Brian Mutambo

Sociology of Education
 Table of contents
Unit 1

Introduction to Sociology of Education

Unit 2

Understanding of Sociology of Education

Unit 3

Theories and Sociology of Education

Unit4

The labeling Theory and the classroom situation

Unit 5

Education and the Zambian Society

Unit 6

Social function of Schooling

Unit 7

Socialization
 Aim

Unit 1

Introduces you to the discipline of General Sociology and other branches

of Sociology with a special focus on sociology of Education.
 Unit 1

Objectives
 Define Sociology and the Sociology of Education
 Discuss some of the works of the early sociological
thinkers and founding fathers of Sociology/Sociology of
Education
 Differentiate the focus of the different branches of
Sociology
 Identify the topics embraced under Sociology of
Education
 Background Information

For classic sociologists views and thoughts

 Lewis coser's "Masters of Sociological Thought": Ideas in Historical and Social

Context, 2nd Edition (Direct quotations, in unit 1).
A) Ideas of Great Sociological Thinkers

There are a number of well-known figures whose ideas have
formed what has become one of the most important social
sciences in the modem society.
I. Auguste Comte, 1798-1854 (French) Works of comte
includes
 Methods of Inquiry
 The Law of Human Progress
 Hierarchy of the Sciences
 Social Statics and Dynamics and
 The Normative Doctrine
 Comte Continue...

• Auguste Comte coined the term sociology which means the study of society.
• Comte is known as the father ofsociology.
• Believed that the scientific method could used in understanding of man or of
society through observation, experimentation and comparison;
• scientific methods should be used to study human behaviour. with the
reconstruction and progress of social forms and structures
Comte Continue...

• Comte aimed to establish a science of society on the lines of natural

sciences.
• A science could explain the past development of the human being and
predict its future course.
• Attempted to formulate the conditions which account for social stability
at any given historical moment.
• Social static and social dynamics - order or stability and progress or
change - are the two major concerns of his sociology, and are the twin
pillars of society (Coser, 1971).
 Social Static and Social Dynamics
• Social Statics has to do with the natural development of society and
different social systems or social institutions and their interaction among
them (social institutions), and between these institutions and the society
as a whole.
• Bear in mind, there are many social institutions such as educational,
economic, political, cultural, legal and other institutions. all these
institutions are existing and interacting with one another or are affecting
one another, or they enjoy order of stability, and there is interdependence
among them.
• Sociology is a study of social statics, or of order and stability, of
interaction and interdependence among social institutions, and between
social institutions and society.
• Social Dynamics: is a study of change or progress. Society and
institutions do not only interact and exist in a stable or orderly form, but
they are also dynamic, they change or develop or progress.
II. Karl Marx, 1818-1883 (German)

Works:
 The Overall Doctrine
 Class Theory
 Alienation
 the Sociology of Knowledge
 Dynamics of Social Change.
Marx continue...

• Society to Karl Marx, consisted of a moving balance of antithetical

forces that created social change by their tension and struggle.
• Struggle was the prime mover of progress; strife, the father of all things,
and social conflict the core of historical process.
• his idea of sociology is that social structure is economically determined;
and that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggle" (Marx, 1961:207)
(iii). Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903 (English)

Works:
 Growth Strudure and Differentiation
 Social Types: Militant and Industrial Societies
 Evolution or Multilinear Functionalism
 Individualism versus Organises
 Non-intervention and the Survival of the Fittest
 Obstacles to Objectivity.
Spencer continue...

• Spencer's first and foremost concern was with evolutionary changes in

social strudures and social institutions rather than with the attendant
state.
• A change from a state of relatively indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to
a state of relatively definite heterogeneity was a universal process.
• He explains ... both the earliest changes which the universe at large is
supposed to have undergone ... and those latest changes which we
trace in society and the products of social life.
• Quoting from Spencer's first volume of his works called Principles of
Sociology , lnkeles (1964:4)
Spencer continue...

• The Science of Sociology has to give an account of (how) successive

generation of units are produced, reared and fitted for cooperation.
• The development of the family thus stands first in order. Sociology seeks
to describe and explain the rise and development of that political
organization
• which in several ways regulates affairs which combines the actions of
individuals and which restrains them in certain dealings with one another
• This similarly describes the evolution of ecclesiastical structures and
functions .... The systems of restraints whereby the minor factions of
citizens are regulated, has also to be dealt with.
• The stages through which the industrial part passes have to be studies
(as well as) the growth of those regulative structures which the industrial
part develops within itself ...
Spencer continue...

