Lecture 2: Culture, Social Structure,
& the Birth of Public Education
I. Education, as an
institution, refers to society-wide, aggregate patterns of behavior designed to
solve some problem or set of problems
A. Did not just emerge: product of context
II. Context: the early
stages of the birth of modern society
A.
The first new problems stemmed from the 3 great revolutions of the late
18th century
1. Political, Scientific, Industrial
C.
The institution of education plays an integral role in three key sociological
processes
1.
Socialization
2.
Differentiation
3.
Stratification
D
the political/cultural revolution created a new social category
1.
A new status-role: the citizen
2.
Any status-role comprises a constellation of both rights and obligations,
privileges and duties
III. The Role of Culture
A.
“An inherited system of symbolic forms
& moral demands that controls individual behavior.”
1. Symbolic
Forms
2. Moral Demands
B.
Culture & Social Structure are dialectically linked: when one
changes the other will change accordingly
Sum:
Differentiation:
the revolutions led to the creation of the citizen as a new social
category, a new status-role
Socialization:
This required some mechanism for creating the kind of person that such a social
system requires if it is to survive
Existing
institutions were not up to that job by themselves
Or