Dominant Perspective ON Sociology OF Education PDF

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DOMINANT PERSPECTIVE ON SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATIONINTRODUCTIONHuman life revolves around learning. Learning begins at birth and continues until the death of a child. There are, however, educational institutions that play an important role in the learning process. We could also argue that learning or obt...

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DOMINANT PERSPECTIVE ON SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION INTRODUCTION

Human life revolves around learning. Learning begins at birth and continues until the death of a child. There are, however, educational institutions that play an important role in the learning process. We could also argue that learning or obtaining education is a social process because no one person can know everything. In this process, she or he must always ask for help from others. Learning is a two-way street, to put it another way. Similarly, a slew of academics have offered their viewpoints on educational sociology. Others believe in conflict, while others believe in the functional component of educational sociology, and so on. In this unit, we will learn about the concept of Sociology and Education, the importance of Sociology of Education, and finally, we will discuss the various perspectives of Sociology of Education, focusing on functionalist, conflict, critical, feminist, and interactionist perspectives.

LINKAGE BETWEEN SOCIOLOGY AND EDUCATION

In a nutshell, educational sociology is the study of the patterns of relationships that exist between education and society. It is a study of the social dynamics that occur in a learning environment. Ottaway classifies it as a social study and a subset of social science due to its scientific nature. It's about educational techniques, institutions, goals, curriculum, and operations in relation to society, politics, spirituality, culture, and economic issues. The empirical study of social processes and social patterns in the education sector is known as sociology of education. Education, according to this school of thought, is a collection of social activities and interpersonal interactions. Both formal and informal contexts play a role in the educational process. Sociological studies of human interaction in education can take into account both contexts and contribute to scientific claims about human interactions in schools. The sociology of education focuses on

how public institutions and individual experiences influence educational practises and outcomes.

IMPORTANCE OF SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION

In a variety of ways, sociology aids the educational process. Part of education is the study of how people and cultures interact with each other and with themselves. Interactions between instructors and students, as well as contacts with others outside of the classroom and bringing those experiences into the classroom, all appear to be examples of how our social ties influence our learning. Learning and teaching do not take place in a vacuum. Students bring their own perspectives, expertise, and stories to the classroom, which teachers must acknowledge and incorporate into the learning environment. The idea of students attending a classroom and separating it from their own social experiences is no longer a viable model in today's world. Inclusion and dissemination of culture/traditions must be done deliberately and selectively, because traditions must be chosen for transmission and omitted based on their value and acceptability in today's democratic framework. For instance, the concept of Sarva Dharma Samabhav, which states that all Dharmas (truths) are similar to or complementary to one another, must be widely spread. This statement has recently been interpreted as meaning "all religions are the same," implying that all religious beliefs are simply different paths to God or the same spiritual goal. It emphasises the moral responsibilities that people in society should have toward one another. Simultaneously, education should persuade people to give up practises like child marriage and casteism. The world is changing at a breakneck pace these days, thanks to the emergence of new social trends induced by technological and communication advancements. In order to produce citizens who are anchored in their own cultures while remaining open to other cultures, social patterns must be established alongside the preservation of traditional and new values. The overall situation has improved. Economic development and responsible management of the physical and human environment have evolved to the point where they go hand in hand.

DOMINANT PERSPECTIVES ON SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION

Functionalist Perspective

Sudden changes in the entire system are not important to functionalists. They emphasise the absence of internal disruptive variables that threaten the system's overall stability. We'll look at the perspectives of two functionalists, Durkheim and Parsons, in this section. According to Durkheim, education's primary purpose is to transmit societal norms and values. Society's or collective existence's survival is contingent on a certain level of uniformity among its diverse members. Members' uniformity is achieved by adhering to the society's rules and regulations. From the moment a child is born, education protects and strengthens these societal homogenising characteristics. He emphasises the importance of education in instilling social consciousness in individuals. Individual beings are composed of mental states that are unique to themselves and the events in their lives. The ideas, feelings, and behaviours of the group in which he or she is a member are embodied by the social being. The socialisation process of a newborn distinguishes humans from animals. According to Durkheim, specific abilities acquired in educational institutions are required to maintain society's division of labour. The division of labour becomes more complicated as society progresses from a simple to a complex state, resulting in the creation of increasingly specialised vocations. Academic institutions provide their members with the necessary specific abilities based on societal demands, and they educate them to perform the role sets that society provides. The government, according to Durkheim, is in charge of overseeing the educational system and deciding what moral concepts are taught to its citizens. Parsons' views on education are comparable to those of Durkheim. According to Parsons, two key concerns are critical in the context of education in society. The first is the internalisation of commitments and abilities for adult tasks by school-aged children. In this case, the school classroom could be viewed as a socialisation agency

where children are encouraged to take on adult responsibilities. The distribution of human resources within the adult society's role structure is the second. He recognises the impact that various socialisation agents such as family, informal peer networks, and others have on society's shaping of the young. According to Parsons, the school also serves as an allocation agency, preparing human resources and assigning them to specific roles within society. He observes that graduating from high school is quickly becoming the bare minimum of educational achievement for all members of society.

