Role of an Individual in the Development of any Society | Citizenship Education and Community Engagement | Course code 8606 | B.Ed Solved Assignment

 

Evaluate the role of an individual in the development of any society?

Course: Citizenship Education and Community Engagement

Course code 8606

Level: B.Ed Solved Assignment

ANSWER 

Individual Status and his/her Role in Society

In sociology, individual social status is the honor or prestige attached to one's position in society (one's social position). It may also refer to a rank or position that one holds in a group, for example, son or daughter, playmate, pupil, etc. Social status, the position or rank of a  person or group within society, can be determined in two ways. One can earn his or her social status through one's own achievements, which is known as achieved status. Alternatively, one can be placed in the stratification system by his or her inherited position, which is called ascribed status. Ascribed statuses can also be defined as those that are fixed for an individual at birth. Ascribed statuses that exist in all societies include those based on sex, age, race ethnic group, and family background. For example, a person born into a wealthy family characterized by traits such as popularity, talents, and high values will have many expectations growing up.

Therefore, he or she is given and taught many social roles as he or she is socially positioned into a family becoming equipped with all these traits and characteristics. Achieved statuses meaning also what the individual acquires during his or her lifetime as a result of the exercise of knowledge, ability, skill, and/or perseverance. Occupation provides an example of status that may be either ascribed or achieved, it can be achieved by one gaining the right knowledge and skill to become socially positioned into a higher position in that job; building a person’s social identity within the occupation.

A  role or a  social role is a  set of connected behaviors,  rights, and obligations as conceptualized by actors in a social situation. It is an expected or free or continuously changing behavior and may have a given individual social status or social position. Individuality is not the impersonal and mechanistic thing that the  State treats as an “individual". The individual is not merely the result of heredity and environment, of cause and effect. He is that and a great deal more, a great deal else. The living man cannot be defined; he is the fountainhead of all life and all values; he is not a part of this or of that; he is a whole, an individual whole, a growing, changing, yet always constant whole. For understanding the individual role in society it seems better to highlight the role of family, school, society, and individual which are affecting each other.

1.  Human family protects the young ones, thus illustrating the fact that the species comes into existence for more than procreation.

2.  Society developing the weaker members is an extension of the role of the family.

3.  School offers organized education.

4.  Family and society precede and succeed the school in offering institutionalized cultural education and education that is not yet fully organized.

5.  Society creates the individual and submits to his leading it.

6.  The final aim of the individual is to create a society where every individual is fully evolved.

7.  Family trains by social authority, school by the authority of knowledge, and society by its subconscious wisdom.

8.  In his growth the individual moves from physically inherited habits to opinion and attitude and finally by his own motive.

9.  Opinion of the mind and attitude of the vital are superseded by the motive of the being.

10.  Society fulfills itself when it discovers the wisdom, that it developed in the

individual

 

BEd Course Code 8606| Role of an Individual in the Development of any Society | Citizenship Education and Community Engagement | Solved Assignment | aiou

Q. 1   Evaluate the role of an individual in the development of any society.

BEd Course Code 8606| Role of an Individual in the Development of any Society | Citizenship Education and Community Engagement  | Solved Assignment | aiou

Answer:

The human being and the group. The problem of man cannot be solved scientifically without a clear  statement  of  the  relationship  between  man  and  society,  as  seen  in  the  primary collectivity—the family, the play or instruction group, the production team and other types of formal or informal collectivity. In the family the individual abandons some of his specific features to become a member of the whole. The life of the family is related to the division of labour according to sex and age, the carrying on of husbandry, mutual assistance in everyday life, the intimate life of man and wife, the perpetuation of the race, the upbringing of thechildren and also various moral, legal and psychological relationships. The family is a crucial instrument for the development of personality. It is here that the child first becomes involved in social life, absorbs its values and standards of behaviour, its ways of thought, language and certain value orientations. It is this primary group that bears the major responsibility to society. Its first duty is to the social group, to society and humanity. Through the group the child, as he grows older, enters society. Hence the decisive role of the group. The influence of one person on another is as a rule extremely limited; the collectivity as a whole is the main educational force. Here the psychological factors are very important. It is essential that a person should feel himself part of a group at his own wish, and that the group should voluntarily accept him, take in his personality.

Everybody performs certain functions in a group. Take, for example, the production team. Here people are joined together by other interests as well as those of production; they exchange certain political, moral, aesthetic, scientific and other values. A group generates public opinion, it sharpens and polishes the mind and shapes the character and will. Through the group  a  person  rises  to  the level of a  personality,  a  conscious subject  of historical creativity. The group is the first shaper of the personality, and the group itself is shaped by society.

 The unity of man and society. A person's whole intellectual make-up bears the clear imprint ofthe life of society as a whole. All his practical activities are individual expressions of the historically formed social practice of humanity. The implements that he uses have in their form a function evolved by a society which predetermines the ways of using them. When tackling any job, we all have to take into account what has already been achieved before us. The wealth and complexity of the individual's social content are conditioned by the diversity of his links with the social whole, the degree to which the various spheres of the life of society have been assimilated and refracted in his consciousness and activity. This is why the level of individual development is an indicator of the level of development of society, and vice versa. But the individual does not dissolve into society. He retains his unique and independent individuality and makes his contribution to the social whole: just as society itself shapes human beings, so human beings shape society.

The individual is a link in the chain of the generations. His affairs are regulated not only by himself, but also by the social standards, by the collective reason or mind. The true token of individuality is the degree to which a certain individual in certain specific historical conditions has absorbed the essence of the society in which he lives.

Consider, for instance, the following historical fact. Who or what would Napoleon Bonaparte have been if there had been no French Revolution? It is difficult or perhaps even impossible to reply to this question. But one thing is quite clear—he would never have become a great general and certainly not an emperor. He himself was well aware of his debt and in his declining years said, "My son cannot replace me. I could not replace myself. I am the creature of circumstances."[1] It has long been acknowledged that great epochs give birth to great men. What tribunes of the people were lifted by the tide of events of the French Revolution.

Mirabeau, Marat, Robespierre, Danton. What young, some times even youthful talents that had  remained  dormant  among  the  people  were  raised  to  the  heights  of  revolutionary, military, and organisational activity by the Great October Socialist Revolution. It is sometimes said that society carries the individual as a river carries a boat. This is a pleasant simile, but not exact. An individual does not float with the river; he is the turbulently flowing river itself. 

The events of social life do not come about by themselves; they are made. The great and small paths of the laws of history are blazed by human effort and often at the expense ofhuman blood. The laws of history are not charted in advance by superhuman forces; they are made by people, who then submit to their authority as something that is above the individual.