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418 ChaPTEr 13 Education and religion

the punishment, we could expect honesty in reporting
to jump immediately. Real graduation rates could help
pinpoint where the problems are, letting us to know
where to focus solutions. If you don’t know where it’s
broken, you don’t know where to fix it.
Let’s turn to the third problem.
Violence
The man stalked the high school’s hallways. He pressed his
ear against a door, trying to determine if students were
in the classroom. Hearing nothing, he moved silently to
another classroom and did the same thing. Going from
one locked door to another, he proceeded down the length
of the entire hallway. Students were behind each door, but
they remained absolutely quiet.
Still hearing nothing, the man smiled.

The man smiled? Yes, because he was not a sociopath
seeking random victims. This was a teacher checking
how well the school was performing in a “Code Blue”
Education is undergoing controversial drill. In some schools, the safety of students and
changes. One of them is MOOCS, teachers is so precarious that armed guards, metal detectors, and drug-sniffing dogs are
Massive Online Open Courses. The permanent fixtures. In an era of bomb threats and armed sociopaths, some states require
course in philosophy taught by this
professor at Duke University enrolled lockdown, or “Code Blue,” drills: The classrooms—each equipped with a phone—are
180,000 students. locked. Shades or blinds on the windows are closed. The students are told to remain
absolutely silent, while a school official wanders the halls, like an armed intruder,
listening for the slightest sound that would indicate that someone is in a classroom
( Kelley 2008).
Certainly, a good teaching-learning environment starts with safety, and school shoot-
ings have become a national concern. Are they getting worse? The answer—in the Mass
Media box on school shootings on the next page—might surprise you.

The Need for Educational reform

Most of the changes in education are merely minor adjustments to a flawed system: giv-
ing this test instead of that test, requiring more memorizing or less memorizing, measur-
ing progress this way instead of that way, tinkering with the curriculum, or motivating
teachers and students by this carrot or that carrot. Each might be important in its own
way, but each is but a minute adjustment to the details of a system that needs to be over-
hauled from top to bottom.
We are unlikely to do this.

13.6 Explain what Durkheim religion: Establishing Meaning
meant by sacred and profane;
discuss the three elements of Let’s look at the main characteristics of a second significant social institution.
religion.

What Is religion?
Watch on MySocLab
Video: The Big Picture: Religion
Sociologists who do research on religion analyze the relationship between society and
religion and study the role that religion plays in people’s lives. They do not try to
prove that one religion is better than another. Nor is it their goal to verify or disprove