SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION

Social Foundations of Education draws upon several disciplines and fields to examine education, namely
history, philosophy, comparative/ international education, cultural studies, sociology, and political
science. Social Foundations inquiry helps to sharpen students’ capacities to understand, analyze, and
explain educational issues, policies, and practices in order to improve education.

Thus, the purpose of Social Foundations study is to draw upon these humanities and social science
disciplines to develop students’ interpretive, normative, and critical perspectives on education, both
inside and outside of schools (Council for Social Foundations of Education, 1996, 2004). The
development of such perspectives helps educators to “exercise sensitive judgments amidst competing
cultural and education values and beliefs” (CSFE, 1996).

Rather than reducing education to a formula for best practice, courses in the Social Foundations of
Education challenge students to think deeply about the relationships between education (formal and
informal) and society(ies) at large. Social Foundations encourages educators to use “critical judgment to
question educational assumptions and arrangements and to identify contradictions and inconsistencies
among social and educational values, policies, and practices” (CSFE, 2004).

Culture, Socialization, and Education

Our text, Foundations of Education, defines culture as “continually changing patterns of acquired
behavior and attitudes transmitted among members of a society. Culture is a way of thinking and
behaving; it is a group’s traditions, memories, and written records, its shared rules and ideas, its
accumulated beliefs, habits, and values” (Gutek, Levine, & Ornstein, 2011). According to the U.S. Census
Bureau, “in 2000, 3.4 million U.S. children ages five through seventeen (about one in fifteen) spoke little
or no English” (Davis & Yang, 2006). As more students with more diverse cultural backgrounds integrate
into classrooms today, it is vitally important for teachers to understand, respect, and acknowledge these
varying beliefs and practices. Teachers need to be multi-culturally educated so that they can provide all
students with equal educational opportunities and not focus solely on one single cultural belief and
practice. However, this can be extremely challenging because many cultures vary greatly on
expectations and norms.

As a future teacher, I personally am concerned with the challenges I may face in trying to create a multi-
cultural classroom for my students to emphasize equality in education. Although I will be aware of the
varying cultural aspects, I worry I may tend to continually rely on American literature (as I will be an
English teacher) as the bulk for my curriculum because it is what I know. However, I would love to talk to
my students from different cultures and learn about their favorite pieces of literature and perhaps
incorporate those into the curriculum, as I know they will be able to appreciate and identify with those
works.

One example of cultural diversity in the classroom we were asked to potentially think about is the
following: Many Americans with European backgrounds tend to place great value on the individual.
Many Americans, such as those with Asian backgrounds, tend to place greater value on the family or
society or to the value the group and the individual equally. Consider this, you are teaching a fourth-
grade class with many Asian American children in it. How will the difference in values between Anglo-
European American and Asian American students affect your teaching and your relationships with
students and parents? Since there is a value on individualism in one culture and a value on the group in
another, I would incorporate individual work and exercises, as well as group work and interaction, in my
curriculum. I would distribute these two practices evenly. Therefore, students can show their individual
capabilities and ideas, as well as their ability to work together and share diverse ideas and concepts. As
far as the family aspect goes, to acknowledge both cultural values I would be inclined to send weekly
progress reports home. Parents of both backgrounds will be frequently informed of their child’s progress
and work quality; they will see the individual work and the group work completed to see both values are
being incorporated in their child’s class.

Overall, although I have some concerns as a future teacher in being able to adequately incorporate
diverse cultural experiences and practices in my classroom I look forward to learning from my own
students, and working with them and their families to make the most of their educational experience.
The most important aspect to remember for me is that “children from diverse cultures and their families
can succeed in American schools without surrendering the customs of their home cultures” (Davis &
Yang, 2006). The more the schools and the families work together to preserve each child’s unique
culture, the more each child will benefit from and appreciate their educational experience.

Davis, Carol & Yang, Alice. Welcoming families of different cultures. 2006. Education World. Received
October 18, 2011 from www.educationworld.com

Gutek, Levine, & Ornstein. Foundations of education. 2011. Wadsworth, Cengage Learning

2.

The individual is seen to deal with culture either through adaptation to culture as context or through
internalisation of cultural models and ideas. The view of individuals automatically adapting to or
internalising a general cultural context is reinforced by the trend to define cultures in terms of
psychological content, by which I mean positions on specific psychological variables such as emotions
(shame-cultures and guilt-cultures), notions of the self (interdependent self and independent self) or
values (collectivism and individualism). Individuals’ socialization into these groups affects their
functioning at any given point in life. These enculturations are further dependent on their gender, age,
and education. Assessment of culture’s relation with individual functioning requires adequate
measurement of both personality and normative aspects of situations in which behavior is enacted.

Agents of Socialization

Several institutional and other sources of socialization exist and are called agents of socialization. The
first of these, the family, is certainly the most important agent of socialization for infants and young
children.

The family is perhaps the most important agent of socialization for children. Parents’ values and
behavior patterns profoundly influence those of their daughters and sons.

Randen Pederson – Family – CC BY 2.0.

Should parents get the credit when their children turn out to be good kids and even go on to accomplish
great things in life? Should they get the blame if their children turn out to be bad? No parent deserves
all the credit or blame for their children’s successes and failures in life, but the evidence indicates that
our parents do affect us profoundly. In many ways, we even end up resembling our parents in more than
just appearance.

