Education
One of the most powerful means of propagating and sustaining new developments is the system of education available in a society. Education is the means for organized transmission of society's collective knowledge to each next generation by the previous generation. It equips each new generation to face the opportunities and challenges of the future with the knowledge gathered from the past. It shows the young generation the opportunities that lie ahead for them and thereby raises their aspiration to achieve more. The information imparted by education raises the level of expectations of youth as well as their aspirations for higher income. It also equips them with the mental capacity to devise ways and means to improve productivity and enhance living standards.
Society can be conceived as a complex fabric consisting of interrelated activities, systems and organizations. Development occurs when this complex fabric improves its own organization. That organizational improvement can take place simultaneously in several dimensions.
- Quantitative expansion in the volume of social activities
- Qualitative expansion in the content of all those elements that make up the social fabric.
- Geographic extension of the social fabric to bring more of the population under the cover of that fabric.
- Integration of existing and new organizations so that the social fabric functions more efficiently.
Such organizational innovations occur all the time as a continuous process. New organizations emerge whenever a new developmental stage is reached and old organizations get modified to suit the new developmental requirements. The impact of these new organizations may be so powerful as to lead the people to believe that these new organizations are powerful in their own right. Actually it is society that throws up the new organizations required to achieve its objectives.
The direction that the developmental process takes is very much influenced by the awareness of the population as to what are the opportunities available in the society. Increasing awareness leads to greater aspiration which in turn releases greater energy that helps bring about greater accomplishment.
Read more about this topic: Social Development Theory
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“It’s fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“We find that the child who does not yet have language at his command, the child under two and a half, will be able to cooperate with our education if we go easy on the “blocking” techniques, the outright prohibitions, the “no’s” and go heavy on “substitution” techniques, that is, the redirection or certain impulses and the offering of substitute satisfactions.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)