I think that's the most important part of doing this job, is learning different personality types. I mean, it's kind of like sociology or psychology in a sense. With that, and with every project I do, I think I'm able to pull something away that further makes me understand humanity in a way I didn't before.
Education
by
Charles Lamson
Education for a Changing World
In the poorer regions of the world, there is a dire need for universal access to schools; in the more developed regions, serious issues of educational equity need to be addressed. And amid the clamor for school reform in the United States, there is also concern that new standards and new pressures for higher performance will not be matched by the necessary resources of money and talent. Although critics of public schooling abound, there is little consensus about how to achieve better student performance (Torres & Mitchell, 1998, Sociology of Education). But why are schools and education so often at the center of controversy and debate? To begin answering this question, we turn to basic concepts in educational sociology.
 |
Efforts to change the goals and methods of education are not new. One of the most famous trials in history took place in ancient Greece when Socrates was accused of corrupting the morals of Athenian youth with his innovative ideas and educational methods. Today, the fact that proposals for educational reforms are receiving so much hopeful attention is evidence of the importance of education in modern societies. There is great concern with the need to improve education in order to train new generations of workers. We will see at many points in the next few posts that there is a widespread desire to reform schools without significantly increasing school funding. However, although critics of the public schools abound, there is little consensus about how to achieve better student performance (Torres & Mitchell, 1998). Education may be defined as the process by which a society transmits knowledge, values, norms, and ideologies and in so doing prepares young people for adult roles and adults for new roles; in other words, it transmits the society's culture to the next generation. Education thus is a form of socialization that is carried out by institutions outside the family, such as schools, colleges, preschools, and adult education centers. Each of these is an educational institution because it encompasses a set of statuses and roles designed to carry out specific educational functions---it is devoted to transmitting a specific body of knowledge, values, and norms of behavior. A particular school or college may be referred to as an institution in everyday language, but in sociological terms it is an organization that exemplifies an educational institution. Thus, El Centro College in Dallas, Texas, is an organization that exemplifies the institution of higher education. The high school you attended was also an organization, but its curriculum and norms of conduct were those of the institution known as secondary education. Educational institutions have a huge effect on communities in the United States and other modern societies. Upwardly mobile couples often base their choice of a place to live on the quality of the public schools in the neighborhood. Every neighborhood has at least an elementary school and every large city has one or more high schools and at least one community college or four-year college. Cities usually also have a variety of school administrations---public and private---and some owe their existence, growth, and development to the presence of a college or university (Ballantine, 1997, The Sociology of Education).
The Nature of Schools Educational institutions affect not only the surroundings but also the daily lives of millions of American children and their parents, college and university students, teachers, and professors. Hence, education is a major focus of social scientific research. And because it affects so many lives and deals so directly with values, it is often an arena of conflict among people with conflicting values. To the sociologist, the most common educational institution, the school, is a specialized structure with a special function: preparing children for active participation in adult activities. Schools are sometimes compared with total institutions, in which a large group of involuntary "clients" is serviced by a smaller group of staff members. The staffs of such institutions tend to emphasize the maintenance of order and control, and this tendency often leads to the development of elaborate sets of rules and monitoring systems. This comparison should not be taken too literally; schools are not prisons, although some of the inmates may think of them as such, but the typical school does tend to be characterized by a clearly defined authority system and set of rules. In fact, sociologists often cite schools as examples of bureaucratic organizations (Ballantine, 1997; Mulkey, 1993, Sociology of Education). A more interactionist viewpoint sees the school as a set of behaviors; that is, the central feature of the school is not its bureaucratic structure but the kinds of interactions and patterns of socialization that occur there. From this perspective, we need to examine all the rules involved and see how they interact---how they mesh or failed to mesh. For example, homework is assigned, but who besides the student is involved in completing the assignment? Are the parents involved? In what ways---as helpers or merely as disciplinarians? Do the parents ever ask what the teacher did with a homework assignment? The interactionist perspective thus insists on examining all the factors involved in learning, often in an effort to determine how they may be strengthened or challenged so as to create more effective learning environments (Torres & Mitchell, 1998).
Conflict theorists, by contrast, view education in modern societies as serving to justify and maintain the status quo (Arrow, Bowles, & Durlauf, 2000, Meritocracy and Economic Inequality; Bowles and Gintis, 1976, Schooling in Capitalist America; Castells et al., 1998, Critical Education in the New Information Age). This critical perspective challenges the more popular view that education is the main route to social mobility and that it can offset inequalities in family background (Bell, 1973, The Coming of Post Industrial Society). When sociologists analyze the impact of educational institutions on society, they generally conclude that the benefits of education are unequally distributed and tend to reproduce the existing stratification system (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985, Education Under Siege; Fullan, 1993, Change Forces). If we think of education from a global perspective, and if we focus primarily on the schools, the major theoretical perspectives in sociology tend to pose different, but overlapping, questions for research. The functionalist perspective leads to questions about how schools work to reach as many of the nation's children as possible, how well students actually learn in those schools, and how the schools function with regard to other major social institutions. Are the schools secular or religious institutions, or both? In more formal terms, how differentiated are the schools from the society's other social institutions? This question is the familiar one of separation of church and school, or of political party and school. Even in relatively secular nations such as the United States, where separation of church and school is the law, there are continual battles over issues like prayer in school and the teachings of "creationism" or "intelligent design" (the idea that God set in motion the mechanisms of evolution). In less secular societies, such as many Islamic nations, religious institutions are entirely responsible for running the schools, in which case little value may be placed on scientific objectivity or freedom of inquiry. As noted earlier, sociologists with a conflict perspective on social research often ask whether schools are actually involved in creating equal opportunities for social and group advancement or whether they are in fact working to justify and reproduce existing patterns of inequality. Are they preparing all students, regardless of class, race, ethnicity, or gender to rise in the social class hierarchy, for example, or are they preparing students to accept their positions in society, especially when those positions are less advantaged? Interactionist sociologists ask questions about what actually goes on in the daily life of schools and classrooms. Their research focuses on the interactions among students, between students and their teachers, or among teachers and administrators. Their research on these questions usually helps answer questions asked by those with other sociological perspectives as well. For example, observation of classroom interactions might reveal that without knowing it, teachers are following the what is sometimes called a "hidden curriculum" that communicates different expectations for girls and boys, with boys expected to do better at math and science and girls expected to do better at analyzing characters and emotions, typical gender stereotypical roles (Lynch, 1990, The Hidden Curriculum).
The different perspectives generate many specific questions and diverse research projects. This is especially true when one takes a global perspective because educational issues vary widely across different regions of the world. *MAIN SOURCE: WILLIAM KORNBLUM, 2003, SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., PP. 554-556* end |
No comments:
Post a Comment