TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

Jumar G. Basco, Ph.D.

Associate Professor III
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

“School prepares
you for the real
world…which
also bites”.
- Jim Benton
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Today, many traditional functions of

the family have been shared, if not,
totally "surrendered" to school as life
becomes more complex. In many
respects, schools have become the
institutional focus of first and last
resort to resolve individual and
societal needs and concerns. They
are frequently viewed as cure-to-all
social and individual problems.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Because of this, pressures among schools

are created to assume multifaceted
functions to individuals and society. At
present, schools do not only serve as
teachers, but also as parents, nannies,
police officers, health workers, spiritual
advisers, election officers, researchers,
economic producers, and entertainers
of society. These functions are expanding
even more as the society continuously
entrusts schools to address its collective
and individual needs.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

1. Intellectual function - the development

of mental powers or the acquisition of
knowledge and skills. This is known as
the school's most important function.
In this function, students are taught to
think freely, creatively, and logically. New
knowledge is generated, for example,
through research and development, while
old ones are communicated from one
generation to another.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

2. Political function - the promotion of patriotism,

law, and order. Politically, schools help in the vital
task of nation-building by welding a nation under
one political ideology and social institutions that
ensure maximum political awareness and
participation.
3. Economic function - the preparation of vocations
and occupations that provide the framework for a
viable economic system. Economically, schools are
expected to contribute to the manpower needs of
the country and help increase the Gross National
Product (GNP) and financial sustainability of the
nation.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

4. Social function - the socialization of the

young in the norms and values of society.
Understandably, the social function of
education is where social dimensions of
education are rooted. It involves the passing
on of culture, learning to become productive
members of society, and to be globally
literate. Socio-culturally, schools play a
significant role in the development of
national identity, unity, pride, and
consensus among the citizens.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ In his analysis of the diverse functions

reflecting competing interest groups in
communities, Ballantine (2001) presents
the purposes of schooling from differing
groups in the system, such as society,
community, and individual student. These
functions may overlap, causing conflicts
between and among groups. In the same
way, they may have positive and negative
outcomes or congruence between expected
and actual outcomes.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Socializes the young to perform needed adult

roles
▪ Keeps the young occupied
▪ Delays entry into the job market
▪ Helps perpetuate society by socializing the
young into particular societal values,
traditions, and beliefs
▪ Develops skills needed to live in society such as
reading and writing
▪ Selects and allocates the young to the needed
roles from professionals to laborers
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Formalizes socialization experiences,

especially in formal learning
▪ Facilitates peer interaction
▪ Structures socialization experience
▪ Helps meet family goals for successful
children
▪ Gives children more options in the
competitive marketplace
▪ Produces young people who will fit into the
community
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Provides an opportunity to get

together with peers and engage in
sports and other activities
▪ Socializes students into having
acceptable attitude and behaviors
▪ Provides skills and knowledge for
them to fit into society's competitive
bureaucracies
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ At the individual level, schools serve the

different needs of varying individuals and
diverse social groups, primarily for
economic progress, career or professional
advancement, and for achieving
aspirations in life.
▪ The role of the school is to make an
individual a better person than he or
she was before entering school.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ After years of stay in school, individuals are

expected to become better persons as the
school socialization may enhance their
personal and social developments.
▪ Schools are responsible for character-building,
teaching how a boy is turned into a man and
how a girl is turned into a woman.
▪ Likewise, after some years of schooling,
individuals are expected to become
independent thinkers, free from the restraints
of thoughts enforced by family, peer, culture,
and nation.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ The various individual expectations to

schools may create different goals and gains
from schooling. Some seek to develop their
minds and to learn more about their world,
their culture, and themselves.
▪ Others hope to get an interesting or
prestigious job, while some want to make a
lot of money. However, all these motives
operate in each person at varying degrees.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