• the scope of sociology is, according to Spencer, It encompasses the

analysis of the society and its institutions, their interdependence and
development, interactions of the individual with the society and
institutions and the systems of controlling their interactions.
• A close observation of the quotation above and of Spencer's works in
general, will show that the issues of sociology are: the family, politics,
religion, other institutions, social control, work or industry, communities,
associations, social stratification, division of labour and other issues.
 (IV). Emile Durkheim, 1858-1917 (French)
Works:
 General Approach
 Individual and Society
 The Sociology of Religion
 The Sociology of Knowledge
 Functional Explanation
 De la division du travail social (Division of Labour).

Durkheim continue...

• social facts are the subject matter of sociology,. They have distinctive
social characteristics and determinants which cannot be explained at the
biological and psychological levels.
• These facts are external to any particular biological individual. They
endure over time while particular individuals die and are replaced by
others.
Durkheim continue...

• Durkheims' sociology was concerned with a theory of the social facts.

• His preoccupation was with the establishment of a sociology which is as
objective, and having models , and whose subject matter is the social
facts.
• The subject of this science must be specific & distinct from the subjects
of other sciences and that this subject must be observed and explained
in the manner which is similar to the way facts are observed and
explained in other sciences.
• To Durkheim, sociology should be the study of social facts, which must
be regarded as things, and that, these social facts influence on
individuals (Aaron, 1970).
Durkheim continue...

"Sociology's distinctive field is the study of a group life; how the individual is
influenced by others and how he influences them, how human societies
develop and change, and how they are swept b y such social contagions as
fads, panics, hysterias, and ideologies, to what degree society is a tyrant and
to what extent it is a friend to the individual. "
By durkheim
(v). George Simmel, 1858-1919 (German)

Works:
 Formal Sociology, Social Types;
 The Dialectical Method in Simmels©s Sociology;
 The Significance of Numbers for Social Life;
 Simmels Ambivalent of Modern Culture;
 A Note on the Philosophy of Money.
Simmel continue...

• Society consists of a web of patterned interactions.

• sociology is to study the forms of these interactions as they occur and
reoccur in diverse historical periods and cultural settings.
(vi). Max Weber, 1864-1920 (German)

Works:
 Natural Science, Social Science, and Value Relevance;
 The Ideal Type;
 Causality and Probability;
 Types of Authority, The Function of Ideas, Class, Status, and Power;
 Bureaucracy;
 Rationalisation and Disenchantment.
Weber continue...

• Max Weber's focus was on the subjective meaning which human actors
attach to their actions in their mutual orientations within specific social
historical contexts. Behaviour, which has no such meanings, is outside
the area of sociology.
(vii). Thorstein Veblen, 1857-1929 (American of
Norwegian origin)

Works:
 The General Approach;
 The Anatomy of Competition;
 Sociology of Knowledge;
 Functional Analysis;
 The Theory of Social Change.
 Veblen continue...

• It is the characteristic of man to do something ...

• He is not simply a bundle of desires that are to be saturated ... but rather a
coherent structure of propensities and habits, which seek realisation and
expression in an unfolding activity.
• The economic life history of the individuals is a cumulative process of
adaptations of means to ends.
(viii) Charles Horton Cooley; 1864 -1929 (American)

Works:
 The looking -Glass Self;
 This Organic View of Society;
 The Primary Group. Sociological Method;
 Social Process; Institutional Analysis.
Cooley continue...

• Self and society are twinbom. This stress on the organic link and
indissoluble connection between self and society is the theme of most of
Cooley's writings.
• He argued that a person's self grows out of a person's contact with
others. The social origin of his life comes by the pathway of intercourse
with other persons".
• The self is not first individual and then social; it arises dialectically
through communication. One's consciousness
• of himself is a reflection of the ideas about himself that he attributes to
other minds, thus there can be no isolated selves. There is no sense of
• "!" ... without its correlative sense of you, or him, or them
(ix) George Herbert Mead, 1863-1931 (American)

Works:
 The Self in Society;
 The Genesis of the Self;
 The "I" and the "Me", Mead as Pathsetter.
Mead contiune...

• There can be no self apart from society, no consciousness of self and no

communication.
• In its turn, society must be understood as a structure that emerges
through an ongoing process of communicative social acts, through
transactions between persons who are mutually oriented towards each
other.
(x) Robert Ezra Park, 1864-1944 (American)

