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DECRIPTION OF THE MODULE

Items Description of the Module

Subject Name Sociology

Paper Name Classical Sociological Theory

Module Name/Title Moral Education of Emile Durkheim

Pre Requisites Historicism, Religious Morality and Secular Morality

Objectives Examine the educational system leads to morality in the

society.

Key words Education, Morality, Society, Discipline, Attachment.

Autonomy, Socialization, Pedagogy.

MODULE STRUCTURE

Moral Education of Emile Durkheim A discussion on moral education, the perspective of

Emile Durkheim understanding of socialization.

Team Details

Role Name Affiliation

Principal Investigator Prof Sujata Patel Dept. of Sociology,

University of Hyderabad

Paper Coordinator Vishal Jadhav Dept. of Sociology

Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth,

Content Writer Vishal Jadhav Dept. of Sociology

Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth,

Content Reviewer MT Joseph Dept. of Sociology

University of Mumbai

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CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

Moral Education

Emile Durkheim

Introduction

Emile Durkheim’s moral education provides an important outlook for human moral development.

Morality is a social phenomenon. Moral education plays a major role in once life to achieve highest

goals. Moral education gives a vibrant venture to sociological concepts. Durkheim mentions three

elements for once morality: discipline, attachment and autonomy or self –determination. Last

element, autonomy only exists at a rational level. Education is social phenomena and it is a process

of socialization. Pedagogy is practical theory, which focuses directly towards morality. It is a

responsibility of a teacher to provide moral behavior to his students. The group of people

collectively participates in educational process. People always relate to one another in the society

and broaden their horizons. Socialization is the way to moral education. Through morality, we

communicate to one another in a better way which very one feel accepted and wanted. From the

origin of human life to till today, people try to live better life. It is not only the theoretical

understanding of morality but also practical implication play a major role in Durkheim ideas.

Moral education is the process of internalizing of morality in the new generation.

Emile Durkheim intensely believed in education as well as moral education. The education is the

one of means to re-construct or to reform the society. He established theory of education as a

source of morality. In moral education Durkheim, explained three elements on which morality is

constructed; discipline, attachment, and autonomy. Discipline restraints egoistic tendency and

impulses, function to mediate aggressive self-centered behavior. Attachment is the commitment to

a social group and autonomy is self-accountability and for responsibility for once actions. The

relationship between these threes builds the morality. Education helps us to go deeper in to once

life in order build the moral life.

His works on moral education gave the source of socialization. In this work, I try to open up his

concept of moral education and he as a sociologist and educationalist in providing new thought

away from religious morality.

Education

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In sociology, education is the very important field where socialization process takes place.1 Education has

brought significant changes to the society. Lester Frank Ward, the first president of the American

sociological society, thought of education as a great equalizer.2 He believed that through educating young

generation able to eliminate inequality in the society. In other way, education is the total experience of

infant, child and young adult as preparation for full membership of adult society.3 Today the idea that every

child has a right to an education that enables him or her to read, writes, and make an independent choice is

widely accepted. Formal institution – schools, colleges and universities provide basic knowledge for student

through train professors, teachers, and lectures. Education maintains the value consensus and social

solidarity in the society.

Moral Education

Etymologically, the term “moral” comes from Latin “mos” which means customs or habit, and it

translation of Greek ethos, which means roughly the same thing and is the origin of the term ethics.

For many countries and religions in the world, “moral education” refers to character education

or education for morality. Most thinkers, educational practitioners and parents acknowledge that

children are born to this world helplessly and need to be care and guidance for their future career.

More specially, children need to learn how to live harmoniously in society. Historically, the

mission of school has being to develop in the young both intellectual and the moral virtues. The

moral virtues such as honesty, responsibility, and respect for the others, are the domain of moral

education. Moral education helps children to acquire virtues or moral habits to live better life and

at the same time become productive, contributing members of their communities. The moral

education should contribute not only to the individuals, but also to the whole human community.

