Education / Youth as Predictor of Adulthood

Emile Durkheim is regarded as one of the proverbial founding fathers of sociological research and theory. The two main works of his that can easily be considered his most brilliant and affecting works are The Rules of Sociological Method and The Division of Labor in Society. This particular report focuses on a particular article that was written for and appeared in a scholarly journal article in 2011. The article spoke of Durkheim's theories and how the theory and practice of society very much confirm and verify the assertions that Durkheim made. Specifically, the article focuses on the Moral Education treatise offered by Durkheim. While sociological theory and insight is not an exact science is far from definitive even in the modern day, it is clear to anyone who would pay attention why Durkheim is held in the same fairly high to very high regard as other sociological theories such as Karl Marx and Max Weber.

Analysis

One of the major cornerstones of Durkheim's moral stances and theories that is focused on in this article, as authored by Robert Prus, is that education is something that is and should be a socially engaged process. The article notes that while many people focus on Durkheim's opinions relative to broader society and community, Prus notes that much fewer people focus specifically on the sociological in theories in play as they relate to education. A microcosm of that would be the idea that children are deemed to be less informed and educated by virtue of their age. The author of this report holds that this is entirely not true, especially in the respect of "street smarts" and basic intelligence. Even if a child is not book-smart, they typically know when they are being manipulated or lied to and they are often very savvy and fairly knowledgeable about the world around them than parents or other adults would seem to think. To treat a child as ambivalent or ignorant just because they are young and for little to no other reason would be a mistake. Durkheim made it a point to recognize that in addition to the fact that any observable behavior in adults almost certainly has at least some root in what happened to those adults when they were children. There is a chance that the person's childhood is not extensively relevant, but it at least plays some part of explaining a person's actions and reactions to events experienced later in life (Prus, 2011).

Durkheim follows that string a bit further as he explains and speaks of the correlation between education and community life and how the two should absolutely be inextricably linked. If there is a disagreement between the two, then there will obviously be some discord and very mixed results because the educational foundations of a child will be at odds with what surrounds them. There are times, perhaps, where that is a good thing as some communities are rife with strife and social ills such as gangs and drug use. However, for there to be a clear chasm between the social dynamics of a school as compared to the community in which the people involved are affixed in, then problems will almost certainly rear their head. Durkheim says this himself when he says that the educational practices can and should flow from community life, that there is fundamental nature between the individual and society and so on (Prus, 2011).

Although expanded much more in the work of people like Herbert Blumer, much of what Durkheim had to say can be expanded to include subjects like symbolic interaction, whereby a person interprets, reacts to and is impassioned by something based on what meanings a subject has for the perceiver, the source of and what sculpted this meaning for the person vis-a-vis interactions with society and how the overall meaning is interpreted and manifested. The author would liken this to a beggar stealing a loaf of bread from a store. Some may react from the law and order side of things and say that the beggar should go to jail for theft. A different person, seeing the same exact thing, would say that the man was just hungry and that the store owner should let any charges slide. Others still would demand that the store owner feed the poor as a general practice and/or that the owner should be taxed and regulated based on his wealth to help the beggar and people like him. The salient points that have been lifted from this particular article is that children are much more in tune with morals and how they are being guided and coached than we give credit for a lot of the time and what/how this manifests and happens with the children of today will very much if not entirely guide how they react and feel as adults given events and discussions in society. The beggar parable above is but one potential example that happens all of the time (Prus, 2011).