Works:
 Collective Behaviour and Social Control;
 Four Major Social Processes;
 Social Distance;
 Social Change, The Biotic Order and Social Order;
 The Self and the Social Role.
Park continue...
• To Park, Sociology was "the science of collective behaviour.
• This definition supposes that while he was mindful of the need for analysis of
social structures, he was mainly concerned with the study of more fluid social
processes.
• In his view, society is best conceived as the product of interactions between
component individuals that are controlled by a body of traditions and norms that
arise in the process of interaction.
• Social control is "the central fact and the central problem of society."
• Society is everywhere a control organisation. Its function is to organise, integrate,
and direct the energies resident in the individuals which compose it.
• Sociology is therefore, "a point of view and method of investigating the processes
by which individuals are inducted into and induced to co-operate in some sort of
corporate existence we call society.
• Social control refers to the variety of mechanisms by which collective behaviour is
organised, contained, and channelled. The social process involves forms of
antagonism, of conflict and competition, and social control serves to order these
processes.
(xi). Vilfredo Pareto, 1848-1923 (French)

Works:
 Logical and Non-logical Action;
 Residues and Derivations;
 Two of Non-logical Theories.
 Subjective Intentions and Objective Consequences;
 The lion and the Foxes;
 The Theory of Bites and the Circulation off Bites;
 Social Utility "of and "for" Collective; Summary and Assessment.
Pareto continue...

• His desire was to establish a system of sociology similar in its features

to the generalised physico-chemical system which J. Willard Gibbs
formulated in his Thermodynamics.
• A physico-chemical system is an isolated aggregate of individual
components such as water and alcohol.
• The factors characterising the system are interdependent so that a
change in one part of the system leads in adjustive changes in its other
parts.
• He had a similar idea of the social system, "molecules " were individuals
with interests, drives, and .sentiments" analogous to the mixtures of
chemical compounds found in nature"
• His general sociology sets forth the concept of social system as a
framework for analysing mutually dependent variations among a number
of variable determining human conduct.
(xii). Karl Mannheim; 1893 -1947 (Hungarian)

Works:
 The Sociology of Knowledge;
 The Sociology of Planned Reconstruction.
Mannheim continue...

The sociological point of view

"seeks from the very beginning to interpret individual activity in all spheres
within the context of group experience."
• Thinking is never a privileged activity free from the effects of group life;
therefore, it must be understood and interpreted within its context.
• No given individual
"confronts the world and, in striving for the truth, constructs a world view
out of the data of his experience . It is much more correct that knowledge
is from the very beginning a co-operative process of group life, in which
everyone unfolds his knowledge within a framework of a common fate, a
common activity, and the overcoming of common difficulties."
(xiii). Pitirim A. Sorokin, 1889--1968 ("Russian")

Works:
 The Overall Doctrine;
 A Paranomic of Society and Culture Sociology of Knowledge
 Social Stratification and Social Mobility;
 The Social Philosophy.
Sorokin continue...
• Sorokin's sociological theory is based on the distinction between social static's
(structural sociological as he calls it) and social dynamics.
• To Sorokin, the process of human interaction involves three essential elements:
(i) human actors as subject of interaction
(ii) meanings, values, & norms that guide human conduct
(iii) Material phenomena are vehicles & conductors for meanings & values to be
objectified and incorporated into a sequence of actions.
• Emphasis on the importance of cultural factors, of super-organic elements, as
determinants of social conduct.
• To understand personalities as subjects of interaction, and society as the totality of
interaction personalities, bear in mind that interactions rest on a foundation of
culture - a culture that comprises the totality of meanings, norms, and values
possessed by interacting persons and carried by material vehicles, such as ritual
objectives or works of art, which objectify and convey these meanings.
(xiv). William I Thomas, 1863-1947 (American) and Florian
Znaneicki, 1882-E iii 1958 (Polish)

Works:
 The Polish Peasant- A landmark;
 The Polish Peasant- its Theoretical Underpinnings;
 A Typology of Human Actors;
 William Isaac Thoma - From Ethnographer to Social Psychologist;
 Thomas' Situational National Analysis;
 Florian Znaniecki -Philosopher Tuned Sociologist;
 Znaniecki's Sociology of Knowledge.
 Thomas, Znaniecki continue...
• In both objective and subjective factors Thomas and Znaniecki developed a
scheme that conjoint interplay of individual attitudes and objective cultural values
seen as adequate to account for human conduct. By attitude they understood

"a process of individual consciousness which determines real or possible activity of

the individual in the social world".
• An attitude is a predisposition to act in the relation to some social object; it is not
a purely psychic inner state. A social value, on the other hand, is understood as

"any datum having an empirical content accessible to the members of some social
group and a meaning with regard to which it is or may be an object of activity".
• The main focus of their investigation is social change. They show that it is
always the result of interplay between attitudes and values.

