SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION

Sociology of Education

Sociology of Education

Introduction

Educational institutions play a very vital role in molding the way in which the students perform. Moreover, they also groom the child with respect to its educational and behavioral abilities. Children join schools at a very young age and spend half of their day at school. Therefore, it is more important for the schools especially those who have enrolled students in the primary level to provide the best facilities to the students. This is important because the students learn that their school teaches them. Furthermore, they join high school and university where they are also groomed, and this plays a crucial role for humans to flourish (Taylor, 1999).

Education philosophy is a term popularized by John Dewey (1859-1952) to signify a study of the fundamental principles of the theory of education, as distinguished from the "science of education," i.e., the empirical study of the educational process, and from the "art of education," i.e., the techniques or methods of teaching practice. For Dewey, the philosophy of education dealt principally with the values or goals of education. The history of scholastic thought indicates that fundamental questions of a rational type have been raised concerning (1) the nature of man as he is capable of getting education, (2) the goal or the character of the truly educated man, (3) the trained abilities that man acquires in achieving this goal, and (4) the agents by which man is educated. In this context, the term "education" should not be limited to merely academic training, but rather taken in its widest sense of the development of all facets of human personality—physical, moral, and intellectual—in their individual and social aspects (Noddings, 2011).

Emerging Sociology of Education

Although the emergence of the sociology of education as a distinct field of enquiry is of fairly recent origin, it has its roots in the early development of sociology, especially the functionalism of Durkheim. For Durkheim (1922), the process of education was to be understood in terms of its contribution to the promotion and maintenance of the social order. A related viewpoint (e.g. Mannheim) was to regard education as a means of solving problems and removing social antagonisms.

Until the 1950s, the sociology of education remained strongly influenced by such perspectives, although the development of the discipline owed much to the role of sociology in teacher training, especially in the US, as well as to the tradition of'political arithmetic' in the UK. The latter tradition led to a range of surveys and statistical studies exploring the social influences on educational attainment, and educational and occupational selection and social mobility (e.g. Floud, Halsey and Martin, 1957). Although these studies revealed the persistence of class and gender inequalities in educational opportunity, the assumption remained that education could become a means of social transformation in the long run (Epstein and Mavis, 2000). In the UK, the introduction of comprehensive schools, programs of compensatory education and the expansion of higher education in the 1950s and subsequently, were intended to achieve this end, ...