What Is the Role of School in Society?

Producer of Citizens

Everyone in our society goes through schooling; the vast majority experience schooling in a group social setting, in a school building with teachers. These schools are the place where society focuses its energy to produce The Educated Person, a virtuous person who will work to benefit the society that produced them. This task, the production of citizens--whose goal is both the reproduction of the positive elements of current social life and the mending of its negative elements--is the primary role of school in society.

Welcome and Community

Since school is a place within society where it focuses its energies toward bettering itself through creating citizens, the school is also to be a place where all of society's members come to engage in this positive process, and to enjoy the fruits of each other's company. Citizens gather to promote Good Learning among the students, to observe and encourage Good Teaching among the teachers, and to ponder What Is Worth Knowing. In so doing, they co-create and further the community, a smaller version of the society whose members know and care for one another. To build and foster community is the secondary, but still vital, role of school in society.