Significantly, the school

is useful for meeting
students' potential
partners. With
everyday attendance in
schools, students of
opposite sex get to meet
their future marital
partners, making it a
"matching place" for
mate selection or a
"marriage market.”
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ The function of school at the individual level can be

generally measured by how well it strengthens the
ability of students to realize their full potentials.
According to humanistic philosophy, one of the
main functions of schools is to ensure the
progressive development of innate powers of
the child. This coincides with the idea of the
famous educationist, Pestalozzi, (as cited by
Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990), who remarked,
"The main function of education is to develop
innate powers, such as curiosity, love, self-
prestige, imagination, and reasoning of the
child.” Thus, he defined education as the natural,
harmonious, and progressive development of man’s
innate powers.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ In the Philippines, schools are expected to be

the means of solving social problems, such as
alcohol, and drug abuse, sexual promiscuity,
prejudism, and poverty.
▪ For example, if the number of drug addicts
increases in the community, schools may
institute drug education program;
▪ if there are too many unwanted teenage
pregnancy, schools attempt to solve the problem
by establishing sex education program;
▪ if there is moral decay among citizens, schools
create values education.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Because of this condition, there is a

common belief that individuals who have
undergone higher level of schooling have
more tendency to properly address societal
problems than their counterparts.
▪ This suggests that the level of schooling
among population is highly correlated with
levels of economic contribution, political
participation, social competence, and
cultural involvement in society.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ It is in this context why every nation has

taken education not as a private matter
but as a public policy, and has been
deeply concerned with the aggressive
reform of education.
▪ At the societal level, schools are
expected to realize the following:
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Through schooling, each generation of young

people is exposed to the existing beliefs,
norms, core values, accumulated knowledge,
and protected cultural standards from one
generation to the next.
▪ Since the purpose of school is to conserve
social values and prevent moral decline, it
has always been an indoctrinating force of
the society. To some extent, all schools
practice indoctrination. They only teach the
young what the elders want them to know -
the rights and wrongs, so as to meet the
expectations placed upon them.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Another function of school is to select and

allocate which people will enter into
occupations to be filled in society. This is
called sorting or sometimes known as
gatekeeping. As a general rule, most
challenging positions or occupations in the
society attract the most talented
individuals. The function of school, then,
is to allow those with the most merit to
achieve and fill in higher level positions.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Schools supply the needed manpower

requirements of industry and labor. To do
this, it provides credentials or
certifications to a number of individuals
going to school. Credentialing is the
mechanism to which schools give
credentials (grades) and degrees that
determine the job opportunities available
to individuals in society. Today, a college
diploma virtually becomes a minimum
requirement for entry into the paid labor
force in the Philippines.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Schools promote political integration and

develop a sense of national identity that
stabilizes the political system. Students in
schools are taught the importance of civic-
mindedness and places great value in
developing an educated electorate, that is,
they are taught the importance of voting
and participating in the democratic process.
This function of school eludes the citizens
to rebel against the government and
develop trust and confidence in their
leaders and the social institutions per se.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Schools are the guardians of the society's

future. For such function, schools like the
higher education institutions are expected
to generate new knowledge, technology,
innovation, invention, and up-to-date
skills and information required to lead
industry and other key institutions in
society. It is the fundamental role of the
school to search for new ideas, techniques,
or inventions to facilitate human life and
development.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Schools play a pivotal role in enabling and

guiding students to reach their potentials
so that they could occupy whatever social
and occupational roles they aspire in the
future. They socialize them to their future
occupational positions and the elements of
politics in a given society. Political
socialization refers to the role the school
plays in instilling the values and norms
that support the prevailing structure of
society, including the dominant political
ideology (say democracy).
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Aside from political and economic

socializations, students are trained to be
competitive, to value success, to be
hardworking, and to conform to group
norms. Values and ideologies are
indoctrinated through schools as they
become training grounds for learning
skills and recognizing the rules of the
larger society.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Schools serve as "holding areas” and perform physical

custody for the young from early childhood to adolescence
while their real custodians (parents) go to work. This is the
child-care function or schools or pejoratively called baby-
sitting function. Custodial service refers to the care of
children during the day or keeping kids off the streets, while
their parents work.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Schools are not only confined to