Conflict Perspective

Conflict theorists are diametrically opposed to functionalists in terms of fundamental methodology. According to conflict theorists, society is always in a state of disarray, but it is held together as a whole by powerful social groups that compel cooperation from the weaker. They also emphasise how educational practises are rife with inequality, dominance, and marginalisation. They see society as being divided into dominant and submissive factions who are constantly at odds. Louis Althusser, Ivan Illich, Samuel Bowles, and Herbert Gintis are all sociologists of education who take a conflict perspective. According to Althusser, society is divided into two classes: the capitalist class (which owns the means of production and wields power) and the labour class (which owns the means of production and wields power) (which serves in the production systems and is subject to the former). The capitalist class requires a constant supply of labour power that it can profit from. The capitalist class uses educational systems to generate the necessary labour force. Workers are brainwashed to accept the ruling class ideology, which legitimises capitalism and subjects them to exploitation. The capitalist process, according to Bowles and Gintis, provides a surplus of labour force in order to improve the company's negotiating strength when hiring employees. The educational system produces an overabundance of employees with skills that are best suited to low-wage menial work. Employers can exert control over their employees while keeping pay to a bare minimum due to unemployment and the availability of replaceable labour. The capitalist class determines the educational system's governing framework and curriculum. The hierarchical division of labour in

the workplace is mirrored in the social ties at school. Students' lack of control over important tasks (such as decision-making and policy-making) in school, for example, is comparable to the situation they will face at work as they grow older.

Critical Perspective In the 1920s, critical theory arose in Germany. Marx Horkheimer is regarded as the founder of this school of thought. The concept of critical perspective in sociology of education was borrowed by Neo-Marxists and intellectuals from the Frankfurt School. It is both a Marxist critique of capitalism's economy and a challenge to modernity's traditions as a core product of capitalism. It focuses on concepts such as consumerism and culture, as well as science and technology, as new ways of imposing and addressing modernity's ramifications. Critical theory, which goes beyond Marxism, tries to locate the practise of dominance and subordination in the domain of culture. Critical theory, according to Kellner, differs from traditional mainstream social science in that it takes a multidisciplinary approach and aims to develop a dialectic and empirical sociological perspective. Critical theories are concerned with three main issues: identifying academic inequities, understanding the causes of such injustices, and researching and proposing solutions to those problems. In the United States, Michael Apple, Jean Anyon, and Henry Giroux launched a new Sociology of Education. In the field of pedagogical sociology, Young's book is regarded as a seminal work. Since then, much critical analysis in education has centred on three central concerns, according to Apple: the struggle between functionalism and economic reductionism, or the core problem; second, strongly linked assertions among structuralists and culturalists in education; and third, class reductionism. Horkheimer and Lukacs were ecstatic about the proletariat's possibilities. Lukacs proposed organising the working class in order to bring about a socialist revolution. Horkheimer was persuaded by Lukacs. They believed that the proletariat would play an active role in their rise to power.

In 1930, however, things appeared to be different. There was political unrest everywhere. The rise of Nazi National Socialism rendered the labour movement politically powerless. Both Horkheimer and Felix believed Lukac's ideology was a failure. History had taken a turn for the worse. Horkheimer enlisted the help of psychologists and sociologists. He proposed a new research project in his opening lecture, which will re-examine the topic of social philosophy, in which links can be drawn between the economic function of a given social group in a specific age in specific nations, the alteration of its individual members mental structures, and the concepts and institutions as a whole that affect and are generated by them.

