UNDERSTANDING CULTURE, SOCIETY AND POLITICS

LESSON: SOCIAL INSTITUTION OF EDUCATION (WEEK 2)

INTRODUCTION
Education is another one of the social institutions. Education is defined as a
social institution which meets the need to educate and retrain the members of the
society. The manifest purpose of education is to teach skills, ideas, and logical thinking.
Some say education teachers the core values of the society, others say it teaches the
dominant ideology.

Meaning and Nature of Education

Sociologist and anthropologists view education as the process, in school or
beyond, of transmitting a society’s knowledge, skills, values, and behaviors. Every
society seeks to educate its young members, to prepare them for adult roles.

In the formal sense, education refers to the organized transmission of a culture’s

knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to another. On the other hand, the
process of socialization is the broad, overall process by which individuals acquire those
modes of thinking, feeling, and acting necessary to participate actively in society.
Education is more deliberate and structured training.

Learning in turn, is a product of socialization in which culture is transmitted

from one generation to another. Generally, learning is the alteration of behavior
resulting from informal or formal education.

Different Perspectives of Education

tAccordingly, education may be seen in different perspectives: formal, informal,
and nonformal.

1. Formal education. This is the “education system” with its hierarchical structures
and chronological succession of grades, from primary to university, in which addition
to general academic studies comprises a variety of specialized programs and full-time
technical and vocational training institutions.

2. Informal education. This is a lifelong process par excellence, whereby each

individual acquires attitudes, skills, values, and knowledge through everyday
experience; through the educational influences and resources of his/her environment,
namely family neighbors, workplace, and leisure, in the market, and the library; and
through the mass communications media.

3. Nonformal education. This comprises all those activities that are organized outside
the established formal system, whether functioning separately or as an important part
of broader activity, and designed to serve identifiable clientele and educational
objectives.

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The Functionalist Perspective: Providing Social Benefits

A central position of functionalism is that when the parts of a society are working
properly, each contributes to the well-being or stability of that society. The positive
things that people intend their actions to accomplish are known as manifest functions.
The positive consequences they did not intend are called latent functions. Let’s begin
by looking at the manifest functions of education.

1. Teaching Knowledge and Skills

Education’s most obvious manifest function is to teach knowledge and skills—
whether the traditional three R’s or their more contemporary counterparts, such as
computer literacy. Each generation must train the next to fill the group’s significant
positions. Because our postindustrial society needs highly educated people, the schools
supply them.

2. Cultural Transmission of Values

Another manifest function of education is the cultural transmission of values,
a process by which schools pass on a society’s core values from one generation to the
next. Schools in a socialist society stress values that support socialism, while schools
in a capitalist society teach values that support capitalism. U.S. schools, for example,
stress the significance of private property, individualism, and competition. Regardless
of a country’s economic system, loyalty to the state is a cultural value, and schools
around the world teach patriotism. U.S. schools—as well as those of Russia, France,
China, and other countries around the world—extol the society’s founders, their struggle
for freedom from oppression, and the goodness of the country’s social institutions.
Seldom is this function as explicit as it is in Japan, where the law requires that schools
“cultivate a respect for tradition and culture, and love for the nation and homeland”
(Nakamura 2006). To visualize what the functionalists mean, consider how differently a
course in U.S. history would be taught in Cuba, Iran, and Muncie, Indiana.

3. Social Integration
Schools also bring about social integration. Among the ways they promote a sense
of national identity is by having students salute the flag and sing the national anthem.
This integrative function of education goes far beyond making people similar in their
appearance, speech, or even ways of thinking. To forge a national identity is to stabilize
the political system. If people identify with a society’s institutions and perceive them as
the basis of their own welfare, they have no reason rebel. This function of education is
especially significant when it comes to the lower social classes, from which most social
revolutionaries emerge. The wealthy already have a vested interest in maintaining the
status quo, but getting the lower classes to identify with a social system as it is goes a
long way toward preserving the system as it is.

Latent Functions of Schooling

Schooling also serves several less widely recognized functions. It provides child
care for the growing number of one-parent and two-career families. In addition,
schooling occupies thousands of young people in their teens and twenties who would
otherwise be competing for limited opportunities in the job market. High schools,
colleges, and universities also bring together people of marriageable age. Finally, schools
establish networks that serve as a valuable career resource throughout life.

