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:
“Statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, much legislation is moral legislation because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres of life.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)
“In England, I was quite struck to see how forward the girls are made—a child of 10 years old, will chat and keep you company, while her parents are busy or out etc.—with the ease of a woman of 26. But then, how does this education go on?—Not at all: it absolutely stops short.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)