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Saving My Revised GRE Issue GRE Issue(Manuscript under Review) Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang.

g. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012

Supplementary Ref

005

Education and Society

A.K.C. Ottaway. Education and Society, Routledge & Kegan Paul PLC, 1966 Harold T. Shapiro. A Larger Sense of Purpose: Higher Education and Society, Princeton University Press, 2005

The rapid and seemingly irresistible trend towards a global society affects today even the smallest and most remote villages in the developing world. It challenges established cultures, values and patterns of behavior and poses a number of very important educational challenges. People living together are said to live in a society or a community and these two words are often used in almost the same sense. The difference between them depends on the type and degree of organization in the group, and the extent to which the people are conscious of their social mode of life. Both imply having something in common, such as a certain geographic territory, and a feeling of belonging to the same kind of group. A community is everybody, adults and children, social and nonsocial persons, living in a certain territory where all share a mode of life, but not all are conscious of its organization or purpose. A society is a kind of community (or a part of a community), whose members have become socially conscious of their mode of life, and are united by a common set of aims and values. For education, this is a useful distinction because children are members of the community, but cannot be said to be members of the society until they are conscious of the way their society functions, and of their rights and duties in it as full citizens. Children are potential members of society, and it is one of the tasks of education to prepare them for full membership. While they are in the process of being educated for social life, they are a part of what Collingwood

calls the non-social community. It can be said that society is fully social part of a community, and the special nature of a society is judged by the behavior of those members with full social consciousness. The social fact that a society has a set of aims, which means that its members are to some extent conscious of the direction in which they wish it to change, is very important. A society is never static, but is a collection of people who look towards the future. They may be uncertain of their aims, but to live together in some kind of organized way. The members of any society have a set of techniques for bringing up and educating their children. The educator, in accordance with the aims he accepts, attempts to develop the personality of the child and to prepare him for membership of his society. This dual function of education corresponds to the double role a person has to play in life, both as an individual and as a member of society. The development of the child should be thought of in relation to his society and culture. It is not only that the individual cannot, in fact, grow up separated from his social group, but that he becomes the kind of person he is, at any stage of his development, by means of interaction between himself and his social and physical environment. That education is concerned with the development of personality is a normal assumption in our society today. Personality is one of those concepts for which there are a number of definitions. It is usually

Saving My Revised GRE Issue GRE Issue(Manuscript under Review) Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012

regarded as an organized whole and all-inclusive, comprising the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual characteristics of a person. It includes character and temperament, which are parts of personality. The individual does not come into the world a blank, but with inborn constitutional factors and qualities. So the growth of personality depends partly on innate factors, and partly on environment. The influence of the environment in this combination will clearly depend on the way of life of the society in which the person grows up. The most important part of this environment is the human environment, namely the other people of all kinds and ages who are around him and influence him during his period of growth and learning. One of the tasks of education is to transmit the cultural values and behavior patterns of the society to its young and potential members. By this means, society achieves a basic social conformity, and ensures that its traditional modes of life are preserved. This has been called the conservative function of education. But a modern society also needs critical and creative individuals, able to make new inventions and discoveries, and willing to initiate social change. To provide for change is the creative function of education. Handing on tradition is bound at times to be in conflict with a desire to initiate change. When a society is changing slowly the new elements of its culture can be more easily absorbed, but the rapid changes in the industrial societies of the twentieth century have led to much conflict between old and new habits of life and thought. it is true that education If depends on the total way of life of a society, then the kind of education provided will be different in different kinds of society. Not only will educational systems and institutions be different, but each society has its own ideal types of men, or cultural heroes, for the young to emulate, so that the development of personality will also vary from one culture to another. It will also follow that the education provided within any given society will change from time to time as the society changes. It is sometimes suggested that education is one of the causes of social change. The opposite is more true. Educational change tends to follow other social changes, rather than initiate them.