According to Durkheim, moral education plays a great role to transmit its culture tradition for

generation to the next through norms and values in the society.4

A Brief History of Moral Education

Every existing community has a moral code and it is the responsibility of the adults to instill this

code in the heart and mind of its young. Every society expected the school to contribute positively

1 M Francis Abraham, Contemporary Sociology: introduction to Concepts and Theories,. (New York: Oxford

University press, 2006), 181. 2 Ibid. 3 Arnold W. Green, Sociology: An analysis of life in Modern Society, 4th Ed. (Tokyo: Japan, Tosho Printing

Co.LTD 196), 499. 4 Abraham, Contemporary Sociology: introduction to Concepts and Theories, 182.

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to the moral education of the children. This was the prime concern of the school for this new digital

world. In England Puritans, believed moral code resides in the Bible so it is imperative that the

children to be taught to read the Bible. They thought inability to read the scripture leads children

to be prey to the snares of the Satan. During colonial period, religion played the major role in the

moral education. The nineteen-century schooling promoted for both secular and moral education.

Abraham Lincoln wrote “I desire to see the time when education, and by it means morality,

sobriety, enterprise and industry shall become much more general than at present”. During this

period there was also a growing reaction against organized religion. Intellectual leaders and writes

were deeply influence by the ideas of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich

Nietzsche. They try to separate morality from the religion and the state. Karl Marx saw religion as

an enemy of a socialist revolutionary state and opium for people.5This trend increased after the

World War II and further intensified by what appeared to be large cracks in the nation’s moral

consciousness in the late 1960s.

During the twentieth century, many schools attempt to ignore moral dimension from education.

Result of this achievement score began to decline, discipline and behavior problem increased, and

voices were raise accusing the schools of teaching, secular humanism. As the sane time educators

were encouraged to address the moral concerns of students, using two approaches value

classification and cognitive developmental moral education. Here comes the Emile Durkheim as a

major functionalist of education to transmit society through morals and values.6

Emile Durkheim was a French Sociologist and Educationalist.

Durkheim was a person who trusts in education and possibility of changing moral education.

Education is the mean to change the social structure and the reform the society. Therefore, he

builds up the moral on the base of education. In educational world, he found himself as a leading

pedagogical figure. All his life he was deeply, immersed in the teaching profession at various

levels. Unlike the situation in Britain and the United States, French civil service based in Paris

controlled formal education in France. It was centralized and influence by the government in

power. In 1884, state of France began to support new system of publication and secular

5 Abraham, Contemporary Sociology: introduction to Concepts and Theories, 182 6 M Haralambos and R M Heald: Sociology Themes and Perspective (New York: Oxford university press, 1980),

173.

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education.7According to Durkheim, fundamental duty of the state is lay down in this very fact in

calling individual to a moral way of life through education.8 Local authority has no right for

administration. In this situation, Durkheim selected as someone important for the future of the

education in France. To enhance his career, they sent him to German under the leading

psychologists and philosophers. He was happy about his creative-work, mission as that of

developing the science of sociology, which he was convinced has so much to offer to the academic

world and to society in general.

Moral Education and Durkheim

He starts his book “moral education” with; ‘I propose to talk about moral education as an

educator. There for, I ought to give you my concept of education at the very outset. He sees

education as an art. Art indeed, made up of habits, practices and organized skills. According to

him, morality is social phenomena and it relative to the needs of structures of particular societies

and it open to systematic observation.’(Durkheim, 1957;1)

The internalization of social morals through education and socialization is the paramount of his

works. He explains discipline to restrain passion, a sense of autonomy to enable action, and a sense

of obligation or devotion to society. Durkheim believes that society is the source of morality:

therefore, he also believed that society could be reform, especially through moral education.

According to him, morality has three components:

Discipline: a sense of authority that resist egoistic impulses.

Attachment: to society since society is the source of morality.

