascription to achievement, with equal educational opportunity the crucial component. The historical pattern of academic failure by minority and working-class students was a blemish on the principles of justice and equality of opportunity expounded by a democracy.
This educational pattern necessitated the formulation of reform programs to ensure equality of opportunity. Even though functionalist theorists disagreed on the causes of academic failure, they vigorously believed that the solutions social education essay both educational and social problems were possible within the capitalist social structure.
The central distinction made by the functionalist perspective was between equality of opportunity and equality of results. A democratic society is a just society if it generates the former. Therefore, functionalist theory rests on a positive view of meritocracy as a laudable goal, with education viewed as the necessary institutional component in guaranteeing a fair competition for unequal rewards.
The just society is one where each member has an equal opportunity for social and economic advantages and where individual merit and talent replace ascriptive and class variables as the most essential determinants of status.
Education is the vehicle in ensuring the continual movement toward this meritocratic system. Education plays a significant function in the maintenance of the modern democratic and technocratic society. In a political democracy, social education essay, schools provide citizens with the knowledge and dispositions to participate effectively in civic life. In an increasingly technical society, schools provide students with the skills and dispositions to work in such a society, social education essay.
Although schools do teach specific work skills, they also teach students how to learn so they may adapt to new work roles and requirements, social education essay.
Functionalist theory was the dominant paradigm in sociology and the sociology of education until the s. In the s, conflict theory emerged as a significant critique and alternative to functionalism. Conflict theorists argue that schools functioned in the interests of dominant groups, rather than everyone, and that functionalists confused what is with what ought to be. According to this critique, whereas schools ought to be democratic and meritocratic, the empirical evidence did not support the functionalist contention that they were.
Although the specific nature of conflict theory is developed in the next section, it is important to note some of the problems with functionalism. First, conflict theorists argue that the relationship between schooling, skills, and jobs is far less rational than functionalists suggest. Second, conflict theorists point out that the role of schools in providing equality of opportunity is far more problematic than functionalists suggest.
Third, social education essay, large-scale empirical research on the effects of schooling casts significant doubt on the functionalist assertion that the expansion of schooling brings about an increasingly just and meritocratic social order. Conflict sociologists of education do not believe that society is held together social education essay shared values and collective agreement alone, but rather on the ability of dominant groups to impose their will on subordinate groups through force, co-optation, and manipulation.
The glue of society is economic, social education essay, political, cultural, and military power. Ideologies or intellectual justifications created by the powerful are designed to enhance their position by legitimizing inequality and the unequal distribution of material and cultural goods.
Conflict sociologists see the relation between school and society as problematic. Whereas functionalists emphasize cohesion in explaining social order, conflict sociologists social education essay struggle. From a conflict point of view, schools are similar to social battlefields, where students struggle against teachers, teachers against administrators, and so on.
These antagonisms, however, social education essay, are most often muted for two reasons: the authority and power of the school, and the achievement ideology. In effect, the achievement ideology convinces students and teachers that schools promote learning and sort and select students according to their abilities, not according to their social status.
Although Karl Marx — did not write a great deal about education, he is the intellectual founder of the conflict school in the sociology of education. His analytic imagination and moral outrage were sparked by the social conditions found in Europe in the nineteenth century. Industrialization and urbanization had produced a new class of workers—the proletariat—who lived in poverty; worked up to eighteen hours a day; and had little, if any, social education essay, hope of creating a better life for their children.
Marx believed that the class system, which separated owners from workers and workers from the benefits of their own labor, made class struggle inevitable. In the s, political economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis used a neo-Marxist perspective for examining the growth of the American public school.
They argued that there is a direct correspondence between the organization of schools and the organization of society, social education essay, and until society is fundamentally changed, there is little hope of real school reform, social education essay. Other conflict sociologists of education, however, argue that traditional Marxism is too deterministic and overlooks the power of culture and human agency in promoting change. They suggest that Marxism places too much emphasis on the independent effects of the economy and not enough on the effects of cultural, social education essay, social, and political factors.
An early conflict sociologist who took a slightly different theoretical orientation when viewing society was Max Weber — Like Marx, Weber was convinced that power relations between dominant and subordinate groups structured societies, but unlike Marx, Weber believed that class differences alone could not capture the complex ways in which human beings form hierarchies and belief systems that make these hierarchies seem just and inevitable, social education essay.
Thus, Weber examined status cultures as well as class position. Status is an important sociological concept because it alerts us to the fact that people identify their group by what they consume and with whom they socialize, social education essay. Weber also recognized that political and military power could be exercised by the state, social education essay, without direct reference to the wishes of the dominant classes.
Weber had a critical awareness of how bureaucracy was becoming the dominant type of authority in the modern state and how bureaucratic ways of thinking were bound to shape educational reforms. Or are these two goals compatible? The Weberian approach to studying the relation between school and society has developed into a compelling tradition of sociological research, social education essay.
Researchers in this tradition tend to analyze school organizations and processes from the point of view of status competition and organizational social education essay. One of the first Social education essay sociologists of education to use these concepts was Willard Waller.
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Education, everywhere, has the function of the formation of social personalities. Education helps in transmitting culture through proper moulding of social personalities. In this way, it contributes to the integration of society. It helps men to adapt themselves to their environment, to Estimated Reading Time: 6 mins 9/3/ · Education is a social organization and throughout the school program it meets a cultural need since the school system is our initial tertiary peer group, the college system presents us to societal best practice rules, and the school system imparts to world, knowledge and blogger.comted Reading Time: 12 mins Education is a significant institution in our society as it serves to fulfil many functions and provide opportunities for children. One important role that education plays is carrying out the process of secondary socialization where the education system teaches children the norms and values of society in a way that the family cannot
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