Social Dimention of Education

Terms:
Consensus -is a general or widespread agreement among all members of a particular
society.
Conflict is a clash between eideas, principles and people.
Consensus Theory- focuses on the struggle of social classes to maintain dominance
and power in social
system.
Consensus Theory- emphasizes on social order, stability and social regulation.
The Consensus and Conflict Sociological Theories are reflected in the works of
certain dominant social theorist :
Karl Marx emphasized the role of human beings in social conflict. That change is
emerging from the conflict as emerging from the conflict between human being and
society.
Social Theorist argued that his theory characterized byclass conflicts or the conflict
between the bourgeoisie ( rich owner) nd the proletariat ( poor worker)
Emile Durkheim Max Weber argued that schools teach and maintain particular status culture,
that is , groups in society with similar interest and positions in the status heirarchy.
Education systems may train individuals in specialties to fill the needed positions or
prepare cultivated individuals, those who stand among others because of their
superior knowledge. In early China those who were educated came from the elite, thus
perpetuating their family status culture.
Talcot Parson & Robert Meton
Louis Althusser & Ralph Daendorph
Herbert Mead & Herbert Blumer
Structural Functionalism states that society is made up of various institutions that
work together in cooperation.
Parsons structural funtionalism has four functional imperatives for all action systems,
embodied in his famous AGIL scheme. These fucntional imperatives that are necessary
for all sysems are:
1. ADAPTATION: A system must cope with external situational exigencies. It
must adapt to its environment and adapt environment to its needs.
2. GOAL ATTAINMENT: a system must define and achieve its primary goals.
3. INTEGRATION: A system must regulate the interrelationship of its compnent parts. It must
also manage the relationship among the other three funcional imperatives A,G,L
4. LATENCY: ( pattern maintenance): A system must furnish, maintain, and renew

both the motivation of individuals and the cultural patterns that create and sustain
the motivation.

Parson's desined the AGIL scheme to be used at all levels in his theoretical system.
The behavioral organism is the action system that handle the adaptation function by
adjusting to and tranforming the external world.
The personality system performs the goal -attainment function by defining system
goals and mobilizing resources to attain them.
The social system copes the integration function by controlling its component parts.
The cultural system performs the latency function by providing actors with norms and
values that motivate them for action.
Parson's work- the problem of order which was his overwhelming concern, that
becme a major source of criticism of his work.
Parson found his answer to the problem of order in stuctural functionalism, which
operates in his view with te following sets of assumptions:
1.
2.
3.
4.

System have the property of order and interdependence of part.

Systems tend toward self- maintaining order or equilibrium.
The system maybe static or involved in an ordered static of chance.
The nature of one part of the system has an impact on the form that the major
parts can take.
5. Systems maintain boundaries with their environments.
6. Allocation and integration are two fundamental processes necessay for a given
state of equilibrium of a system.
7. Systems tend toward self-maintenenace involving the maintenance of the
relationshipsof parts to the whole, control of environmental variations, and control
of tendencies to change the system from within.
Social System
begins at the micro level with interaction between ego and alter ego define as
the most elementary form of the social sytem.
Decribes social system as something which consists of a plurality of individual
actors who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the optimization of
gratificaion and whose relation to their situations, including each other, is
defined and mediated in terms of a system of culturally stuctured and shared
symbols.
He was interested in its stuctural components large scale components of social
systems as collective, norms, and values.
Parson was also a functionalist.
Functional Requisites of a Social System
1. Social system must be structuresd so that they operate cooperatively with other
systems.
2. To survive, the social systems must have the rquisits from other systems .
3.The system must meet a significanct proprtion of the needs of its actors.
4. The system must elicit adequate particiption from its members.
5. It must have at least a minimum of control over potential disruptive behavior.

6. If conflict becomes sufficiently disruptive, it must be controlled.

7. Finally, a social system requires a language in order to survive.