The topic of this week is education, and it includes an analysis of the history, purpose, formats, trends, and sociological perspectives on this subject. Dog and Erdoes’ (1999) article “Civilize them with a stick”, deals directly and theoretically with this week’s topic. This article concerns the research which Dog and Erdoes conducted about an Indian student’s account of her experience in an old-fashioned mission school at St. Francis. The student describes the struggles she faces at the Catholic facility, with a focus on how the teachers used caning as a method of “civilizing” Native Americans. The research method the authors employed is an autobiography, which involves collecting oral or written materials (such as personal interviews, narratives, and stories) providing useful social and individualized contexts to investigate (Walker, 2017). The results of the findings of this narrative inquiry were that schools are the agents of control and socialization as they can facilitate the assimilation of racial-ethnic groups.
To obtain the results, the investigators explored the concept of education by examining how schools serve as the agents of social control by absorbing individuals and ethnic populations into the cultural traditions of the dominant group. They drew on the personal narratives of an Indian student to explore how schools execute their social control role. The young girl’s stories demonstrate how she and her family members (sister, mother, and grandmother) were “kidnapped”, isolated from their old traditional Sioux family, and coerced to adopt the dominant culture. Boarding schools proved to be more effective in social control. For example, the nuns employed stringent and torturous tactics such as beating, withdrawal of food, and separation from parents for even years. These austere tactics aided in “resocializing” many Native Americans into the predominant white society.
In conclusion, one of the most prominent roles of education in society is social control. Schools may enforce it through formal and informal sanctions such as indoctrination, shame, criticism, and coercion. As depicted in Dog and Erdoes’ article, educational institutions further the goals of social control by socializing students from ethnic minority groups into behaving in ways that are perceived to be acceptable in the dominant culture.
References
Dog, M., & Erdoes, R. (1999). Civilize them with a stick. In S.S. Ferguson (Eds.), Mapping the social landscape (pp. 554-562). SAGE Publications.
Walker, A. (2017). Critical autobiography as research. The Qualitative Report, 22(7), 1896-1908. Web.