Ideas of change originate in the minds of men; often in the mind of a single man. Exceptional individuals invent new techniques and profound new values for their society. These ideas arise from the impact of man on his culture, but do not change the culture until they are shared and transmitted by a social group. Education can not be changed until the culture changes, except by a few pioneers who are ahead their time and are trying to educate society. Education is at the heart of development. It is education that gives societies the strength and sense of purpose they need to address the main problems confronting them today: widening economic disparities among and within countries, mounting debt burdens, rapid population growth, widespread environmental degradation, civil strife and armed conflicts, and - least tolerable of all - the preventable deaths of millions of children. It is again education that may pave the way for a genuine culture of peace, that will bring to the fore the essential rights and capacities of women, that will preserve and enrich mankind's cultural heritage, and will hold the keys to medical and scientific progress. Is education thus the panacea? To claim this would be to ignore that education itself is, unfortunately, conditioned, and often distorted by the same social ills, economic obstacles and cultural inertia, which it is trying to overcome. It takes leadership, political commitment and strong alliance of society around the cause of education for all to actually mobilize the tremendous potential of education for social progress. The most vital mission of education is, no doubt, that of building and strengthening peace. With the easing of global tensions, secure development will be threatened less by external aggression than by intolerance based on ignorance, tensions, between disparate values, or the over-assertiveness of certain group interests. Just as they tend to equip themselves to face war, societies will need to be equipped to face and preserve peace. The main defenses of this peace will need to be constructed in the minds of men, women and children all over the world. Building this "culture of peace" is undoubtedly, the first and foremost challenge facing educational systems the world over.

Saving My Revised GRE Issue GRE Issue(Manuscript under Review) Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012

Given the ever-increasing role of the media as a source of information, communication and even education, there may be very real dangers of schools and universities becoming a marginal source of learning in society. The safeguarding of cultural identities will be increasingly critical in the emerging global society. The issue of language in education reflects many of the simultaneous and conflicting demands made in the name of globalization, easier communication, but also preservation of cultural identity. Various models of bilingual education should be objectively evaluated and the results be shared amongst educational systems. Many societies consider that, in a world increasingly shaped by materialism, a more significant place needs to be assigned to the teaching of ethics, values and Culture in school curricula. Education needs to prepare individual for citizenship and participation in societies which are increasingly opening up to democratic practice. Citizenship in a pluralistic society will require a thorough and continuous revision of educational contents at all levels. Both children and adults need to be made aware of their civil rights and learn to exercise them. Given the many centrifugal tendencies in pluralistic societies, the issue of common core curricula including the question of a common medium of instruction is likely to be of critical importance. Marginalization must be seen as an increasingly dangerous phenomenon all societies and, in face, in the relationship between societies. Education has an extremely crucial role to play in strengthening the social fabric, promoting cohesion through equality and fighting against exclusion and social disruption. Education, at all levels, must also contribute to the fight against the growing and dangerously

disruptive social problems of crime and drug abuse, and needs to play a major and active role in the prevention of AIDS. The family, essential to social cohesion in every society, is being threatened and disrupted on an ever-growing scale. Education can do to strengthen and protect families as the basic tissue of the society. The role of women and girls in education is a societal issue of paramount importance. Sustainable development requires above all human development through education. Through education, societies will be able to bring about the behavioral changes, the new values and the knowledge they need to cope with such problems as excessive population growth or the depletion of environmental resources. On a global scale and in every single society, preventive action will have to be taken against the over exploitation of environmental resources. The problems of environmental depletion and degradation involve very important challenges for education, training and the raising of public awareness. The complexity of environmental issues will require much greater emphasis on interdisciplinarity in both education and research. In the domain of economic growth, work and employment, the role of education will increasingly be to help individuals and entire societies to cope with even more rapid change and to come with a new distribution between learning, work and leisure throughout life. The strategies of economic growth in developing countries should in the future be increasingly based on human resource development, in particular, on education for all. If preference were to be given to growth based on capital investments in certain key sectors only, economic disparities within societies and between regions risk becoming more pronounced.

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