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

* Jefferson proposed the creation of a system of public education to provide the socialization needed for democracy to survive

 

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