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1. Gatekeeping (Social Placement)
Sociologists Talcott Parsons (1940), Kingsley Davis, and Wilbert Moore (Davis and
Moore 1945) pioneered a view called social placement. They pointed out that some jobs
require few skills and can be performed by people of lesser intelligence. Other jobs, such
as that of physician, require high intelligence and advanced education. It is up to the
schools to sort the capable from the incapable. They do this, say the functionalists, on
the basis of merit, that is, the students’ abilities and ambitions. As you can see, social
placement, more commonly known as gatekeeping, means to open the doors of
opportunity for some and to close them to others. The question is what opens and closes
those doors. Is it merit, as the functionalists argue? To accomplish gatekeeping, schools
use some form of tracking, sorting students into different educational “tracks” or
programs on the basis of their perceived abilities.
Some U.S. high schools funnel students into one of three tracks: general, college
prep, or honors. Students on the lowest track are likely to go to work after high school,
or to take vocational courses. Those on the highest track usually attend prestigious
colleges. Those in between usually attend a local college or regional state university. The
impact of gatekeeping is lifelong. Tracking affects people’s opportunities for jobs,
income, and lifestyle. When tracking was challenged—that it is based more on social
class than merit, which perpetuates social inequality—schools retreated from formal
tracking. Placing students in “ability groups” and “advanced” classes, however, serves
the same purpose (Loveless 2013).

2. Replacing Family Functions

Over the years, the functions of schools have expanded, and they now rival some
family functions. Child care is an example. Grade schools do double duty as babysitters
for families in which both parents work, or for single working mothers. Child care has
always been a latent function of formal education, for it was an unintended
consequence. Now, however, with two wage earners in most families, child care has
become a manifest function, and some schools offer child care both before and after the
school day. Some high schools even provide nurseries for the children of their teenaged
students (Bosman 2007).

3. Social control.
In some countries, schools have been assigned the function of developing
personal control and social skills for children. Some social scientists argue that the most
important lessons learned in school are not those listed in the formal curriculum but
rather the social attitudes and values that schools create in children explicitly or
implicitly. This “hidden curriculum” is what prepares children to accept the
requirements of adult life and to “fit into” the social, political, and economic statuses
the society provides.

Educational Institutions
Educational institutions help to preserve and promote or modify the conditions
of social life through teaching and learning. The following illustrates how informal
education takes place:

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 Social Service
Agencies Mass Media
The Family

The Special Interest

Religion Child Groups

Work Place
Peer Group Social Class

Source: Palispis (1996:242)

The figure shows that society is the direct teacher in informal education in society
through the influence of the following:

1. The family. The parents serve as the first and foremost teachers, and the family the
first and foremost school. The family is therefore, the primary informal educational
institution.

2. The peer group. The peer group or barkada exerts great influence in the socialization
of the individual. For instance, many contemporary parents have neither the desire nor
the understanding and competence required to teach their adolescent sons the most
current courtship practices; they rely upon their son’s peers to do the job for them. This
is true of other situations.

3. The mass media. Internet, movies, newspaper, magazines, television, etc. are
sources of entertainment and information. They are extremely influential agencies of
informal and non-formal education.

4. The work place. Many people obtained their most meaningful and practical
education from their work place. In a society that largely segregates economic life from
family and other affairs of day-to-day community living, the social environment of one’s
work place becomes important here.

5. The church. To the extent that people are involved with organized religion today,
they receive an education from affiliation with a church, from sermons, and from
associating informally with people in social events. The church may be considered the
major source of doctrinal as well as secular education for great numbers of people in
many societies.

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6. The street gang. The street gangs are a largely urban phenomenon, and in the inner-
city youth, a tremendously important agency of survival, identity, and income for many
lower-class boys and increasingly girls. The street gangs offer the members a well-
defined territory and protection from other street gangs. The urban street gangs is an
informal educational institution with amazing power over the allegiances of large
numbers of inner-city youth growing up in many countries.

7. Social interest groups. These groups arise to meet the needs of individuals
possessing common concerns such as hobbies, occupations, sports, politics or even
schooling. These groups base their memberships more on the similarity of interest than
on personality compatibility.

8. Social service agency. Social service agency is a highly-structured organizations set

up in part explicitly to educate people in different walks of life. For instance, social
welfare agencies, while responsible primarily for helping clients in their socio-economic
needs, also offer pyschiatric, career and family counseling services to their clients. Some
examples of them would be NGOs, drug rehabilitation centers, legal assistance services,
veteran’s organization, etc.

9. Social class. To belong to a class in our society requires that the member or would
be member learns the class culture and the expected patterns of interpersonal behavior
within the class and toward persons belonging to social strata.

References
O’Donnell and Joan Garrod. Sociology in Practice: An Introduction to sociology and
Social Science. Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1990.

Heslin, James. Essentials of Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach. 11th ed. New

York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2015.

Macionis, John J. Sociology. 14th ed. New York: Prentice-Hall, 2011.

Palispis, Epitacio S. Introduction to Sociology and Anthropology. Manila: Rex

Bookstore, Inc. 1996.