The Development of Literacy and Schooling

educational organizations are the backbone of our society....... Socialization at home taught the children simply learnt the trade of their parents.

Schools and educational institutions are the most important social organization of our society. Infants are socialized by their family at their initial days but, as they grow up they need some specialized knowledge which can be obtained by schools and colleges. Thus educational organizations are the backbone of our society.

In the earlier societies like hunting and gathering and horticultural societies, there was no social institution called education, and there were no formal facilities called schools. Socialization at home taught the children simply learnt the trade of their parents.

Children learned what they needed to know by watching whatever was going on and helping wherever practical. It took no school to teach an Indian boy how to hunt. A boy’s father (or in some societies, his uncle) would give him instruction in hunting and these lessons were the nearest thing to “educational institutions” that could be found in a simple society. Such instruction was not an educational institution; it was simply a part of a man’s family duties.

Schools appeared when cultures became too complex for all needed learning to be handled easily within the family. As empires grew, they needed tax gatherers and record keepers, and this called for the training of scribes. In the ancient civilizations of China and Greece, learned men taught young boys from upper class families.in ancient India there was the Gurukula system; young men, usually from the upper castes, lived with great teachers and learnt from them. In feudal Europe, education was the prerogative of the social elites; young men from the upper classes who had nothing else to do went to school to learn the classics.

Developing religions often required that a great many legends, chants and rituals be memorized. Whether scribes or priests were the first schoolboys or not, is not yet known. We can imagine that a man with a son or nephew to train might agree to take another nephew and perhaps a friend’s son or nephew to teach at the same time. We can imagine that this “class” grew over the generations, with the “teacher” now giving full time to instruction. 

At this point, with full-time specialists as teachers and formal classes of students, operating apart from the family and viewed as the necessary and proper way to train these boys, we can say that educational institutions arrived. The concept of universal education is a relatively new idea.it was only in the beginning of the 20^th century that most nation-states began to practice the concept of mass education in earnest.

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To know more you can visit these significant topics:
Commensality, Indian State, State, Indian Society, Religion, Marriage, kinship System, Social Institution, Types of Marriage, Family, Community, Indology, Social Movement, Bride Wealth (Price), Nation State

Reference:

• Abraham, M. Francis. Contemporary Sociology – An introduction to concepts and theories. Oxford University Press.
• Horton, Paul B. and Hunt, Chester L. Sociology (6th edition). Tata Mcgraw-Hill

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