Education as Socialization

(Excerpt from Giddens, Anthony. Sociology. 6th ed., Polity Press, 2009, pp. 834–835.)

For Emile Durkheim, education plays an important role in the socialization of children because, particularly by learning history, for example, children gain an understanding of the common values in society, uniting a multitude of separate individuals. These common values include religious and moral beliefs and a sense of self-discipline. Durkheim argues that schooling enables children to internalize the social rules that contribute to the functioning of society. Durkheim was particularly concerned with upholding moral guidelines, because in late nineteenth-century France, an increasing individualism was developing that threatened social solidarity. Durkheim saw a key role for schools in teaching mutual responsibility and the value of the collective good. As a ‘society in miniature’, the school also teaches discipline and respect for authority.

In industrial societies, Durkheim argues education also has another socialization function: it teaches the skills needed to perform roles in increasingly specialized occupations. In traditional societies, occupational skills could be learnt within the family, but as social life became more complex and an extended division of labour emerged in the production of goods, an education system developed that could pass on the skills required to fill the various specialized, occupational roles.

American sociologist, Talcott Parsons, outlined a somewhat different structural functionalist approach to education. Durkheim was concerned with the way in which nineteenth-century French society was becoming increasingly individualistic and looked for ways to mitigate its possible harmful effects. But, writing somewhat later, in mid-twentieth-century America, Parsons argued that a central function of education was to instil in pupils the value of individual achievement. This value was crucial to the functioning of industrialized societies, but it could not be learned in the family. A child’s status in the family is ascribed – that is, fixed from birth. By contrast, a child’s status in school is largely achieved, and in schools children are assessed according to universal standards, such as exams. For Parsons, the function of education is to enable children to move from the particularistic standards of the family to the universal standards needed in a modern society. According to Parsons, schools, like the wider society, largely operate on a meritocratic basis: children achieve their status according to merit (or worth) rather than according to their sex, race or class (Parsons and Bales 1956). However, as we shall see, Parsons’s view that schools operate on meritocratic principles has been subject to much criticism.

There is little doubt that functionalist theory does tell us something significant about education systems; they do try to provide individuals with the skills and knowledge needed to participate in societies, and schools do teach children some of the values and morals of wider society. However, functionalist theory appears to overstate the case for a set of society-wide values. There are many cultural differences within a single society and the notion of a set of central values that should be taught to all may not be accurate or well received. This highlights a recurring problem within functionalist accounts, namely the concept of “society” itself. Functionalists see education systems as serving several functions for society as a whole, but the problem is that this assumes that society is a relatively homogeneous and that all social groups share similar interests. Is this really true?