SOCIOLOGY STUDY AS AN AID TO TEACHERS.

This article focuses on educational sociology. In the teachers colleges it is customary to think in terms of educational sociology, which may be defined roughly as the application of sociology to education. The basic courses, ordinarily, are introductory sociology and social problems, or their equivalent. Comparatively few courses now carry educational sociology labels. To get a true picture of the situation, it is necessary to broaden the scope of our definition so as to include all elements primarily of a sociological nature which have a direct bearing on the educative process. What seems significant, in this connection, is that "education" courses are steadily increasing their "sociological" content, while shifting their emphasis from the study of individual differences as such to the effects of the social environment upon children as a factor in these differences. Many students are confused in their thinking about social issues by reason of the barrage of propaganda to which they are exposed through the mass media of communication. A major source of the difficulty is that professional propagandists often popularize common sense conclusions about social phenomena with the deliberate intention of misleading the public. Unless he learns to discriminate regarding his sources of information, the mentally immature student may therefore turn out to be a "social illiterate" as an adult. Since no truly intelligent thinking can take place until the facts are at hand, he needs to study propaganda analysis as a means of separating truth from falsehood, whether it be in relation to advertising, economics, or politics.