Emile Durkheim

  Emile Durkheim
"Father of Sociology"
Birth:
Emile Durkheim was born April 15, 1858.
Death:
He died November 15, 1917.
Early Life and Education:
Durkheim was born in France. He came from a long line of devout French
Jews; his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been rabbis. He
began his education in a rabbinical school, but at an early age, decided not to
follow in his family's footsteps and switched schools, realizing that he
preferred to study religion from an agnostic standpoint as opposed to being
indoctrinated.
Career and Later Life:
Durkheim became interested in a scientific approach to society very early on in
his career, which meant the first of many conflicts with the French academic
system, which had no social science curriculum at the time. Durkheim found
humanistic studies uninteresting, turning his attention from psychology and
philosophy to ethics and eventually, sociology.
 Work of Emile Durkheim
Functionalism

Functionalism emphasizes a societal equilibrium. If something

happens to disrupt the order and the flow of the system, society
must adjust to achieve a stable state. According to Durkheim,
society should be analyzed and described in terms of functions.
Society is a system of interrelated parts where no one part can
function without the other. These parts make up the whole of
society. If one part changes, it has an impact on society as a whole.

For example, the state provides public education for

children. The family of the children pays taxes, which the
state uses for public education. The children who learn
from public education go on to become law-abiding and
working citizens, who pay taxes to support the state.
* Durkheim’s Perspective on Education
Durkheim argued that ‘to become attached to society,
the child must feel in it something that is real, alive
and powerful, which dominates the person and to
which he owes the best part of himself’ (Durkheim,
quoted in Haralambos 2013). 

School is the only institution capable of preparing

children for membership in wider society – it does
this by enforcing a set of rules which are applied to all
children, and children learn to interact with all other
children on the basis of these shared rules – it thus
acts like a society in miniature.