ABSTRACT
Previous chapters in this book have stressed the fact that education has close links with other important aspects of human life, with human nature, with the growth and development of children, with knowledge and understanding, with morals and religion. Another obviously close connection is that between education and the ordering of human society. Education may be seen as one of the devices which society employs to preserve its present integrity and its future survival. In its descriptive sense 'education' is simply the name of a complicated network of institutions and practices designed to bring the young into society by initiating them into the current culture, the intricate pattern of practices, assumptions and expectations which make up social life. Thus education and its practices will form part the subject—matter of various social sciences. The sociologist of education, the student of comparative education and the historian of education all try to deal with education as a social phenomenon, and their work results in social theories about education. In The Republic Plato was, among other things, giving a social theory about the role of education. Education for him was a means of providing the elites needed to govern the ideal state. [19] For the sociologist Durkheim, education was a means of integrating and consolidating the bonds which ensured a stable society. [4] For Dewey, education was a device to facilitate what was for him the most desirable kind of society, a democracy. [2] In each case a social theory was being offered, and from one point of view the theories mentioned can be regarded as descriptive in character, setting out what it is assumed education can, or does, do in society. An important question to ask in each case would be whether the theory offered was, factually, an adequate one: whether or not education can do or does do what is claimed for it. To the extent to which educational theories are of this kind they are descriptive sociological theories, and in so far as the philosopher of education is concerned with them it would be with the conceptual apparatus employed and with the consistency of the arguments used. The theories themselves would be validated by, and be subject to, empirical evidence.
