SOCI 1002 Lecture Notes - Assortative Mating, National Wealth, Imagined Community
19 Feb 2014
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Document Summary
Education system has displaced organized religion as main purveyor of formal knowledge. Education system also is second in importance only to the family as agent of socialization. Universal mass education is recent phenomenon and is limited to relatively wealthy countries. 1950: only 10% of world"s countries had system of compulsory mass education. Today: half of citizens in developing countries are illiterate, while in canada, education is nearly universal. Creating systems of education that had sufficient resources to include all children was social change of breathtaking scope. Religious training was never widely available and tended to set people apart from surrounding community. Replacing these forms of instruction with centralized and rationalized system created strong pressures toward uniformity and standardization. Diversity among families, regions, and religious traditions gradually gave way to homogenized indoctrination into common culture. Amount of education that people receive has risen steadily, and trend expected to continue.
