Introduction
Education systems in Canada and other nations of the world have made great impacts on children in different ways as well as helped in shaping the future leaders of the society. Socialization refers to the process through which people learn the ways of life or the culture of the group. This process refers to a lifelong occurrence that does not only stop at adolescence and has several agents in the society. Socialization, also referred to as enculturation refers to the process whereby individuals learn the social controls of their cultures alongside the norms and values about the wrong and right of the society. Through socialization, individuals acquire the long cultural aspects that have been transferred through generations into the current society. In sociology, the socialization agents are any groups that mold the behavior of individuals in the society. From this sociological perspective, everything about schools shapes behavior. Schools ensure that the learners do certain things and behave according to predetermined behavior that ensures that standards are maintained.
The complex process of socialization involves several individuals, groups, and social institutions. Therefore, socialization can be described as the process through which individuals are made aware of the behaviors that are expected of them regarding the norms, attitudes, beliefs, and values of the society in which they live. This therefore implies that even foreigners living in alien territory have to learn the values, beliefs, attitudes, and norms of their domicile society. There are several agents of socialization including education or school, the family, peer groups, and the mass media. The family is the most important socialization agent since it forms the basic and first as well as continuous social world for its members. This paper focuses on the Marxist’s Conflict Perspective, which proposes that the education system is structured in such a way that some members of the society will benefit more from such social institutions than others, which further results into social inequality. This paper further explains the role of education or schools as a socialization agent while focusing on the Canadian society. This paper acknowledges that several other factors that contributes to socialization, and extends to affect the socialization process in schools such as peer groups, family orientation, religious institutions, and mass media.
The Conflict Perspective of Education
In the world history, the education systems have served the political and economic needs of the society. This has long dictated the purpose of education in the society. Currently, educators and sociologists hold varied views on the function of education including the functionalism, interactionist, and the conflict perspectives. According to the conflict perspective, education maintains social inequality as well as preserves power for the people who dominate in the society, thereby dulling the lower classes in the society into obedient servants (Franklin & Thompson, n.p.). This perspective also argues that education systems sort the learners based on distinct ethnic and class liens as opposed to merit. It also believes that education trains the members of the society that belong to the working class to accept their statuses in the society through the hidden curriculum. While defending this theoretical position, the conflict theory provides several factors including the fact that property taxes are used to fund most schools, thereby ensuring that wealthy districts provide more money for their schools. They argue that these districts can afford to pay higher salaries, use relevant technology, attract better educators, as well as purchase the best texts for learning. Students that attend these schools from the affluent districts have an upper hand over their counterparts in qualifying for better colleges and better and high paying jobs later jobs later in life. Additionally, the conflict theory considers the school testing, especially Intelligence Quotient testing used in school to sort students. This theory believes that some of the questions asked in this test favor class bias. For instance, when giving the learners to give the instruments used in an orchestra definitely implies that these students can differentiate an orchestra from a band (Wilder, n.p.). In this manner, education has been blamed for the current social order in the world that ensures that the rich members of the society remain rich and the poor continue to serve these property owners.
Discussion
An agent of socialization refers to an individual, group, or institution that is tasked with the responsibility of replicating the social order in the society. These agents of socialization are responsible for the transfer of the expectations, rules, norms, folkways, and values of a given social order such as a community. In an advanced capitalist society, education forms one of the basic agents of socialization. The school is known as a micro system refers to an institution where learning takes place to develop the learners. The school provides an environment that individuals develop their skills, knowledge, beliefs, customs, attitudes, and interests that characterize them as well as shape their performance of their adult roles. In school, learners are taught about the important social norms and values in the community that are supposed to integrate them into the society that they live in it. The educators transfer the skills, knowledge, beliefs, customs, attitudes, and interests they earlier learned in schools onto their learners that ensure that these learners acquire such relevant phenomena in the community.
Norms refer to the things, rules, or codes of conducts that are generally accepted in a specific community or society, but they are not necessarily the laws governing behavior in these societies (Wilder, n.p.). For instance, not picking your nose while having dinner at a restaurant is not a law, but it is definitely the norm in most societies. Such conducts can lead to very disturbing looks from onlookers. Values on the other hand, are the things that we are taught as the right thing to in the society (Wilder, n.p.). These values are equally not laws and are established in such socialization agents as schools. Schools assist in instilling as well as developing the moral values and norms among the learners. Some of the norms and values learnt in school are impacted so early in life, but become very crucial in the later development stages of the grown adult. For instance, while schools might teach fourth grade pupils about avoiding drug abuse, this might not make sense for these learners, but they will need this knowledge later in their high school days. Similarly, schools educate about parenting styles to children when they do not have the plans of becoming parents. However, these learners would later in life require these parenting skills to bring up their families according to the societal standards.