The reason we turn out much like our parents, for better or worse, is that our families are such an
important part of our socialization process. When we are born, our primary caregivers are almost always
one or both of our parents. For several years we have more contact with them than with any other
adults. Because this contact occurs in our most formative years, our parents’ interaction with us and the
messages they teach us can have a profound impact throughout our lives, as indicated by the stories of
Sarah Patton Boyle and Lillian Smith presented earlier.

The ways in which our parents socialize us depend on many factors, two of the most important of which
are our parents’ social class and our own biological sex. Melvin Kohn (1965, 1977) found that working-
class and middle-class parents tend to socialize their children very differently. Kohn reasoned that
working-class parents tend to hold factory and other jobs in which they have little autonomy and instead
are told what to do and how to do it. In such jobs, obedience is an important value, lest the workers be
punished for not doing their jobs correctly. Working-class parents, Kohn thought, should thus emphasize
obedience and respect for authority as they raise their children, and they should favor spanking as a
primary way of disciplining their kids when they disobey. In contrast, middle-class parents tend to hold
white-collar jobs where autonomy and independent judgment are valued and workers get ahead by
being creative. These parents should emphasize independence as they raise their children and should be
less likely than working-class parents to spank their kids when they disobey.

If parents’ social class influences how they raise their children, it is also true that the sex of their children
affects how they are socialized by their parents. Many studies find that parents raise their daughters and
sons quite differently as they interact with them from birth.

For example, they are gentler with their daughters and rougher with their sons. They give their girls dolls
to play with, and their boys guns. Girls may be made of “sugar and spice and everything nice” and boys
something quite different, but their parents help them greatly, for better or worse, turn out that way. To
the extent this is true, our gender stems much more from socialization than from biological differences
between the sexes, or so most sociologists probably assume.

Schools socialize children by teaching them their formal curricula but also a hidden curriculum that
imparts the cultural values of the society in which the schools are found. One of these values is the need
to respect authority, as evidenced by these children standing in line.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

Schools socialize children in several ways. First, students learn a formal curriculum, informally called the
“three Rs”: reading, writing, and arithmetic. This phase of their socialization is necessary for them to
become productive members of their society. Second, because students interact every day at school
with their peers, they ideally strengthen their social interaction skills. Third, they interact with authority
figures, their teachers, who are not their parents. For children who have not had any preschooling, their
teachers are often the first authority figures they have had other than their parents. The learning they
gain in relating to these authority figures is yet another important component of their socialization.

Functional theorists cite all these aspects of school socialization, but conflict theorists instead emphasize
that schools in the United States also impart a hidden curriculum by socializing children to accept the
cultural values of the society in which the schools are found. To be more specific, children learn
primarily positive things about the country’s past and present; they learn the importance of being neat,
patient, and obedient; and they learn to compete for good grades and other rewards. In this manner,
they learn to love America and not to recognize its faults, and they learn traits that prepare them for
jobs and careers that will bolster the capitalist economy. Children are also socialized to believe that
failure, such as earning poor grades, stems from not studying hard enough and, more generally, from
not trying hard enough (Booher-Jennings, 2008; Bowles & Gintis, 1976). This process reinforces the
blaming-the-victim ideology discussed in Chapter 1 “Sociology and the Sociological Perspective”. Schools
are also a significant source of gender socialization, as even in this modern day, teachers and curricula
send out various messages that reinforce the qualities traditionally ascribed to females and males, and
students engage in recess and other extracurricular activities that do the same thing (Booher-Jennings,
2008; Thorne, 1993).

The mass media are another agent of socialization. Television shows, movies, popular music, magazines,
Web sites, and other aspects of the mass media influence our political views; our tastes in popular
culture; our views of women, people of color, and gays; and many other beliefs and practices.

In an ongoing controversy, the mass media are often blamed for youth violence and many other of our
society’s ills. The average child sees thousands of acts of violence on television and in the movies before
reaching young adulthood. Rap lyrics often seemingly extol very ugly violence, including violence against
women. Commercials can greatly influence our choice of soda, shoes, and countless other products. The
mass media also reinforce racial and gender stereotypes, including the belief that women are sex
objects and suitable targets of male violence. The mass media certainly are an important source of
socialization unimaginable a half-century ago.

One final agent of socialization is religion, discussed further in Chapter 12 “Aging and the Elderly”.
Although religion is arguably less important in people’s lives now than it was a few generations ago, it
still continues to exert considerable influence on our beliefs, values, and behaviors.

Here we should distinguish between religious preference (e.g., Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish) and
religiosity (e.g., how often people pray or attend religious services). Both these aspects of religion can
affect your values and beliefs on religious and nonreligious issues alike.

In Summary, the ways in which parents socialize children depend in part on the parents’ social class and
on their child’s biological sex.

Schools socialize children by teaching them both the formal curriculum and a hidden curriculum.

Peers are an important source of emotional support and companionship, but peer pressure can induce
individuals to behave in ways they might ordinarily regard as wrong.

The mass media are another important agent of socialization, and scholars debate the effect the media
have on violence in society.

In considering the effects of religion on socialization, we need to distinguish between religious

preference and religiosity.
References

https://www.bgsu.edu/education-and-human-development/school-of-educational-foundations-
leadership-policy/educational-foundations-inquiry/social-foundations-of-education.html#:~:text=WHAT
%20IS%20SOCIAL%20FOUNDATIONS%20OF,%2C%20sociology%2C%20and%20political%20science.

https://capperso.umwblogs.org/2011/10/18/culture-socialization-and-education/

https://open.lib.umn.edu/sociology/chapter/4-3-agents-of-socialization/#barkan-ch04_s03_s04_f01