It
has been an old belief that schools should impart knowledge to their students
as the goal of schooling. Students should be provided with different aspects of
knowledge such as physical, mental, and emotional/moral for them to be
functional citizens in their day-to-day lives. We all need to know how to
write, read, and solve problems. These have been the basic core concepts of
schooling for most schools, if not all. There have been issues regarding a
collision of ideas about the core purpose of schooling or education as a whole,
and as part of the culture, not to mention each school personnel has an opinion
about such. Therefore, it is necessary to recognize other standpoints, including
the school administrators, parents, and any other people around the
institution.
As
for Justin Saldana, Ph.D., the purpose of schooling is the transmission of
culture, the process by which the culture of a society is passed on to its
children. So, the agents of socialization are the people, the groups, and
institutions who influenced each other, which results in social pressures
because each individual has something different to offer. But, they have to
respectfully accept these differences as, once again, transmitted culture from
schools. However, not only the influence of school that the culture formed and
executed, but with the help of family and church as these traditional
institutions support continuity of thought, morals, values, and other tenets
the culture considers significant.
Foucault
believes that power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything but
because it comes from everywhere. This concept of power became the focus of the
discussion. To embody such power, the school exercises strategic power
relations as a means and as an end to teach conformity, and in so doing some
students learn to become agents in its service, while others learn to oppose
it. Schools have to utilize different tactics to achieve their goal for
learners and the state. The development of the schools is considered a
development of the society. However, schools, like any other institution,
cannot please everyone.
As
stated in Henslin, 1999:77-78, schools are the agents responsible for
socializing groups of children and young people on specific skills and values
in a society, which makes sense considering that people are sent to school at
an early stage to learn skills and values through active participation of
activities and interaction with peers. However, it is not fair to say that the school system has become the glue that holds society together, which was
claimed by Justin Saldana, Ph.D., just because the school system responds to
society’s needs, and complies with society’s demands, for trained workers, intellectual
citizens, and well-educated citizens. Instead, the School system may be one of
the factors of societal development, but the people themselves hold the society
together. If the people respect individuals, obey the rules implemented for the
general welfare, and do their responsibilities as good citizens, the society
they are into would surely be strong socially and economically regardless of
their educational status. But, nowadays, it is hard to achieve such. Therefore,
society uses schools more than the family and church to make people act
according to what was expected from them to maintain oneness. That is the reason, society invested a high expectation toward the school system. As Justin
Saldana, Ph.D. stated,
“Today's society expects the
school system to teach students life skills, such as drug awareness, conflict resolution, and sex education, all within the confines of set parameters
imposed by today's society's conflicting values, diverse morals, and emerging
mores. The other traditional agents of socialization, the church, and the
family, have changed, and in the absence of a consistently strong and
homogeneous church and family, the school has emerged slowly as society's
binding agent.”
Furthermore,
it was also discussed that there was a shred of evidence showing that the
purpose of the school from the start was to give heterogeneous society
commonness. With power in the school system, students were indirectly taught to
act according to the norm. It has been an ideal thought for the school to
create a responsible adult that shares something in common, for example having
the privilege to vote during elections. However, it is not often possible in
other cases, especially in a larger community, considering that there have been
individual differences; skills, attitude, and mindset. Hence, culture is one of
the contributors to uniting people regardless of individual differences, which
also a way to reduce territorial fragmentation and supremacy. For societal
culture to be strong, the school system should be given attention. The power
that the school system holds is more than just controlling the society,
instead, allowing the society to be well-developed. As claimed by the author that Foucault
doesn’t think that power is repressive, his point is that the repressive model
is too narrow. It doesn’t mean that once the school system holds the power to
society, it gives them authority to hold everyone. Power will only be good if
it is not abused or taken for granted and only used in a good way that would make
society better. Thus, power is not a bad possession, unless using it in a bad
way. In the later part of the paper, the author concluded that;
If the education system seeks to
empower rather than constrain it needs to focus on genuine autonomy, and it needs
to encourage public debate about the nature of democracy and the rights and
responsibilities of citizenship. The church and the family need to shoulder
some of the responsibility of promoting genuine cognitive reflection as well
since the survival of these two institutions is dependent on the school not
becoming an instrument of oppression.
Finally,
society would look school system as more than just a tool in transmitting
culture, but it is a way to empower each individual- to respect and enjoy the individual
rights but at the same time fulfilling the responsibilities as a good citizen.
After all, it is important to nurture a strong balance between what is good for
ourselves and our society.
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