Education nowadays plays a very pivotal role in the development of social integration and solidarity. What we never see about education is how it becomes efficient, considering the diversed fields that it offers and the diversed areas that each field specializes.

According to Durkheim’s “Division of Labor in Society” both produces solidarity and efficiency in society, which are both needed for a society to function well. This concept results from the interdependence of the society’s parts to each other as they carry out their tasks. Interdependence means that there is the dependence of each aspect of the society or the institution to each other. The loss of one means conflict.

Other articles say that division of labor is the segregation of tasks to different workers or people in order to come up with an outstanding output as the process is being actuated.

If we try looking at the school where we go to, specialization on different fields is applied. There is a particular person teaching a specific subject that he or she masters well. All your subjects are divided to different people to make sure that everyone gets a share in the division of labor. When you look at the bureaucratic component of the university or the school, same thing happens. There is the president of the university who carries out a particular job, followed by the vice president and then so on and so forth. Even the janitor or the vendor in a university plays their roles that may affect the whole system if not performed well. This just proves that division of labor is also applicable in universities as a depiction of a society in a smaller scale.

One of the advantages of this is that there is the assurance that a specific task is carried out well, because a person assigned to do it has nothing to think of, except that

part that he or she has to play. Another is the fact that it encourages solidarity which is needed by a society to avoid conflicts. The consequences of the division of labor in school is that, in case one person’s not able to attend a particular meting, nobody will be there to help or replace him or her because there is specialization, which means that a person missing cannot be replaced by another who holds another specialty. True enough, problems may arise. There will also be an increased amount of dependency among workers as the process continues over a period of time.  As the functionalist theory states, the society, without the proper work of its interrelated part, would fail to meet its objectives of going smoothly. Moreover, the people, being part of the system will never develop their sense of flexibility because they are already drowned with their roles that may alter the whole process if not given much attention to. Also, a failure that the university experiences would not be thought of as a responsibility of a particular individual because of the interdependence that they have with each other.

Although Emile Durkheim’s theory discusses and touches some aspects in education, he still failed to dwell much more on the specificity of the division of labor done in universities and the parts that students play in the success of this kind of institution. There is a very few discussion with how the students participate in his concept of the division of labor.

References

Durkheim, Emile (1893). The Division of Labour in Society.