Autonomy: a sense of individual responsibility for our action.

Discipline

Discipline is an aspect of morality of Durkheim. Moral discipline is good in itself. Discipline has

social usefulness in and of itself, quite a part of the behavior. It describes social life as a one of the

form of organized life. All living organization pre-supposes determinate rules and to neglect them

7 Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim His Life and Work (New York: Harper &Row Publication, 1972), 109. 8 Emile Durkheim, Ethics and Civil Morals, Tr. Cornelia Brookfield, (Bristol: Burleigh Press, 1957), 69.

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is to invite serious disturbances in society. True social institutions are direct towards society’s

interest not individual as such. On the other hand, if such institute threaten and disorganized the

individual life then its invites disorder in the society.

In school, the child must interact with other members of the school community in terms of a fixed

set of rules. Thus, Durkheim argues that it is by respecting the school rules that the child learn to

respect rules in generals, that he develop habit of self-control. It is the first initiation in to the duty.

Serious life has now begun.9

Durkheim clearly saw his own country was going through a declination of spiritual discipline.10

Therefore, it needed effective emotional morality, which will be appropriate and required through

education. His emphasis was to stimulate and nourish devoting oneself for individual discipline.

Spirit of Discipline can be achieving through moral education.11 Discipline determines, fixes,

regularizes, operates, conduct, society in a better way. Obligations are must be follow with

regularity and duties should be genuine. Genuine obligations are daily once and performing them

daily help to life enhancing.12

Moral requirement is not merely another name for personal habits but it should come from

authority. Authority has an extremely significant function to act independently. Authority is

nothing else than morality. There are two elements: The meaning of regularity and of authority

constitute but two aspects of two single complexes. State of being is to be describe as the spirit of

discipline. Moral discipline present to us as good-in- itself so we have to obey them. To be is to

act, live and any reduction of life is diminution of being. Discipline for Durkheim is first element

of morality. He admits that to the liberal individualist. Durkheim suggests that discipline is

essentially positive.

Discipline helps us to avoid violence against human nature, to limit man to place obstacle in the

path of his free development. This is not to prevent man from fulfilling his desires. We see this

limitation is a condition of our happiness and moral health. Man in fact made for life in a

determined, limited environment, however extended it may be: the sum total of his life activities

9 M Haralambos and R M Heald: Sociology Themes and Perspective, 174. 10 Robert A Jones, the Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism (Cambridge: University Press, 1999), 97. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid.

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is aimed at adopting it to his need. To live is to put ourselves in harmony with the physical world

around us and with the social world of which we are members. The goals we normally seek are

equally delimited and we are not free to transcend our limits without placing our selves at odds

with nature. At each moment of time our hopes, our feelings of all sort must be within the bounds.

The function of discipline is to guarantee such restraint. If such necessary limits are lacking, if the

moral forces surrounding us, can no longer contain or moderate our passion, human conduct loses

itself in the void.

Discipline is useful not only in the interest of the society but for the welfare of the individual

himself. Individual functions are not less important.13 By means of discipline, we learn the control

of our desire without which man could not achieve happiness. It helps us to develop our

personality. The rules teachers us to restrain and master ourselves, is a means of emancipation and

freedom. Above all, it is essential to teach the children this wholesome self-control. Education

helps the child to understand that there are limits based on nature of things that is to say in the

nature of each of us

Attachment to Social Group

Our moral life begins where the collective life begins or in other words that we are moral beings

only to the extent that we are social beings. Humans must still have an interest in linking himself

with society .Man is invited in the society to become other than himself. In reality, the one who

link one’s self with another being is always merge and the attachment goes to the point of sacrifice.

There is no subordinating oneself from other but mutual self-realization play a major role in it.

Whenever the individual disassociate himself from collective goals in order to seek only his own

interest, we see in the society suicide rates is goes up. The man is vulnerable to self –destruction

the more he is detached from the collectivity that is to say more self centered his life. Suicide is

about three times more frequent among bachelors than among married people.

