Ideas of Emilie Durkheim in Education

Durkheim compare school to organism and that teacher need to know what the organism is, what are the component parts of which is constituted and how they are interrelated, how they its be organized. Durkheim makes importance on knowledge of institution and its inner life, the why how the institution are motivated, what goals they seek to achieve. Educational subject can’t be truly comprehensible, that’s why it’s good to research institutional development and evolutionary process. However it’s not only organization of education which history helps to understand, it also shows the educational ideas of organizations that was designed to achieve the aims.
Sociologist also speaks about education aims and why they are important and that investigation of past helps educator to gain student development. “Isn’t the object of education to turn our pupils into men, and in order to know what we need to produce a man of his own times is it really necessary to investigate the past?”(Durkheim, 1977, p. 247) Sociologist suggests that human should escape from their-selves, from our narrow-minded points of view and that’s why a study of the history of education is so important and worthwhile. To understand what contemporary ideal ought to be human need to transport himself to the other end of historical time-scale and through this process to understand the educational ideology, the one which was the first elaborated in European culture and are pretty remote from our own. In meantime educator have to study, describe it, explain it, then step by step follow the series of changes which has undergone and parallel changes society itself. All this is what makes contemporary situation. That’s for sure, that history of education thought and the study of social mores are indeed closely linked.


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