Social institutions are structures and mechanisms of social order that serve to fulfill the needs of society to control and regulate behavior. In general, social institutions are not placed but rather relationships, obligations, and functions. Most importantly, institutions are crucial to society because their main purpose is to socialize the group of people within that institution. Other important functions of social institutions include controlling individuals by defining social values, providing stability by organizing society and its people, and defining social roles. Over the past few days, I realized that family and education are the major social institutions that govern my life. On Thursday of last week, my mother decided to visit me …show more content…
Education as a social institution helps develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes in order the create understanding, competent members of society. As a college student, the main purpose of education is to prepare myself for my occupational roles by learning from experts in the field. This inherently causes social stratification as some majors/occupations especially STEM as compared to others such as women`s studies and Jewish studies which results in an unfair allocation of funds. For example, I realized that the genome sciences have an elegant, glass building while the women`s studies department is located on the third floor of a rundown building. As a STEM major who enjoys these benefits, I believe that these differences can be explained by the structural-functionalist theory of stratification which states that the those higher up in society (the departments who get more funding) are more important to society as they are needed more. Therefore, in this case, the ascribed characteristics of merit and success associated with STEM majors as compared to humanities results in the inequity in university funding. Moreover, as a honors student at UNC, I am able to have smaller class sizes with more group discussion. The group discussion helps facilitate interpersonal relationships by showing how to properly treat peers. The Honors students, however, have been socialized by the university to internalize the social inequalities driven by the categorization of students. Comparing my honors classes to my regular classes, I have noticed that the Honor`s teachers not only have more personal relationships with the students but also put more effort into teaching the course. Therefore, having the merits and grades allows some students to receive better a better