According to Durkheim to maintain a society, need to acquire its member’s sufficient degree of

homogeneity. The education perpetually supports the child from the beginning to develop

collective life demands.14 Without these essential similarities co-operation, social solidarity, social

13 Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim His Life and Work, 113. 14 Haralambos and Heald: Sociology Themes and Perspective, 173.

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life itself would be impossible. A vital task of a society unites individuals into a united whole or

in a other words creating a social solidarity.15 This involved commitment and attachment to society

a sense of belonging and a feeling that the social unit is more important than the individual is.

Durkheim argues that to become attach to society the child must feel in it something that is real,

alive, powerful which dominates the person and to which he owes the best part of himself.16History

of education provides link between the individual and society. Through this, the child develops a

sense of commitment to the social group.

Man possesses all the less of himself when he possesses only himself. It is because man is in large

part a product of society. It is from society that there comes whatever is best in us, all the higher

forms of our behavior. Language plays a major role in the society. Society transmits the massage

from one generation to the next. Language is not merely a system of words: it has a particular

mentality that of the society which speaks. It expresses its own temperaments, and provides

foundation for individual mentality. Religion plays a great part on language. It has served for many

people as the foundation of collective life. All religious ideas are social in their origin; on the other

hand, they remain the pre-eminent from the public and the private thought for the vast majority of

people.17 Today they say that science has replaced the religion. Science is the part of religion and

it has religion origins and it work of the society. If people have lived isolated from one another

science would have been no use to them.

Society is beyond us it constitute the possible goals of moral conduct. This goal is beyond our own

individual goals, we cannot seek to achieve it without elevating ourselves in the same measure

beyond ourselves- without surpassing our individual nature. Great historical fingers those who

seems to us infinitely greater than all others are not the great artists, or the men of profound

wisdom, statesmen but those who achieved, greatest moral triumphs: Moses, Socrates, Buddha,

Jesus, Mohammed and Luther.

Autonomy or Self- Determination

15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid, 475.

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Autonomy is the state of mind of moral agent. Autonomy is freely willed, freely accepted, this free

acceptance is nothing else than an enlighten acceptance.18

Autonomy or self –determinism is the other concept Durkheim employed in his lecture on moral

education. This concept represents another aspect of morality. To act morally is not enough –above

all, it is no longer enough –to respect discipline and to be committed to a group.19 Beyond this we

must have knowledge as clear and complete awareness as possible of the reason of our

conduct…Autonomy does not spring from escaping collective influence or from a total immersion

in collective influences such that society justifications becomes the individuals.

We are not purely rational beings: we are also emotional creatures. Temperament is the quality by

which persons are distinguished from one another; my joys are mine alone and only reflect my

personal temperament. Obligations are essential element of every moral aspect. Our whole nature

has a need to be constrained, bounded, and restricted –our intellectual and emotional nature. In

reality, reason is not a transcendent faculty: it is part of nature and consequently is subject to the

law of nature. The universe is limited and all limitation pre-supposes some focus, which do the

limiting.

We have complete knowledge of things and that each of us has this knowledge .the world is not

outside from us: it has become the part of us since we have within us system of symbolic

representation that adequately expresses it. Everything in physical world is represented in our

consciousness by an idea .These ideas are scientific -that is to say, distinct and clearly defined-we

can manipulate them.

10. Transformation of moral education

According to Durkheim there is no good and bad in general. Morality is the specific living

conditions. He says that “However, morality of undeveloped society is not ours. They are

essentially religious”. He wants to provide the scientific basis for a new moral order .The moral

education, which find in religious beliefs have to be transform in to a secular moral. The duty can

be serving as example for the moral element. According to him, both religious bond morality and

18 Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim His Life and Work, 114. 19 Ibid, 116.

