socioogy and education

From ancient times, man felt the need to communicate and relate to each other, until today we interact as members of a family, residents of a neighborhood or a town, are members of a certain social, economic, religious or ethnic group, and citizens of a nation influenced by a certain group, so that sociology is born as a science having as precursors to Bruce J. Cohen, Ergo and the so-called French "father of sociology" Augusto Comte.

This arises in Europe in the twelfth century, as by 1838, where Auguste Comte gives name to this discipline, calling it first Social Physics and then Sociology (etymologically is a hybrid word that comes from the Latin soclus, meaning treaty or study of the society). It is a science because its purpose is to study the reality of social entities as they are, but not as they should be, the different forms of social organization and the relationships and institutions that have emerged to elaborate the laws of social development. In addition to being a science helps us to know and understand social reality, discovering those factors that, conjugated, determine human behavior; their methods, such as experimentation and case studies are good examples.

The first thoughts related to sociology are in the philosophical thoughts with the concern to know the origin of life and man, but it is until the last century when the concern arises to know society in a scientific way, also born as science in a moment of crisis, in favor of capitalism, as a prevailing social system at that time and against feudalism that was the social system, which was being buried by progress.

However, for many centuries thinkers from many parts of the world tried to explain about the functioning of society and since the nineteenth century being a conflict and violent century: wars, revolutions, riots and various conflicts that characterized this era, allowing new controversies of the participation of man and the social interaction that led to those events.

On the other hand, sociology also originates in the historical process of development of knowledge linked to social interaction which has been concentrated in a minority group of society, limiting knowledge. These groups that have held the knowledge have always been part of the power that has controlled and directed societies. Hence the phrase "knowledge is power".

In this regard, education appears within the social fact to pose a different perspective before the problems of knowledge and an agent of change. Emmile Durkheim, one of the fathers of sociology, is considered the initiator of the discipline with his works Education and sociology, Education: its nature, its function and pedagogical evolution in France, published after his death in 1917.

The sociology of education is characterized by being a special sociology, that is, it is one of the sociological sciences that deal with some of the concrete aspects of the social, being a science of education since its object of study is education and be an explanatory and descriptive discipline, essentially, in front of others that pretend or have as main objective to intervene in the educational process.

For all the above-mentioned educational fact, history has reserved an important space for analysis on the processes and dynamics of social development and their educational expressions. The vital development of humanity has had as an essential element education, this social practice has been expressed in different ways, according to the development of the history of man. As stated by Ovelar (1989), education as a social and historical process ... represents a set of phenomena, processes, practices, which condition the development of the acting and thinking subject in the context of a given reality. (p46)

 For Ovelar (1998) Education as a social process is an inseparable part of a social and historically determined totality and influenced by a series of factors of a political, economic, cultural, etc ... Indeed, educational processes form part of a network of social relationships that express the different interests and needs of social forces in a society and at a given historical moment

 In this logic of analysis, some definitions of the history of education, its object, its method and importance are considered. We do this thinking of the students of the teacher training school that day by day approaches this reality, but further on, we invite a discussion -though belated in context- about the role of the history of education and its historical significance in the understanding and governability of our current educational reality.