Sociological Foundation of Education, Education Society & Culture
Society is defined as “A collection of individual who have organized themselves into a
distinct group.”
Culture is defined as “A kind of social cement that consists of the characteristic habits,
ideas, attitudes, beliefs and ways of thinking of a particular group of people.”
The relation of education with society and culture is very deep. Both are dependent on each
other. The relationship between education and society has been summed up by the
international commission on the development of education, (1972) as, “In our view, there is
a close correlation between changes, in the Socio-economic environment and the structures
and forms of action of education, which we believe makes a functional contribution to
historical movement. Moreover, it seems to us that through the knowledge it provides of
the environment in which it operates, education may help society to become aware of its
problems”.
Education is a reflection of the social, cultural and political conditions prevailing outside. It
reflects society but, in turn, it has within it the seeds of dynamics of change and thus can
keep with the fast changing world.
Different social and cultural values provide basis for educational. system. The educational
system of a society is a reflection of the values of that society. The philosophy of life, the
way of life, various religious beliefs etc. of a society provide a base for educational system of
that society. They have a direct effect on education. A Muslim society must have such
educational system, which is based on the principles of Islam, and so is the case with other
societies.
The function of education is not only imparting knowledge to children it has a great
responsibility with the march of civilization. It is an instrument of social and cultural change.
Education is expected to play an important role in tackling antisocial behavior.
It is concerned with preparing the mind of the pupil and students for the right type of
thinking in a society so that he may be able to solve various problems of the society
amicably. Education is considered to be an important instrument of assisting people in
knowing their weaknesses and enabling them to gain necessary knowledge in order to
achieve progress in various spheres of their life in a systematic manner.
Sociological Concept of Education Centre of thoughts of sociologists is society. They look
and understand human in the context and perspective of its society. They consider
education as the means of development of individual and society.
They have expressed following views for process of education:
1. Education is a Social Process—sociologists have clarified that when there is social
interaction between two or more people, then they get influenced by each other’s
language, thought process and behavior. This process is called learning and when this is
done with certain predefined objectives, then it is called education. We know that humans
are innate with some qualities, in the social and natural environments, these qualities grow
and as a result, his behavior changes. For example, system of sound pronunciation is there
by birth, but with this system he learns language of those, in the company of which he lives
and exchanges thoughts. Entire civilization and culture of humans is the result of social
process only. This is also true that after development of work and knowledge organs, he
independently observes, examines, meditates and concentrates and learns thus. But for
this, required work and knowledge organs, language and thought processes are developed
in the social environment only. In the absence, neither we can learn language nor can we
learn to think. Children learn about objects, language and activities by being in society only.
Sociologists have clarified that education is the means of fulfillment of social goals and
objectives. Society has the ambitions and education of same nature; the way it is built up. In
fact, education is related with past, present and future, all three. With this, knowledge of
past, fulfillment of present and future building is done. Education is social process from this
perspective also.
2. Education is a Continuous Process—second fact as expressed by sociologists is that,
education keeps on happening in the society. Soon after birth, human being start receiving
education and keeps going on till his last. If we see in detail, then member of society
(individual) peril, but system of education keeps moving forward generations after
generations. It never takes rest. Hence, continuity is it’s another characteristic.
3. Education is a Bi-polar Process- as per sociologists, in the process of education, when side
affects and another gets affected. Hence, it is clear that education is a bi-polar process. As
per them, education has two poles-one which affects (teacher) and another which gets
affected (student). American academician john Dewey also accepts it-one psychological and
another social. By psychological, he means the interest, inclination and ability of the learner
and by social organ, they mean its social environment. But as per our experience, not only
social environment but natural environment also affects the process of learning. In the
context of planned education, teachers, objectives of education, academic discussions and
method of education too are infl uential element. Learning and teaching all these things are
called situation. It would be proper to say that process of education happens between
situations of learner and teacher.
