The result of this worldwide educational inequality is a social concern for many countries, including Canada. Countries that do not have such basic amenities as running water are unable to support robust education systems or, in many cases, any formal schooling at all. As you might expect, a country’s wealth has much to do with the amount of money spent on education. The major factors affecting education systems are the resources and money that are utilized to support those systems in different nations. Every nation in the world is equipped with some form of education system, though those systems vary greatly. (Photo courtesy of kodomut/flickr)Įducation is a social institution through which a society’s children are taught basic academic knowledge, learning skills, and cultural norms. These children are at a library in Singapore, where students are outperforming North American students on worldwide tests. In this way, schools are profound agencies of normalization. Within the norms established by school curriculum and teaching pedagogies, students learn from a very early age to identify their place as A, B, C, etc. Those who do less well are gradually confined to lower, subordinate positions in society. Those who demonstrate facility within the standards established by curriculum or through the informal patterns of status differentiation in student social life are set on trajectories to high-status positions in society. They are provided with a unifying framework for participation in institutional life and at the same time are sorted into different paths. Students learn a common knowledge base, a common culture, and a common sense of society’s official priorities, and perhaps more importantly, they learn to locate their place within it. Students from diverse backgrounds learn a standardized curriculum that effectively transforms diversity into homogeneity. It promotes two main socializing tasks: homogenization and social sorting. In terms of socialization, the modern system of mass education is second only to the family in importance. They provide students with skills for communication, social interaction, and work discipline that can create pathways to both independence and obedience. Schools can be agents of change or conformity, teaching individuals to think outside of the family and the local norms into which they were born, while at the same time acclimatizing them to their tacit place in society. You might recall learning about the Canadian parliamentary process in a social studies course as well as learning when and how to speak up in class. (For students outside the dominant culture, this aspect of the education system can pose significant challenges.) You might remember learning your multiplication tables in grade 2 and also learning the social rules of taking turns on the swings at recess. We learn cultural expectations and norms, which are reinforced by our teachers, our textbooks, and our classmates. Our education system also socializes us to our society. But even then, education is about much more than the simple learning of facts. Once in grade school, academic lessons become the focus of education as a child moves through the school system. As the infant grows into a young child, the process of education becomes more formal through play dates and preschool. At first, education is an informal process in which an infant watches others and imitates them. Explain and discuss how functionalism, conflict theory, feminism, and interactionism view issues of education.įrom the moment a child is born, his or her education begins.
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