imparting knowledge and skills
(literacy, numeracy, arts, life skills,
and community roles), but also go
beyond the performance of these
tasks. They assume internal
monitoring and control of students'
behavior as a way of regulating
individual and group behaviors inside
and outside the school. Through this
function, students are oriented to
ethical conduct of good public life and
rules of behavior, which may be
consistent or contrary to what they
were normally taught at home.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ refers to the set of rules that are

dispensed for individuals who act
contrary to the standards of proper
conduct.
▪ Its imposition in school allows the
students to imbibe acceptable behaviors,
such as punctuality, respect,
accountability, discipline, good study
habits, as well as conformity and
compliance to the norms and values of
the school system.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ means that teachers have to exercise their

authority in the best interest of the
students, emphasizing the development of
self-discipline, independence, and
maturity.
▪ It does not always mean punishment, but it
is creating a positive corrective measure
that allows students to reform or change
their deviant or unacceptable behavior.
Significantly, discipline must, at all times,
be fair, consistent, positive, and carefully
applied.
TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ School as a social institution has both manifest and

latent functions. two concepts were introduced by
sociologist Robert Merton. Manifest functions are
the intended, open, official, explicit, stated, and
deliberate positive goals of schools, which are
organized, defined, and acknowledged. Whereas,
latent functions are the unintended goals, silent,
unofficial, and the hidden curriculum of schools.
These are usually the unorganized, unconscious,
and unacknowledged results and intentions of
schooling. They are sometimes referred to as the
informal consequences of the educational process.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Instruction and training - development

of critical and creative thinking and tasks
essential for maintenance of society;
▪ Sorting - grouping students based on
talents and abilities;
▪ Socialization - teaching the duties of
citizenship, patriotism, and nationalism;
▪ Social integration -love for humanity,
inculcate dominant values, and shape
societal thinking;
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Transmission of culture - teaching

values and ideologies from generation to
generation; and
▪ Research and development - generation
of knowledge, innovation, invention, and
change.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Latent functions or unintended functions of schools

may include:
(1) developing youth culture that conflicts with
parents;
(2) obtaining potential mates - "marriage market";
(3) custodial or care-giving service while parents work;
(4) challenging authority; and
(5) restricting job competition by keeping young
people temporarily out of the labor force.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ The church-like function of the school is observed

when emphasis is made on praying the rosary,
holding masses every first Friday and during
holidays of obligation;
▪ What is family-like in school is when the school
conducts family gathering or family day that
enhances family cohesion and nourishment of
family life;
▪ What regard school as a factory is when there is
emphasis on production or business activities, such
as producing goods or products by the school;
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ The school is likened to a prison cell when there is

too much emphasis on lining up, use of
punishment and maximum security enforced
constantly by the principal, teacher, school
counselor, and prefect of discipline;
▪ What is media-like in school is reflected in its
school advertisements, notices, greetings in both
radio and television programs that promote not only
its educational offerings, but also its ideological,
political, and religious orientations.
 TCSCOL (The Teacher and the Community, School Culture and Organizational Leadership)

▪ Tamayao, A. I. (2014). Social dimensions of education. 1st Edition. Manila: Rex

Book Store
▪ Ballantine, Jeanne. (2001). The Sociology of Education: A Systematic Analysis
(5th ed). New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
▪ Breen, R. and Goldthorpe, J.H. (2000). Explaining Educational Differentials:
Towards a Formal Rational Action Theory in Goldthorpe, J.H. On Sociology.
Oxford: OUP.
▪ Kincheloe, Joe L. (2007). Critical Pedagogy in the Twenty-First Century:
Evolution for Survival. In Peter McLaren & Joe L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical
Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? New York: Peter Lang.
▪ Kincheloe, Joe. (2008). Critical Pedagogy Primer. 2nd 'Ed. New York: Peter
Lang.
▪ Meighan, R. & I. Siraj-Blatchford, (2004). Sociology of Educating, 4th ed.
London:
▪ Continuum International Publishing Group, Ltd.
▪ Sullivan, A. (2001). Cultural Capital and Educational Attainment. Sociology 35
(4).