4. Education is the process of Development—innate human behavior is like animals. With
education, his behavior is modifi ed and refi ned. If we look into detail then we fi nd that
humans keep this experience safe with the medium of language and hands it over to next
generation. Coming generation moves even ahead with this knowledge and adds its own
knowledge and experience. This is how, development of any society’s civilization and culture
takes place. It is not possible in the absence of education. It is clear that education is the
process of development. We should understand one thing here that every creature of the
world learns to move, eat and speak by living and emulating within its own species. Consider
life of animals and birds. Soon after their birth, they start to learn the ways of eating,
moving and fl ying like their species, but this act of theirs is confi ned only to the synergy
with environment for self defense mechanism, but in case of humans, education not only
teaches them to have synergy with environment, but also develops their ability to develop
conducive environment as suitable for them. By education, there is a constant change in the
lifestyle, eating & thoughts and in the methods and tools of making an easy and comfortable
life for humans. Another name for this development is education. Thus, it is clear that
human education is the process of development, not of animals.
5. Education is a Dynamic Process—with help of education, humans keep developing its
civilization and culture. For this development, one generation hands over its knowledge and
skill sets to another. For this transfer, each society plans for the social academic education.
Hence, objectives, syllabus and method of education are defi ned for any particular time
period. But as society keeps changing, education keeps accepting those changes and moves
forward. Thus, its objective, syllabus and method of education keep changing as per
requirement. This is its dynamism. Had education not been dynamic, we would not have
developed and grown. Some academicians have defi ned education on the basis of above
facts only. In the words of Indian thinker Bhairav Nath Jha— Education is a process, a social
function carried on and by the society for its own sake. —B.N. Jha Famous academic
Sociologist Ottoway has defi ned education as following by incorporating both nature and
function of education— The whole process of education is the interaction between
individuals and social groups, with certain ends in view for the development of the
individual —A.K.C. Ottoway As per academic sociologists, humans bring in appropriate
changes in society with education only. T. Raymond has defi ned education by keeping
across this view pointEducation is the process of development, which consists of passage of
human being from infancy to maturity, the process by which he adapts himself gradually in
various ways to his physical, social and spiritual environment.
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Throughout sociology's history, there have been many famous sociologists who have left
their mark on the field of sociology and the world at large. Learn more about these
sociologists by browsing through this list of 21 of the most famous thinkers in sociology
history.
Auguste Comte
French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is known as the founder of positivism and
is credited with coining the term sociology. Comte helped shape and expand the field of
sociology and placed a great deal of emphasis on his work on systematic observation and
social order.
Karl Marx
German political economist Karl Marx (1818–1883) is one of the most famous figures in the
founding of sociology. He is known for his theory of historical materialism, which focuses on
the way social order, like class structure and hierarchy, emerges out of the economic system
of a society. He theorized this relationship as a dialectic between the base and
superstructure of society. Some of his notable works, like "The Manifesto of the Communist
Party," were co-written with German philosopher Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). Much of his
theory is contained in the series of volumes titled Capital. Marx has been described as one
of the most influential figures in human history, and in a 1999 BBC poll he was voted the
"thinker of the millennium" by people from around the world.
Emile Durkheim
French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) is known as the "father of sociology" and is
a founding figure in the field. He is credited with making sociology a science. One of his most
famous pieces of work is "Suicide: A Study In Sociology," which described the common
characteristics of people who commit suicide. Another important work of his that focuses
on how society functions and regulates itself is "The Division of Labor in Society."
Max Weber
German economics professor Max Weber (1864–1920) was a founding figure of the field of
sociology and is considered one of the most famous sociologists in history. He is known for
his thesis of the Protestant Ethic, described in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism published in 1904 and elaborated in 1922's "Sociology of Religion," as well as his
ideas on bureaucracy.
Harriet Martineau
Though wrongfully neglected in most sociology classes today, Harriet Martineau (1802–
1876) was a prominent British writer and political activist, and one of the earliest Western
sociologists and founders of the discipline. Her scholarship focused on the intersections of
politics, morals, and society, and she wrote prolifically about sexism and gender roles.
W.E.B. Du Bois
W.E.B. Du Bois was an American sociologist best known for his scholarship
on race and racism in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. He was the first African-American
to earn a doctorate degree from Harvard University and served as the head of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. His most notable
works include "The Souls of Black Folk," in which he advanced his theory of "double
consciousness," and his massive tome on the social structure of U.S. society, "Black
Reconstruction."
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a French sociologist best known for his book
"Democracy in America." Tocqueville published many works in the areas of comparative and
historical sociology and was very active in politics and the field of political science.
Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was an Italian political activist and journalist who wrote
prolific social theory while imprisoned by Mussolini's fascist government from 1926–1934.
He advanced Marx's theory by focusing on the role of intellectuals, politics, and media in
maintaining the dominance of the bourgeois class in a capitalist system. The concept
of cultural hegemony is one of his key contributions.
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French social theorist, philosopher, historian, public
intellectual, and activist best known for revealing through his method of "archaeology" how
institutions wield power by creating discourses that are used to control people. Today, he is
one of the most widely read and cited social theorists, and his theoretical contributions are
still important and relevant in the 21st century.
C. Wright Mills
U.S. sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) is known for his controversial critiques of both
contemporary society and sociological practice, particularly in his book "The Sociological
Imagination" (1959). He also studied power and class in the United States, as displayed in his
book "The Power Elite" (1956).
Patricia Hill Collins
U.S. sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (born 1948) is one of the most revered practitioners of
the field alive today. She is a ground-breaking theorist and research in the areas of feminism
and race and is most well-known for popularizing the theoretical concept
of intersectionality, which emphasizes the intersecting nature of race, class, gender, and
sexuality as systems of oppression. She has written numerous books and scholarly articles.
Some of the most widely read are "Black Feminist Thought," and the article "Learning from
the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought," published in
1986.
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a French sociologist and philosopher who contributed a
great deal in the areas of general sociological theory and the link between education and
culture. He pioneering terminologies such include habitus, symbolic violence, and cultural
capital, and he is known for his work titled "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of
Taste."
Auguste Comte (1798–1857)—The Father of Sociology
Auguste Comte is considered by many to be the father of sociology. (Photo courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons)
The term sociology was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès
(1748–1836) in an unpublished manuscript (Fauré et al. 1999). In 1838, the term was
reinvented by Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Comte originally studied to be an engineer, but
later became a pupil of social philosopher Claude Henri de Rouvroy Comte de Saint-Simon
(1760–1825). They both thought that social scientists could study society using the same
scientific methods utilized in natural sciences. Comte also believed in the potential of social
scientists to work toward the betterment of society. He held that once scholars identified
the laws that governed society, sociologists could address problems such as poor education
and poverty (Abercrombie et al. 2000).
Comte named the scientific study of social patterns positivism. He described his philosophy
in a series of books called The Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–1842) and A General
View of Positivism (1848). He believed that using scientific methods to reveal the laws by
which societies and individuals interact would usher in a new “positivist” age of history.
While the field and its terminology have grown, sociologists still believe in the positive
impact of their work.
Harriet Martineau (1802–1876)—the First Woman Sociologist
Harriet Martineau was a writer who addressed a wide range of social science issues. She
was an early observer of social practices, including economics, social class, religion, suicide,
government, and women’s rights. Her writing career began in 1931 with a series of stories
titled Illustrations of Political Economy, in which she tried to educate ordinary people about
the principles of economics (Johnson 2003).
Martineau was the first to translate Comte’s writing from French to English and thereby
introduced sociology to English-speaking scholars (Hill 1991). She is also credited with the
first systematic methodological international comparisons of social institutions in two of her
most famous sociological works: Society in America (1837) and Retrospect of Western
Travel (1838). Martineau found the workings of capitalism at odds with the professed moral
principles of people in the United States; she pointed out the faults with the free enterprise
system in which workers were exploited and impoverished while business owners became
wealthy. She further noted that the belief in all being created equal was inconsistent with
the lack of women’s rights. Much like Mary Wollstonecraft, Martineau was often discounted
in her own time by the male domination of academic sociology.
Karl Marx (1818–1883)
Karl Marx was one of the founders of sociology. His ideas about social conflict are still
relevant today. (Photo courtesy of John Mayall/Wikimedia Commons)
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a German philosopher and economist. In 1848 he and Friedrich
Engels (1820–1895) coauthored the Communist Manifesto. This book is one of the most
influential political manuscripts in history. It also presents Marx’s theory of society, which
differed from what Comte proposed.
Marx rejected Comte’s positivism. He believed that societies grew and changed as a result
of the struggles of different social classes over the means of production. At the time he was
developing his theories, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism led to great
disparities in wealth between the owners of the factories and workers. Capitalism, an
economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of goods and the means
to produce them, grew in many nations.
