Is School a Formal Organization?

The school is defined as one of the most important- formal agency of education which plays a major role in moulding the ideas, habits and attitudes of a child with a view to produce well balanced personalities: physically strong, mentally alert, emotionally stable, culturally sound and socially efficient.

In formal agencies of education such as the church and the home fail to satisfy increasing educational requirements of a complex society and thus are losing their hold on the people. Hence, we can say that the school is a social institution to set up by the society to serve its ends. It is a place where men of tomorrow arc trained and disciplined in certain forms of activities.

Schools are related to a number of other formal organisations. Some of these are integral to the education system i.e. college and universities, and state and oilier educational agencies. There are other agencies which arc auxiliary to this formal structure i.e. textbook, publishers and the school boards, viz. primary, secondary and higher secondary. Every school has a pattern of social relations that is not only unique but which persists through time, so that the pattern is not radically changed even when different individuals enter or leave it.

A school has the following formal structure:

The school board acts as an agent of wider community. Frankly speaking, the school is a complex web of social interactions with various types of interactions taking place simultaneously, each affecting the whole, and having at least an indirect influence upon the child.

The future of mankind depends upon the education imparted in schools. ” world whose schools are unreformed is an unreformed world “. Write H.G. Wells, an eminent educationist.

According to Prof. S. Bala Krishna Joshi ‘ ‘school is not a mere brick and mortar structure housing a miscellany of pupils and teachers; a school is not a market place where a heterogeneous crowd gathers with diverse objects; a school is not a rigorous reformatory where juvenile suspects are kept under vigilant watch, a school is a spiritual organism with distinctive, personality of its own; a school is a vibrant Community centre, reading life and energy all round; a school is a wonderful edifice, resting on the foundation of goodwill-goodwill of public, goodwill of the parents; goodwill of the pupils.”