"The cause of a social or an individual phenomenon is never another social or

individual phenomenon is never another or individual phenomenon alone, but always
a combination of a social and an individual phenomenon or, in more exact terms: the
cause of a value or of an attitude is never an attitude or a value alone, but always a
combination of an attitude and a value".
Pre-Definition
• Before we come to the definition of sociology, let us note two important issues in relation to
the works or ideas of these great thinkers.
• Firstly; there is no great difference in the ideas of these sociologists as to what sociology is
all about. Although their works touch on a number of issues, which were of their interests,
they are all talking about society and its institutions and the interactions which take place in
the society and in institutions.
• Secondly,;sociology has its origin in Europe and in the USA The first thinkers in this field
have their roots in Europe and in the United States of America knowledge
• Note: the difference in the topics of their interest; the Europeans seem to be more interested
in philosophical issues than the Americans, more Europeans, for example, have written about
sociology of knowledge than Americans,
Definitions
• Sociology: is a discipline which deals with things which everyone in
society is familiar with,and about which they have common sense
knowledge.
• it has sometimes been termed as "a science of the obvious whose major
activity consists in carefully documenting in elaborate detail, with tables
of painstakingly gained statistics, what men already know(Chinoy, 1967:6
-7).
• There is new discussion in sociology of education which we teachers are
tasked to advance systems of learning and teaching this discpline has
room for growth
 Definition of sociology

• Sociology: is the study of social order- the underlying regularity of human

social behaviour.
• The concept of order includes the efforts to attain it and departures from
it.
• Sociology seeks to define the unit of human social action and to discover
the pattern in the relation of these units,
• Sociology seeks to learn how these units are organised as systems of
action,
• Sociology seeks to learn how to work with such systems of action,
• sociology attempts to explain their continuity through time, and to
understand how and why these units and their relation change or cease
to exit.
Definitions continue...
• Sociology: is a study of society or a scientific study of human interactions or a
body of knowledge about human interadions which is a resultant of such a study.
• It is a study which tries to throw light on the strudure of human society and its
institutions, the interactions of those found within these institutions and in the
society, and on the interactions of social institutions to one another and to the
whole society.
• Stewart and Glynn (1971 :4) define sociology as follows; What is clearly needed
is an approach to knowledge that attempts an understanding of society, that
seeks the constant and relevance in social systems, and that tries to increase
man's understanding of his fellow man ...
• Sociology: has also been interested in the dilemma of rapid material progress
that seems to outrun society's capacity to adjust, as well as the search for basic
principles of social organisation.
• Sociology: is a systematic and scientific discipline seeking knowledge of man as
a social animal: his societies and sub-societies and his adjustment to them his
customs and institutions and the patterns of stability and change that man
develops.
Definitions
• Note:, Sociology is the only social science, which embraces every
aspects of human life.
• It tries to study society in its entirety;
• The political systems -the means by which social power and authority
are institionalised, put to use and regulated -which is the jurisdidion of
political science;
• The economic systems-the systems of produdion of goods and service
which is the jurisdiction for economics;
• The legal systems- which fall under the jurisdiction of law.
• It touches on all these and other aspects of society, such as religion,
education, medicine, nursing, culture, crime, sports, occupations and
organisations.
Definitions continue...
• Readings from Modem Sociological Issues Reinchman; readings edited by Peter Worsely, and
Society: An Introduction to Sociology: Introductory
• Readings edited by Wishart and Modern Sociology: An Introductory and Society: An
Introduction to Sociology Peter Worsley by Chinoy will give you a good picture of how wide
the scope of sociology is.
• In other words, sociology is extremely broad in its perspective. This is the one major aspect
which makes sociology different from other social sciences. It is because of this that you will
come across a number of
• sociology of occupation,
• sociology of medicine
• sociology of education,
• sociology of suicide,
• sociology of organisations,
• sociology of health,
• sociology of the third worlds,
• sociology of underdevelopment,
• sociology of knowledge; and who knows there may even be sociology of the mindsets
Summary
• Sociology and sociology of education are interrelated, and a student of sociology of

education needs to know something about sociology if he/she has to appreciate the

field of sociology of education.
• In trying to have some understanding of sociology, we have made a brief overview

of the ideas of some sociology thinkers as discussed in Lewis Coser;s book, with

some references, in some cases, to other authors.
• We have shown that all these great thinkers whose origins are from Europe and the United
States of America has similar ideas of the subject matter of sociology, though their issues of
interest would have been different.
• The subject and matter of sociology is the study of society and its institutions, their progress
or change and their stability or order and all the interactions which take place with them.

• We have also established that, of all the social sciences, sociology is the only study which
attempts to shed light on every aspect of human life, that it has an extremely wide
perspective, thus resulting in various disciplines which are associated with it.
 Activity
1. A number of works of the sociological thinkers have been outlined here. Read one or two of their
works either from Coser's work or their own works, and make a summary of their ideas of sociology.

2. Why should a student of sociology of education have an understanding of the field of sociology?

3. What is your understanding of the field of sociology?

4. What is the one major thing which makes sociology different from other social sciences?
God bless you