2.1.1 Sociology of education and socialisation

Explained

1. Educational sociology vs sociology of education.

• Scope of both: relation of education with society, culture and social change; the school as a social system; teacher and pupil roles; class, caste, gender and opportunity; education and social mobility, democracy, modernisation.
• Durkheim's view: each society forms the kind of person it needs; education creates in the child the physical, intellectual and moral states that society and his own milieu demand. So education is a social fact, and it differs from society to society and age to age.
• T.P. Nunn saw the school as a place where the young are trained in the activities of most lasting value to the wider world, not merely a place for learning facts.

2. Education as a social and cultural process.

• Social process: it takes place only through interaction (parent-child, teacher-pupil, peers); it develops social qualities (cooperation, tolerance, leadership); it prepares the child for social roles. Dewey: education is life itself, not a preparation for life.
• Cultural process: culture is learnt, not inherited. Education has three functions towards culture:
  • conserve it (keep traditions, language, values);
  • transmit it from one generation to the next (the cultural heritage);
  • renew it (remove outdated parts, add new knowledge, help adjust to cultural change and close cultural lag).
• Social distance (concept measured by Bogardus' scale, 1925): the degree of closeness or antipathy between members of different groups. Education aims to reduce it. Detail: EDU-SO-03.

3. Socialisation: what it is and is not (BRAOU).

• Sociality is a quality (being social); socialisation is a process; socialism is a theory of how society should be organised.
• Maturation is a physical and chemical (biological) unfolding that a person can control very little; socialisation is learnt through interaction with others.
• At birth the baby is only a biological organism; socialisation turns it into a social person.
• Three elements: the person's physical and psychological heritage, the environment he is born into, and culture, which grows out of the interaction of the two.
• Four goals: (1) control of impulses and growth of a conscience; (2) preparation for roles and their performance; (3) cultivating sources of meaning (what is valued); (4) preparing the person to function in social life.
• Effects: on the individual, it gives skills and habits and makes participation possible; on society, it makes members accept its norms and keeps social and cultural life continuous across generations.
• Feral children show that socialisation is needed to become human: Kamala and Amala, the "wolf children" of Midnapore (Bengal, 1920), and the isolated children Anna and Isabelle studied by Kingsley Davis, lacked speech and social behaviour.

4. The four mechanisms.

Other texts add conditioning, reward and punishment, role-play, sympathy and cooperation.

5. Types of socialisation.

• Secondary socialisation brings smaller changes than primary and lasts through life.
• Re-socialisation is sharpest in total institutions (Erving Goffman, Asylums, 1961): prisons, army camps, mental hospitals, where one authority controls the whole of daily life.

6. Development of the self.

• Cooley's three steps: (1) we imagine how we appear to others; (2) we imagine how they judge that appearance; (3) we feel pride or shame (self-feeling). So the self is "a reflection of others' perceptions" (2025), not fixed at birth.
• Cooley's primary group: small, face-to-face, intimate and lasting (family, play group, neighbourhood). A secondary group is large, formal and goal-based (an office, a party).
• Mead's stages: imitation / preparatory (copying without meaning, under 3); play (taking the role of one significant other: playing "teacher" or "mother"); game (taking several roles at once, as in cricket, which teaches rules; the child forms the generalised other, the shared expectations of the whole group).
• Freud: the id follows the pleasure principle, the ego the reality principle, the superego is the conscience formed from parents' and society's rules.

7. Agencies of socialisation and education.

• Family: the oldest institution, from which the others grew; Froebel and Pestalozzi saw the home as the first school and the mother as the first teacher. BRAOU's five functions: socialisation, acculturation, a sense of belonging, passing on religious faith, moral learning. It uses reward and punishment and informal social control.
• School: from Greek skholē, "leisure". A special environment, a simplified, purified and balanced version of society (Dewey); it widens the child's world beyond the family.
  • BRAOU's functions of the school: all-round development; transmission and enrichment of culture; social efficiency; higher values (satyam, shivam, sundaram); post-school adjustment (Brown: a direct duty of the school); vocational training; national integration; international understanding; leadership training; educating parents; coordinating the other agencies.
  • Dewey: children go to school to learn systematically the occupations that make up living.
• Peer group: members of similar age; free, spontaneous interaction; the first group of equals; its influence overtakes the parents' as the child grows (strongest in adolescence); conflict arises when peer standards differ from the family's.
• Community: Ogburn and Nimkoff: the total organisation of social life within a limited area. Features: area, population, we-feeling, cooperation, common heritage, service institutions. Its educational role: providing schools, free and compulsory education for 6–14, framing aims, control of education, curriculum, equal opportunity, vocational education.
• Mass media: a powerful passive agency that shapes views by repeated exposure; one-way; needs media literacy. In Indian education: radio, TV, films, CCTV, SITE (1975), INSAT, multimedia, newspapers. The Delors report (Learning: The Treasure Within, 1996) added computers and the Internet.
• Library: often called the "people's university"; a free, voluntary agency of lifelong learning.
• Payne: every group of educative agencies shapes social adjustment and adds to social control.

8. Functions of the school named in options.

9. Formal, informal and non-formal agencies. Formal = planned, with a set curriculum, time and certificates (school, college, university). Informal = incidental, lifelong, no plan (family, community, peers, media). Non-formal = planned but flexible (open schools, distance learning, adult education centres). Details: EDU-FN-01.