Understanding the Social Characteristics of Education

Posted on Apr 5, 2025 in Social sciences

Education is a social phenomenon for the following reasons:

1. Education Takes Place in a Social Environment

Educators and students are always in a social context. Every society has a context that affects the education that occurs. Society is a system in which human relationships are verified to communicate cultural patterns of individuals. Education is the necessary means available to society to transmit and develop its own culture.

2. Education Works with Social Content

The content studied in school are social conventions, which are not immutable. Teachers explain things they have learned, that is, not original, not making it up. To educate is to provide a culture, and that culture is the atmosphere that a society breathes and produces. All educational content is social in nature.

3. Education for Social Aims

On the one hand, there is an idealist view that the purpose of education is to spread good science and justice, ensuring that individuals are improved and happy. Then there are sociological trends, which state that education can only lead to social objectives. Education has many important social objectives it serves, but there is also space for personal purposes.

4. Education Has Social Functions

Education has significant personal and numerous functions that cannot be neglected: promoting the development of the whole person, giving job training, raising the level of culture and art. From a sociological perspective, we focus on the social functions:

  1. Adapting the individual to the demands of the social group. This is what we call socialization.
  2. Ensuring social continuity and introducing social change. These are two diametrically opposed poles of society. Education brings all of the cultural heritage, customs and practices, ideas and beliefs, fears and desires, and promotes innovation, encourages critical thinking and individual creativity.
  3. The role of professional training of individuals.
  4. Economic role. Education promotes the material progress of society.
  5. The political function of education, i.e., the real concern for public events.
  6. The role of social control. Education promotes the ideas and attitudes of individuals of concern to the leaders of society.
  7. The role of social selection, i.e., the various channels that education exerts in society through educational mechanisms.
  8. Promotes human progress of society. Education is considered an essential element for building the perfect society.

5. Education is Promoted by Social Factors

Education takes place with the intervention of social factors, the presence of social and decisive majority. The main factors are:

  1. The development of the country to increase the economy.
  2. The cultural level for citizens to improve and evolve.
  3. The political interest to get more votes.

6. Education is Socially Conditioned

Society is education. The willingness of teachers and parents, acceptable or available to students, must join the social factors that push the pace of education. These factors mean that each person is qualified in its education.