Feminist Perspective

The gender issues that occur in educational institutions are the focus of feminist theorists. Its main goal is to figure out where the disparities in educational institutions come from and why they exist. It also considers the ramifications of such inequity on society as a whole. Women are treated unequally in educational institutions, as they are in many other societal institutions. Beyond sociology and sociology of education, feminist concepts, techniques, and research processes have spread throughout the social sciences, where they have interacted with other epistemic innovations in social and cultural research. This happened over a 30- to 40-year period, coinciding with broader social and political movements as well as shifts in liberalism. As a result, feminist and critical theories are now influencing a wide range of theoretical and methodological developments. For example, feminists in social and educational studies see the political as personal as part of the'social and cultural movement,' which contributes to the current pedagogical trend in higher education toward the personal. Personal reflections and reflective professional practises have influenced postgraduate and vocational education as well as undergraduate research and studies, resulting in rich and complex educational ethnographies. Despite the fact that most higher education transformations have resulted in the intensification of doctoral education and quality assurance processes that obstruct fairness, uniqueness, and creativity, neoliberalism has created significant opportunities for women's inclusion and feminist

understanding. This seems to be more common in professional doctorate programmes than in traditional doctoral research programmes. Indeed, feminist knowledge and pedagogical practises, which date back to the early second feminist political movement, which pioneered feminist knowledge and theories, may have foreshadowed such advances in doctoral education in the knowledge-based economy, and feminist pedagogies may encourage the development of innovative professional doctoral education practises. Feminine pedagogy has flourished in higher education, particularly doctoral education, and is now ingrained in higher education practises and pedagogies in general.

Symbolic Interactionist Perspective

Interactionists are more interested in visible face-to-face interactions than in macrolevel structural linkages involving a variety of social entities. They investigate social interaction using qualitative methods such as participant observation rather than surveys and interviews. According to interactionists, close contact and immersion in the daily lives of the study subjects is essential for understanding the meaning of actions and the process by which people build situations through their interactions. They are chastised, however, for their highly impressionistic research methods and potential bias in their observations. Those who have made significant contributions to this viewpoint include Cooley, Mead, Blumer, Schutz, Garfinkel, Berger, and Luckman. Cooley's concept of the "looking-glass self" illustrates how a person creates meaning for himself by reflecting others' perceptions of who he is. This process of one mind reacting to the thoughts of others includes how we perceive our image to others, how we imagine others judging that image, and how we think about that judgement ourselves. Individuals, according to Mead, construct their'self' through role-playing. Role playing entails putting oneself in the shoes of the person with whom one is interacting. Goffman compares the social environment to theatrical theatre, in which actors use impression control to show themselves in everyday situations. Sociologists of

education investigate how instructors and students interpret and attribute meaning to their interactions from an interactionist perspective. According to symbolic interactionism, education is an example of labelling theory in action. According to a symbolic interactionist, those in authority are intimately linked to those who are tagged, while those who are labelled are not. Low test scores or poor performance on a particular topic or examination, for example, are frequently used to label a student as a poor performer. It can be difficult to 'cast off' tags like this, which can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Labeling that extends to levels that signify educational attainment is of interest to interactionists. Credentialism is the emphasis on degrees and certificates to demonstrate that a person has a specific aptitude, has completed a specific level of education, and has met specific job requirements. These credentials or qualifications indicate what a person has accomplished and help that person be identified. The labelling theory has the potential to have a significant impact on student education. This can be seen in the educational setting, where professors and powerful groups within the school distribute labels that are accepted by the entire student body. Symbolic interactionism emphasises social interaction in the classroom, playground, and other educational settings. These studies aim to explain not only what happens in schools, but how what happens in schools affects society as a whole. Several studies, for example, show that children's playground activities enhance gender-role socialisation. Men participate in competitive sports, while girls enjoy cooperative activities. In the classroom in New York, Lenore Jacobson and Robert Rosenthal conducted a thorough investigation into this phenomenon. They tested a group of students at the start of the school year and reported to their instructors which students were bright and which were not. After that, the children were tested once more at the end of the school year. Over the course of the school year, the bright students had learned more than the less bright students, which was unsurprising. However, it was discovered that the researchers had chosen which children would be rated as bright and which would be rated as less bright at random. Teachers' activities must have been the cause of the 'bright' kids learning more throughout the school year despite not being brighter at the

start. Rather than the 'less brilliant' students, their professors spent more time with them and admired them. We can use this technique to show why monitoring is harmful to the children who are monitored.

LET US SUM UP The basic sociological theories illuminate how people think about education. According to functionalists, education is a necessary social institution in our society because it helps individuals develop the concept of both manifest and latent function. According to conflict theorists, schools and education help to reinforce racial, economic, and gender inequality. The three main concerns of critical theories are identifying educational inequities, linking those inequities to their underlying causes, and researching and proposing alternatives to any of those disparities. Similarly, feminist theory seeks to understand the origins and causes of gender disparities in education, as well as the social consequences of such disparities. Symbolic interactionists are a school of thought that emphasises how human interaction patterns shape educational practises....