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new secular morality lead to a duty. In religious moral duty is to serve god, and secular morality

duties towards fellow- human being.

Durkheim lived in a time when secularization of the school in France had taken place i.e. the

government had taken it over from the religious domain (church). The need was to replace moral

ideas with rational and scientific views that were required for the proper functioning of society.

One of the most important interests of Durkheim was the new social order in the modern society,

which he called organic solidarity. In the absence of religious morality, he tries to replace a secular

and rational morality. He deems it to be a vital new morality for the new generation.

There are two stages of socialization that takes place during childhood: first takes place within the

family, second during the elementary school, when the child begins to leave the family. Second

stage according to Durkheim is the critical moment in the formation of the moral education- the

socialized citizen so to say. During this period the foundation of a society specified morality has

to be laid that will facilitate the entry of the children into mainstream society. Durkheim argues

that: we have committed ourselves to provide in our schools a completely rational and moral

education in excluding all principles derived from religion.

Function of Education

To influence child, morality is not to nature in him a particular virtue. It is to develop and constitute

completely to the particular circumstances of human life. There is a major problem in our schools

that we lack influential teachers to teach morality. The schoolmaster was the secular successor to

the priest, deriving his authority from the wider morality, which is representing in the school: like

the priest.20 In order to discover meaning of morality we have to look inside ourselves with a little

care. Morality for some for idea of utility; for others the nation of perception and for the still others

it is a concept of human dignity.

All that behavior conforms to pre-established rules. The domain of morality is the domain of duty.

It is up to the person to see how it applies to given situation. Morality consists of a system of rules

and action that pre-determined conduct. Most moralities indeed consider morality as entirely

20 Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim His Life and Work, 114.

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contained in a very general unique formula. Sometimes we say that morality resides entirely in the

individual conscience.

Morality is not something general but very definite rules. It is like so many molds with limiting

boundaries in to which we must pour our behavior. We do not have to construct these rules at the

movement of actions by deducing them from some general principles; they already exist, they are

already made. For Durkheim, discipline is never an end in itself but it is necessary for freedom,

good of the individual and society. The society can have their pride not in being the greatest and

wealthiest but in being the most just the best organized and in processing the best moral values.21

Conclusion

Durkheim saw that of the difficulties in teaching morals to the young was that of authority. The

Catholic Church appeal to the teaching of the divine church, to a divine founder and protestant to

the Bible as a written account of Gods revelation and in all these instances refer an authority

beyond the present world this is not available in the teaching of Durkheim. He was convinced he

has solved the problem by asserting that the authority for such behavior was in society itself. It

was severe weakness in the Durkheim’s thoughts. For him morality has to have reasons and these

can be abstract. Children cannot absorb logical Kantianism, which stands at the foundation of

philosophical humanistic ethics. Further, it has to be admitted that Durkheim’s relativism logically

leads to what today is called post-modernism. According to Durkheim, we need a rational and

moral education system. It is entirely possible and it is at the basis of science.

It is admirable the way Durkheim connects the social with the moral world. Today we need a moral

order or a normative order to ensure dignity to humans across the globe irrespective of one’s class,

caste, race, gender etc. Moral life and intellectual development are the two side of a coin. We

cannot separate them from each other. Durkheim did not believe that there was a basic conflict of

interest among the owners, managers and workers with an industry. For him such conflict occurred

only in structure with a lack of integrative morality.

At the same time, I would like to remark some points that Durkheim highlighted very much

regarding moral education. He tries to separate morality from religious domain. What so ever

21 Ibid, 75.

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origin of moral life based on religion atmosphere, there for we cannot completely neglect its

origin? Socialization takes place in the smallest organization call family. Child tries to pick up

moral values from his immediate society. It is a responsibility not only education section but also

in family domain. Adults can also acquire these moral tools by joining occupational associations

not only the children in education. After all religion is a social institution that inculcates moral and

values and feeds the societal normative order.