Marx predicted that inequalities of capitalism would become so extreme that workers
would eventually revolt. This would lead to the collapse of capitalism, which would be
replaced by communism. Communism is an economic system under which there is no
private or corporate ownership: everything is owned communally and distributed as
needed. Marx believed that communism was a more equitable system than capitalism.
While his economic predictions may not have come true in the time frame he predicted,
Marx’s idea that social conflict leads to change in society is still one of the major theories
used in modern sociology.
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)
In 1873, the English philosopher Herbert Spencer published The Study of Sociology, the first
book with the term “sociology” in the title. Spencer rejected much of Comte’s philosophy as
well as Marx’s theory of class struggle and his support of communism. Instead, he favored a
form of government that allowed market forces to control capitalism. His work influenced
many early sociologists including Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).
Georg Simmel (1858–1918)
Georg Simmel was a German art critic who wrote widely on social and political issues as
well. Simmel took an anti-positivism stance and addressed topics such as social conflict, the
function of money, individual identity in city life, and the European fear of outsiders (Stapley
2010). Much of his work focused on the micro-level theories, and it analyzed the dynamics
of two-person and three-person groups. His work also emphasized individual culture as the
creative capacities of individuals. Simmel’s contributions to sociology are not often included
in academic histories of the discipline, perhaps overshadowed by his contemporaries
Durkheim, Mead, and Weber (Ritzer and Goodman 2004).
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917)
Durkheim helped establish sociology as a formal academic discipline by establishing the first
European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895 and by publishing
his Rules of the Sociological Method in 1895. In another important work, Division of Labour
in Society (1893), Durkheim laid out his theory on how societies transformed from a
primitive state into a capitalist, industrial society. According to Durkheim, people rise to
their proper levels in society based on merit.
Durkheim believed that sociologists could study objective “social facts” (Poggi 2000). He also
believed that through such studies it would be possible to determine if a society was
“healthy” or “pathological.” He saw healthy societies as stable, while pathological societies
experienced a breakdown in social norms between individuals and society.
In 1897, Durkheim attempted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his rules of social
research when he published a work titled Suicide. Durkheim examined suicide statistics in
different police districts to research differences between Catholic and Protestant
communities. He attributed the differences to socioreligious forces rather than to individual
or psychological causes.
George Herbert Mead (1863–1931)
George Herbert Mead was a philosopher and sociologist whose work focused on the ways in
which the mind and the self were developed as a result of social processes (Cronk n.d.). He
argued that how an individual comes to view himself or herself is based to a very large
extent on interactions with others. Mead called specific individuals that impacted a person’s
life significant others, and he also conceptualized “generalized others” as the organized and
generalized attitude of a social group. Mead’s work is closely associated with the symbolic
interactionist approach and emphasizes the micro-level of analysis.
Max Weber (1864–1920)
Prominent sociologist Max Weber established a sociology department in Germany at the
Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in 1919. Weber wrote on many topics related to
sociology including political change in Russia and social forces that affect factory workers.
He is known best for his 1904 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The
theory that Weber sets forth in this book is still controversial. Some believe that Weber
argued that the beliefs of many Protestants, especially Calvinists, led to the creation of
capitalism. Others interpret it as simply claiming that the ideologies of capitalism and
Protestantism are complementary.
Weber believed that it was difficult, if not impossible, to use standard scientific methods to
accurately predict the behavior of groups as people hoped to do. They argued that the
influence of culture on human behavior had to be taken into account. This even applied to
the researchers themselves, who, they believed, should be aware of how their own cultural
biases could influence their research. To deal with this problem, Weber and Dilthey
introduced the concept of verstehen, a German word that means to understand in a deep
way. In seeking verstehen, outside observers of a social world—an entire culture or a small
setting—attempt to understand it from an insider’s point of view.
In his book The Nature of Social Action (1922), Weber described sociology as striving to
“interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in
which action proceeds and the effects it produces.” He and other like-minded sociologists
proposed a philosophy of antipositivism whereby social researchers would strive for
subjectivity as they worked to represent social processes, cultural norms, and societal
values. This approach led to some research methods whose aim was not to generalize or
predict (traditional in science), but to systematically gain an in-depth understanding of social
worlds.
