SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION

Ulfah Muhayani, MPP

Sociology of Education
The SOE is the study of how public institutions and individual experiences affect education and its outcomes. SOE is most concerned with public schooling systems of modern industrial societies, including expansion of higher, further, adult, and continuing education.

Theoretical perspectives on schools and society

How do classical sociological theories help us to understand schooling? How has the sociological understanding of education developed over time?

History
A systematic sociology of education began with mile Durkheim's work on moral education as a basis for organic solidarity and that by Max Weber, on the Chinese literati as an instrument of political control. It was after World War II, however, that the subject received renewed interest around the world: from technological functionalism in the US, egalitarian reform of opportunity in Europe, and human-capital theory in economics. These all implied that, with industrialization, the need for a technologically skilled labour force undermines class distinctions and other ascriptive systems of stratification, and that education promotes social mobility. However, statistical and field research across numerous societies showed a persistent link between an individual's social class and achievement, and suggested that education could only achieve limited social mobility.[1] Sociological studies showed how schooling patterns reflected, rather than challenged, class stratification and racial and sexual discrimination.[1] After the general collapse of functionalism from the late 1960s onwards, the idea of education as an unmitigated good was even more profoundly challenged. Neo-Marxists argued that school education simply produced a docile labour-force essential to late-capitalist class relations.

Emile Durkheim
In Emile Durkheim's view, educational systems reflect underlying changes in society because the systems are a construct built by society, which naturally seeks to reproduce its collectively held values, beliefs, norms, and conditions through its institutions. Thus, as time unfolds, educational systems come to contain the imprint of past stages in the development of society, as each epoch leaves its imprint on the system. By uncovering these imprints and analyzing them, the development of a society can be reconstructed from the educational system.

 The reflection of such changes, however, would not be possible if educational systems were not mirrors of society, albeit on a miniature scale. Changes in society manifest themselves in the educational system because it is constructed by society's members to, in Durkheim's words, "express their needs."

Durkheims ideas
society constructs its educational system to promote and reproduce its ideal of what a human should be, especially of what a human being should be as a part of society "cultural determination and the influence of socialization education is thus "`a continuous effort to impose on the child ways of seeing, feeling and acting at which he would not have arrived spontaneously.'

What is school for? Why we have to go to school?