School As A Social System (Essay Sample)

School as a social system

Any social system is related to the environment. Social systems can be applied to understand social organizations.  As a social system, the school consists of different structures that depend on each other. These include the population that is different from its environment. A school has a complex network of social relationships with unique culture, making it a unique social system. The school is an important organization that prepares children for future roles.  Their working mechanism depends on the interaction between different departments.

Individuals are the key elements of a social system. In school, students, teachers and the school administration bring their needs, beliefs, goals and enhance their course and academic understanding of their roles within the school system. According to the social system theory, organizational performance is determined by the structure, individual, the culture and the environment. All social systems have boundaries; similarly, schools have a building that separates the school with the environment.  As a social system, the school structure has specific characteristics of rational, openness and natural. They have hierarchies of authority, school set goals and have expectations.

A social system can be informal or formal; schools have a formal process, and it is an open system where the school constantly interacts with the environment. In a school system, two or more people work together coordinating activities to attain these goals. School as a social system uses four different resources from environment these are human, financial, physical and information .Human resources are staffs and laborers, financial resources include capital used for its operation. Physical resources needed in school are learning materials ,equipment  and  facilities. Information resources in schools are the input from education experts and the school curricula. The transformation process occurs when school administrators coordinate various resources to attain the set objectives, that is better learning outcomes for all.

Transformation occurs when students and teachers meet to fulfil the overall school objectives.  Students are molded to become better citizens and contribute meaningfully to the society.   School administrator accomplishes these tasks by working within the system to produce output. The transformation processes within the system includes internal operation and general management. The operational Management process requires technical competence of staff and their ability to plan and execute their duty.

Tasks performed by the school administrators will determine the output. The use of input to transform them into output requires internal and external variables to produce outputs. Within the school, social system outputs are goals to be attained or objective to be achieved.  These include reducing school dropout rate. A school as an open system is different from another system because of this transformation process. In school, the inputs are students, and the outputs are graduates. Therefore, the system takes sources from the environment, transforming them according to the needs of the environment.

A school as an open system and is different from another system because of this transformation process. In school, the inputs are students, and the output is the graduate; therefore, the system takes sources from the environment transforming them according to the needs of the environment. However, the most important element of interaction between the school systems is feedbacks. A social system like the school has unique characteristics lie rational, neutral and openness, they should have hierarchies of authority, goals, and role expectation like bureaucratic systems. The interaction and feedback process is important because individuals need affect employee behavior and how they interact with. In summary, schools as a social system t can be described by three qualities these are arbitrary and consequential boundaries, interrelated subsystems and multiple causations these are the events that happens because of more than one cause.

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