Education refers to the process through which a society transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, values, and customs from one generation to the next (Bennett, p. 206). Schools, however, serve as the basic site of education, which also comprises inculcating the hidden curricular of these social norms and values into the learners. The purpose of education and socialization through the school is to ensure that the new generational learners acquire the knowledge, values, and attitudes that they might require to become productive and prosperous citizens. This hidden curriculum refers to that curriculum that extends beyond the clear demands of the formal curriculum (Robson, chpt. 6). This curriculum, though unstated and inflexible, it is generally concerned about how and when the learners learn, and not what they learn (King, p. 3). Schools ensure that the learners acquire their cultural norms and values as well as learn how to coexist within these cultures.
According to the conflict theoretical perspective, the societal segregations are based on the class and ethnic bias. The schools in Canada and other countries of the world are based in settings that have such characters. In these communities, the learners meet learners from similar societal class such as the rich, white, or blacks. In the early stages of education, students attend kindergartens within their neighborhoods, which majorly comprises mostly of members from the same social class. For instance, learners from the wealthy neighborhoods attend schools that their families can afford to pay for them. The poor children also attend low class schools that their parents can afford to pay for them, thereby leading to continual community segregation, where low class children live to serve the rich children from the better-off societies.
In diverse neighborhoods experienced in the current cities, schools enlarge children’s social world to include individuals with diverse backgrounds from their own. In these diverse backgrounds of the learners and the educators, the schools ensure that in incorporating these diversities, they inculcate values of patriotism, justice, democracy, competition, and honesty. Additionally, schools strive to introduce the correct political, social, and economic values of the learners. The current hybrid societies are based on the economic, political, and social systems, which comprise modernized socialization. In modern society, parents have little time for their children due to job related commitments that keep them engaged. Therefore, schools have become the most important socialization agent because learners spend most of their formative years in schools. The schools represent the first impersonal and collective environment that transmits knowledge as well as promote certain values. The values taught in schools such as not cheating in exams and not arguing with their teachers ensure that students have respect for other peoples’ properties as well as respect for their elders in the society including employers and seniors.
Finally, education plays an important role in ensuring that the jobs that are falling vacant from retirements are filled with appropriate personnel. Therefore, in the socialization process, the society intends to ensure that the economic development is propelled to encourage production. Schools sort and rank learners for placement in the labor market upon completion of the learning curriculum as well as the hidden curriculum. The learners that achieve better grades will acquire better training in highly skilled and intellectually tasking jobs, which further rewards them with higher income. On the contrast, the members of the society that get low attainments get least demanding jobs, which attract little income. This kind of socialization has received criticism from the conflict perspective, which maintains that the current ‘democratic’ societies accumulate wealth for the property owners, who also formulate policies for the education systems. Education has since become a very important socialization agent in the current society that is aimed at maximizing production.
Conclusion
The education systems in Canada and other countries of the world have made great impacts on children as well as shaping them as future leaders. Socialization also referred to as enculturation, which entails the process of learning social controls of cultures alongside the norms and values about right and wrong. This process ensures that individuals acquire the long cultural aspects that have been transferred through generations into the society. From this sociological perspective, everything about schools shapes behavior. Socialization can be described as the process through which individuals are made aware of the behaviors that are expected of them regarding the norms, attitudes, beliefs, and values of the society in which they live.
The conflict perspective, however, believes that the current societal education systems ensure that the social classes are maintained. Being the second socialization agent after the family, schools have been used as the best platforms to shape behavior to conform to societal norms and values accepted in these societies. While these norms and values are generally accepted as the right things t do or how to behave, they do not comprise the laws of the society. Education uses the hidden curriculum to ensure that the conflict perspective of education is satisfied, which forms the basic aim of socialization.
Works Cited:
Bennett, M. Daniel, Jr. "Cultural Resources And School Engagement Among African American Youths: The Role Of Racial Socialization And Ethnic Identity." Children & Schools 28.4 (2006): 197-206. ERIC. Web. 12 Jan. 2014.
Franklin, Virginia Thompson, and Burlingame. Dept. of Research. California Teachers Association. The Role Of The Elementary School Teacher In The Political Socialization Process. n.p.: 1972. ERIC. Web. 12 Jan. 2014.
King, David. (2012). What Happened to the “Public” in Public Education? Education Canada, 53(3).
Robson, Karen L. (2013). Socialization in the Schooling Process. Sociology of Education in Canada (pp. 160-191). Toronto: Pearson Education Canada.
Wilder, David E., New York, NY. Bureau of Applied Social Research. Columbia Univ., and Others And. Actual And Perceived Consensus On Educational Goals Between School And Community. Final Report. Volume I And Volume II. n.p.: 1968. ERIC. Web. 12 Jan. 2014.
