ABSTRACT
Emile Durkheim's thinking about education was based on three major aims: to establish sociology as a discipline of academic standing; to apply the methods of natural science, as he understood them, to the study of society; and to discover how an orderly society was maintained, particularly in the complex modern world. This chapter briefly examines what Durkheim had to say about these matters to gain a better understanding of his educational sociology. In the book Education and Sociology we find Durkheim's functional explanation of education. We should teach children the benefits of self-restraint and show them that the only way to be happy 'is to set proximate and realizable goals, corresponding to the nature of each person'. Durkheim argued that the basic ideas we use to organise our thinking concepts like cause, effect, law, space, number, life, consciousness, society are given to us by society.
