Distinctions between educating and socializing have been made a number of ways, and the two have also been treated by some people more or less as synonyms. Usually, the distinctions hold socialization to be the process of preparing someone to be a competent social agent within a particular society, and education to be something in addition to this, which might include being able to reflect critically on one’s particular society or might include a range of more or less refined cultural attainments whose value to the individual might seem clear, but whose value to society at large is less clear.
Underlying most of the distinctions is an implication though it has not perhaps been put so starkly – that anything which may reasonably be called socializing has implicit in it the impulse and tendency to make people more alike, and the contrasting impulse and tendency in education are to make people more distinct. Whether one considers the distinction important to make or not seems connected to what one encompasses within one’s idea of society.” If one’s idea of society is so encompassing that all aspects of all members of society’s lives and their meanings are included within it then education will likely be seen as only a part of a more general socializing process or as a synonym for socialization.
If one’s idea of society includes mainly a set of economic, industrial, legal, political, commercial transactions and a set of relationships determined by them, yet holds distinct a cultural world of knowledge, understanding, and appreciation that provides particular pleasures which transcend the relationships and transactions of particular societies at particular times, then one will likely want to distinguish initiation into “society” by “socialization” and initiation into the cultural realm by “education.” One may say perhaps that the importance or otherwise of the distinction turns on one’s response to what has been called the “problem of the culture-roundedness of meaning”. Socializing and educating have been distinguished in a variety of ways, sometimes quite casually and vaguely.
To try to uncover the main grounds for the distinction it may be useful to begin with the strong distinction suggested above: Socializing activities are those whose aim is to make people more alike; educating aims to make people more distinct. The first great socializer, then, is learning a language. Those who share a language share a considerable part of their view of the world, which is encoded at a level of presupposition in the terms, distinctions, grammatical structure given in that language. Teaching people to be functionally literate is, in this form of the distinction, to socialize, in that it teaches conventions which are shared by everyone who aims to communicate by writing.
Teaching to write with style, talk with eloquence, and read with critical awareness is, then, to educate. Such things stress individual distinctness from the basic conformities which make communication possible; they stress distinctness from the current and conventional forms. A homogeneity in conventional forms of expression serves social utility; there is less complexity, less ambiguity, less likelihood of misunderstandings and also less richness and diversity.
Writing with elegance and reading with discrimination is not a matter of social utility. It is, however, a matter of educational importance. In schools, then, we might expect all activities to have both socializing and educating aspects – the degree of which will vary from activity to activity. In wood work or metal work, for example, learning to use tools is a matter of socializing. Learning to use them with elegance, with individual style, and seeking there through an aesthetic quality in one’s work above and beyond what utility requires, is an educational matter.
In learning, say, Greek there is a level of learning conventions of letters and basic expression which involve a socialization to that language, but the aim of fluency and subtlety in understanding a different view of life and the world is an educational matter. Usually, in schools the distinction can be made more easily and clearly. Those activities which are engaged in so that people can get on more easily in society at large–can get jobs, can fulfil the basic responsibilities of citizenship, parenthood, and so on – will tend to be mainly a matter of socialization.
Those activities which lead to personal cultivation will tend to be mainly educational. We may also distinguish between educating and socializing activities by the grounds on which we justify their place in the curriculum. Socializing activities are justified on grounds of social utility, educational activities on the grounds of cultivation of individuals. Both are worthwhile. The former are worthwhile because they are the homogenizing activities that Durkheim pointed out were necessary to keep a society working the latter are worthwhile for the refined pleasures they provide us individually.
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