Socialization – Continuous Transformational Process

The article talks about socialization mechanisms: successive taking on of different social roles and status (preschool, school, adolescence, etc.), social learning, institutionalized learning, play, imitation, identification. Although the ability to socialize is an essential trait of human nature, at birth, intellectual, emotional, relational and behavioural faculties are only potential. To develop, they require a social context capable of offering the child multiple situations of social and emotional communication. Both education and socialization target the same result – the human being and its development. That doesn’t mean that there are no significant differences. Education, in the limited sense of organized actions carried on with the consent of the person being educated, determines the birth of necessary human aptitudes already existent as genetic potentiality. The educational process unrolls through specific processes, in special organizations, while socialization can occur either as a consequence of a person’s contact with an organization that is not strongly linked to educational goals or through pressure coming from his or her living environment (natural socialization). Socialization is a very complex process through which the human being (with wide social potential) is transformed into a social being, actively involved in the organizations to which he or she belongs while one of the most powerful socialization forces is, of course, education. It is education that offers the opportunity for professional manifestation of a person in the social environment, through socializing forces specialised in education. The success of socialization drastically increases together with the size of the educational territory.