Terms Of Social Development example essay topic

George Herbert Mead is known best for his reform activities, his social psychology course, and his many articles on social and educational questions of the day. Although Mead wrote numerous papers and articles for academic journals, he never produced a written work that demonstrated the great extent to which his thought formed an innovative, systematic whole. Of the founding fathers of American Pragmatism, Mead remains the least known or appreciated. For this, Mead is to blame himself. Mead accepted middle-American values of volunteerism, self-discipline, practical action, and an optimistic attitude toward social progress. He viewed these as incorporated into the development of American democracy.

For Mead, democracy was not just a political system, but an overall emergent pattern of self-identity and social interaction. He felt that the development and growth of democracy as a social advance, but that it was not yet completed. Mead believed that democracy entailed a society in which all individuals were united in the active search of personal goals while at the same time working together to produce a greater shared good. In Meads philosophy, volunteerism and self discipline were viewed as related to democracy.

He saw volunteerism as an ability of persons to clarify their goals while understanding their place in society, an ability to choose their own actions while engaged in a process of cooperation with others. Although democratic cooperation thus incorporates a sense of individual abilities and goals, it also requires self-discipline. He believed that in democracy, social control arises from the mass of the population itself, rather than from being coerced by an upper estate or caste system. Mead asserted that external coercive and punitive controls were adverse to the fulfillment of the democratic ideals of a self-governing population. To Mead, democracy also implied an atmosphere favorable to the increase of scientific knowledge.

He saw the positivistic scientific method of hypothesis construction and testing as the only way of understanding the problems of modern life and offering viable solutions to them. Mead maintained that history was not a series of events, but a process of reflection and interaction among individuals from which there continually emerged new forms of thought, action, and social organization. With the use of dialectical reasoning, Mead gave his arguments about the nature of reality and was the foundation of his ideas about meaning, self, group, consciousness, and scientific methodology. Mead presented the total self as an emergence from the internal interaction between a knowing, un-socialized self and a known, socialized self. Mead termed the un-socialized self as "I", and the socialized self as "me". In Mead's mind, human society was essentially a process of adaptation to the environment.

It involves a division of labor and the cooperative organization of acting individuals into groups and institutions. In that society allows for the ongoing development of the individual self, it must exist prior to the particular individual. Yet although society forms the framework in which the self develops, society's own existence is dependent on acting individuals to create social groups and structures. The relationship between the individual and society is thus one of mutuality and dialectical interdependence.

Individuals emerge from society and society emerges from individual's actions. Society was dependent on humans interacting and taking the role of another. In the course of such action and mutual role-taking, the social reality of group structure emerges, which then serves as the context for further role-taking and development. Dependent on role-taking, the dialectical emergence of society also depends on the ability of humans to understand one another and to demonstrate their understanding of one another.

Communication thus allows society to exist and develop. In taking the role of another one is to imagine ourselves in the role of the other, to understand how to behave from the point of view of the other, to be both a subject and object to the self, and to be able to react to one's self. Taking the role of the other allows the individual to assess possible reactions of others to various behaviors and to choose his or her behavior accordingly to get the most desired reactions from others. In Meads essay "The Objective Reality of Perspectives" Mead asserted, "That it is only through taking the role of the generalized other that individuals can cooperatively produce and manipulate the physical objects necessary to continued societal existence". (Ashley, Orenstein p. 402).

Mead maintained that the experience of role-play and pretence in early childhood were vital for the formation of a mature sense of self, which may only be achieved by the child learning to take on the role of the other, i. e., seeing things from another person's perspective. By doing this, the child may eventually be able to visualize the intentions and expectations of others and see him / herself from not just another's point of view but from groups of others. The generalized other represents the common standpoints of those groups. Mead believed that the most effective social control was the result of role taking. He maintained that by imagining the reactions of others and not acting in ways that would have a negative reaction of those others that individuals would keep their own behavior in line. Mead felt that human society was a society of "selves".

To have a self implies that the individual is either purely an object pushed around by neither natural forces, nor a totally free subject capable of choosing his or her actions in a context- free vacuum. Meads implied that humans are both subjects and objects of their own acts. On the basis of desired goals, they imagine, plan, and choose their acts that they take. They are objects of their own acts in that they reflect on, and respond to, what they have done. The self can be both the subject and the object of its own behavior where the self was emphatically presented as a process of noting, imagining, planning, reflecting, and judging. The known or reflected-on aspect of the self process is the "me".

The "me" is the aspect of the self that the "I" is aware of. It's a person's conception and understanding of who that person is. It contains the subject's past learning, their knowledge of different roles, situations, and individuals, their awareness of social values, and their understanding of the social implications of various types of acts. The "I", is the conscious and reflecting aspect of the self.

It manifests an imaginative novelty and even an impulsive orientation toward new and previously unforeseen lines of action. Mead maintained that the "me" and the "I' existed as alternating phases of the overall self-process. there is an "internal conversation", movement back and forth between the novel proposals of the "I" and the judgmental reactions of the "me". In terms of social development, he felt that the family as the most fundamental social group. It was structurally the smallest social group and developmentally, the group of which larger forms of social organization were developed from.

Mead's methodological beliefs contain an umber of traditionally positivistic assumptions. Mead believed that there could and should be a unity of method among the physical sciences and the social sciences, and even some of the humanities. His emphasis was on a scientific method grounded in hypothesis-testing procedures. One would be mistaken though to call Mead a positivist. Although he accepted some positivistic ideas, he held some decidedly humanistic opinions on how to study social reality. Those included a focus on facts and concepts as social constructions that can be recast as one's conceptualization of social reality changes.

He also used both dialectic and teleological reasoning along with the mechanical and causal reasoning used by positivistic thinkers. Mead saw the focus of social study as centering on the unit of social at, and taking into account the nondeterministic aspect of the act and the role of subjective reflection and choice. Mead saw a dialectical process where one's actions and observations of reality based on assumed theories and ideas result in an encounter with exceptional events or objects that one cannot explain. Mead's view on socialization was that he asserted that the self emerged and developed only through social interaction. He focused on self-development in terms of time periods. He termed these periods the "play" and "game "stages.

In the "play "stage the institution would be the family or peer group. In this stage developmental goals would be to learn the status hierarchy and associated roles, and to begin to play the roles one at a time. Behaviors in this stage would be role-playing, Playing house, school, and doctor while still playing one role at a time. In the "game" stage the family, peer group, organized activities, and school would be the institutions. The developmental goals for this stage would be to begin to develop a sense of the generalized other and play a host of roles simultaneously.

The behaviors in this stage would be game playing, predicting what others should do based on their statuses and roles and to have role enactments and performances.