According to Durkheim, "The major function of education is the transmission of society's norms and values." Discuss. (UPSC CSE Mains 2020 - Sociology, Paper 1)
Durkheim considers education as a social fact. Education has varied in each epoch, Durkheim argues, because each society has to have the system of education that corresponds to its needs and reflects the customs and beliefs of the day to day life. Education, which is determined by the society in which it is practiced, can by studied by the scientific methods of sociology. Durkheim sees education as being composed of real social facts that could be studied like any other social facts detailed in his ‘Rules of Sociological Method’.
As per this theory each of us consists of two beings: our individual being and social being. The latter is “a system of ideas, sentiments and practices which express in us, not our personality, but the group or different groups of which we are part; these are religious beliefs, moral beliefs and practices, national or professional traditions, collective opinions of every kind...To constitute this being in each of us is the end of education”. In all this part of his thought Durkheim appears to be describing the function of education as a means of transmitting the ways of thinking, acting and feeling as members of society which is considered as culture transmission.
Durkheim would call such culture transmission as transmission of collective representations which reflect different aspects of the social reality. The collective consciousness or the collective mind, which is derived from the interaction and combination of individual consciousness and at the same time enters into, changes, and develops the individual being into a social being. The relation between individual and the group through conscience collective becomes clear when Durkheim analysed the social character of learning. “The individual, in willing society, wills himself. The influence that it exerts on him, notably through education, does not at all have as its object and its effect to repress him, to diminish him, to denature him, but, on the contrary, to make him grow and to make of him a truly human being”. To acknowledge the development of individual through education is just one aim of Durkheim’s sociology of education. Living in a society that had undergone much stress, class conflict, and disorder, his goal was to achieve social solidarity, the concept which is further developed in his discussions of moral education.
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